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Originally published by New York NewsDay [here] on January 14, 2004

BY NORMAN KELLEY
Norman Kelley is currently producing a documentary film based on his book, "The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome: The Dead End of Black Politics."

January 14, 2005

If the black political agenda of the post-civil rights era has been to influence the machinery of the federal government to black advantage, going from protest to politics, the re-election of George W. Bush has shown that agenda has failed.

A greater failure, however, is black leadership's inability and unwillingness to confront this as a problem and devise something new; this underscores how utterly bankrupt the leadership is.

Perhaps that should not be too surprising. As Robert C. Smith wrote in "We Have No Leaders," "Black leaders are integrated but their core community is segregated, impoverished and increasingly in the post-civil rights era marginalized, denigrated and criminalized." Put another way, black leaders' "core community" exists in virtual segregation, while the black middle class enjoys virtual equality and the black elite, which includes most black leaders, are truly integrated.

At this point in time and history, on the 76th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birth, African-Americans have no viable political agenda and economic program or platform to withstand the resurgent phenomenon of white nationalism, an aspect of the conservative movement that has been developing in the country in plain sight for the past four decades. This is due to the decline of effective black political leadership.

Since the 1960s, black America has banked its well-being and advancement on being in alliance with what Bayard Rustin called the "coalition which staged the March on Washington." That alliance, however, has netted very little in the past 25 years, since the rise of the New Right to power and influence. The last four decades of American politics have witnessed the rise of conservative politics and the decline of the alliance that staged the March on Washington: "Negroes, trade unionists, liberals, and religious groups."

Except for Brown v. the Board of Education and the two landmark pieces of civil rights legislation of 1964 and 1965, almost every policy - affirmative action, welfare, minority set-asides, etc. - that has come into existence via the federal government to assist blacks has been attacked, chipped away and de-legitimized by the conservative movement.

African-American leadership, ignoring the possibility of a return to a post-civil rights era of hostility to black advancement, never sat down and tried to strategize ideas and policies that would deal with the poor and economics. Today, a swath of the black population is still enmeshed in a web of social dysfunction, which W.E.B. DuBois outlined roughly a hundred years ago. The numbers have gone down since the civil rights era, but as Bill Cosby put it: "The lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal."

But the leadership class hasn't held up "their end in this deal," either. Jesse Jackson's two campaigns have to be viewed as pseudo political mobilization, insofar that they aroused voters but led to no discernible policy changes and no significant grassroots infrastructure building. The Million Man March has shown nothing in 10 years.

Today, no better example of a black political collapse is the rise of the Rev. Al Sharpton as a spokesman for blacks and/or the Democratic Party, despite his years of corruption and cronyism - as well as dalliances with the Republican Party. Despite the Village Voice and the New York Times reporting that Sharpton was playing footsie with the GOP, the black political elite said nothing. Despite his meager showing, lack of ideas and vote-getting in the primaries, he was rewarded by the party for one thing and one thing only at the Democratic National Convention: being an entertaining, boisterous court jester.

Black America has no future-oriented vision of itself within the context of American reality. Its politics of the past 40 years has come to a halt, and the leaders of those years have offered nothing of programmatic substance. And in the face of the New Right, for the past 25 years, nothing but symbolic posturing has been offered as leadership. If professional and working middle-class African-Americans yearn for solutions to problems and a reasonable level of economic well-being, they are going to have to cast down their own buckets in the clear waters of organizational efficiency, political accountability and self-generated economic mobilization. As of this moment, there seems to be no other way.

Copyright © 2005, Newsday, Inc.