
I spent the last two weeks eating crow for the folly of hoping that the current head of the NAACP, Benjamin Jealous, wasn’t an idiot like his recent predecessors. That desperate delusion went out the window when he attacked USDA employee Shirley Sherrod without even bothering to watch the tape of a speech she gave to the organization he heads. Of course he was wrong. Looks like kicking a sister to the curb with little information is at least one thing Ben’s got in common with Barack Obama.
And what’s with the hyped up brouhaha about the New Black Panther Party, a bunch of posturing idiots who have no politics, no program, and virtually no organization? Besides macho BS and playing black power dress-up, their raison d’etre is apparently to divert attention from real issues, serve as the current bugaboo of the Tea Partyers and other right wingers, who cry the idiotic “reverse discrimination” and then demand that other colored people dance the Repudiation Shuffle, previously reserved for anything having to do with Louis Farrakhan. Let’s be clear about these jerks: They call themselves the NEW Black Panther Party because members of the REAL Black Panther Party, the party started by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, sued them for appropriating their name. As for theatrical menacing and strutting around outside a polling place in 2008 brandishing a billy club, please. They’re either idiots or agent provocateurs, probably both. No more time or attention for them or Ben Jealous!
It almost makes me nostalgic, but then who’s there to be nostalgic about? I’m not calling for the reinstatement of Jesse Jackson as Leader of the Negro People. It’s impossible to forgive him for his comment during the 2008 campaign that he wanted to cut off Obama’s nuts, appointing himself Massa’, overseer, and lynch mob and ending his career in 15 seconds. Now that’s multi-tasking! So here we are with a president who tries so hard not to show favoritism that he’s negligent, the bumbling, inarticulate, reactionary Ben Jealous, the PHONY Black Panthers, and Jesse’s tawdry successor, the conked hair, FBI wire-wearing Al Sharpton. Talk about makes me wanna’ holla? That’s an under-statement.
It’s all a sorry state of affairs, and saying the struggle for civil rights is over, the playing field’s leveled, and we’re living in post-racial America don’t make it so. In these depressed times all does do is justify and rejuvenate white privilege so they can gobble up not only all the courses and dessert – as usual – but the crumbs too, the ones people of color and working class people used to subsist on. It’s not the issues that’ve disappeared, it’s leadership with integrity, brains and vision. We’re living in awful, awful times, and having a cool, stylish, smart Black president, First Lady and First Family isn’t enough. We need to demand and fight for jobs, an end to both wars, quality education for all, a revived infrastructure, extension of un-employment benefits, an end to Bush’s tax cuts for the rich when they expire the end of this year, the end of police violence and abuse – not just of the privileged class but of all of us – I could go on and on and on, but then I’d be accused of ranting, or being an emasculating, demanding black women, or, heaven forbid, old school. Well, at least there were schools back in the old days.
Finally, I’ve got nothing against recently confirmed Supreme Court Associate Justice Elena Kagan, but nothing for her, either. To my mind, the President could and should have appointed a Black woman to the court. There are Black women judges, law school professors, and others who are qualified. The appointment of Kagan seems yet another example of how when we learn the rules, the rules are changed. Ditto as well as a repudiation of the old adage many of us grew up with, that to achieve what Caucasian have it’s not enough to be as good, we have to be better. Now here comes Kagan, who’s never been a judge, appointed to the court. Talk about damned if you do and damned if you don’t. I’m not a religious woman, but am I the only person unsettled by a court with six Roman Catholics and and three Jews on it? How about some religious diversity? On the same note, how about a Justice who didn’t attend Harvard or Yale?
Call me what you will, it’s time for us, WOMEN, we who have our feet in the earth and hit the ground running every day, to wake up, speak up, and take over. Or at least have a national convention in this time of tremendous crisis to decide which issues are most important to us and devise a plan of action. (I’m confident our collective priorities are deeper than Michelle Obama’s trip to Spain, Essences’s Caucasian fashion editor, Alicia Keys’ wedding, blah, blah, blogosphere.) If we don’t organize, no matter how educated and essential we may think we are, how progressively post-racial and ensconced in a privileged class that trumps racism, we’ll be relegated to an upgraded version taking care of the chill’ins and the kitchen garden – i.e. the brilliant Michelle Obama – or turned into popular cultural representations of male notions of black women, i.e. Precious, Madea, Rasputia, Big Momma, ad nauseum, or, more likely for most of us, simply disappeared. Rise up, sisters, our time has come round once again. The men have had their chance, and look where we aren’t.
Making the Third Chapter Fabulous: Prose! Yoga! Passion!, the retreat at my home on Martha’s Vineyard, runs from August 31 – September 5. Please visit my web site for more information, and be there with us virtually by following live posts and pictures from the participants during the retreat. Please check us out!
Finally, an AMAZING photograph!
Jill Nelson 8/10/10 – The blog with the musical notes!