i think it's been a week or so since tvone aired tavis smiley's stand. the commercials for the show featured tavis on a bus with cornel west, west's brother, michael eric dyson, dick gregory, and some other black men travelling through the south talking about race and politics. i was excited about watching this. although i don't like tavis and michael eric dyson is like nails on my chalk board, i respect cornel west and i expected a new, anti-black in america point of view with some solutions. what i got was none of the above, worse, and disappointing. i tweeted during the show and wasn't really going to blog about it, but i read melissa harris-lacewell's take on it and i wanted to add my 2 cents, too.
it seemed to me that the entire point of the doc was to in authenticate barack obama as a black man and good president. tavis smiley has been hating on obama for a long time. it's probably one of the reasons he left the tom joyner morning show. he claims obama doesn't do enough for black people and should have attended the state of the black union instead of campaigning in texas during the presidential race. he basically feels that he is underused as a black leader and under represented in obama's cabinet. whatever.
the show was disappointing because it didn't really show a side of anything that we hadn't already seen. it's called stand but what are they standing for? they argued about whether beyonce is better than aretha. they listened to dick gregory's mlk stories. they lamented over the decline of the black church. and they bitched about obama.
a few things particularly rubbed me the wrong way. cornel west proclaimed that we need someone who's "gonna love us out in the open and not on the down low." tavis repeatedly compared himself to black figures of previous eras. they claimed that obama was wrong to talk about personal responsibility the way he did because white people were listening. and dyson did a really wack impression of mlk.
first of all... i'm really disappointed that cornel had to be the one to say this foolishness. the black community doesn't need someone to "love us out in the open." if obama ran on a strictly pro-black platform he wouldn't have been the right candidate. the nation needs a leader who represents all the people. not just the ones who look like him. in fact, that seems to have been the problem with previous presidents. they ignored black people in favor of an agenda that would help the rich and the white advance. obama ran as a man for everyone. the policies he proposes will do for everyone. not just one group of people.
tavis repeatedly compared himself to black male leaders of yesteryear. he claims that he is the mlk to obama's lbj. he is the douglass to obama's lincoln. those men existed out of necessity. we're not slaves; we don't need a douglass. we're not getting hosed down for walking down the street; we don't need a martin. melissa harris-lacewell says, "smiley and his 'soul patrol' seemed to have missed the intervening 40 years between the era of king and the election of obama. african-americans are no longer fully disenfranchised subjects of an oppressive state." that's exactly right. what good are you to the contemporary black community if you sit here trying to apply archaic methods to an evolved situation?
back when jesse jackson called obama a nigga and said he wanted to castrate him this defense emerged along the lines that obama shouldn't have been in the black church telling black fathers to take care of their children because white people were listening. obama was making us look bad in front of whitey. really? bullshit. i think the message hit too close to home for some of them. there was nothing wrong with what obama said, how he said it, where he said it, and to whom he said it. we can put this shit on cnn under the guise of "enlightening" whites to our plight, but we can't take a black man being real to his people about this messed up situation? stfu with that stupidity.
also, these same black "leaders" who gave aaron mcgruder hell for having a cartoon mlk say, "will you niggas please shut the hell up?!" before he delivered a speech detailing his disdain for the "progress" we've made as a race, sat on this bus and laughed while michael eric dyson did an ridiculous impression of him. that seems awfully hypocritical. ugh. dyson gets on my nerves.
as harris-lacewell eloquently put it, "the piece exposed and embodied the contemporary crisis of the black public intellectual." she notes that they "yearned for an imagined racial past" but "ignore the cutural contributions of the contemporary black youth [and] the democratizing effect of new media forms which revolutionized the 2008 election."
my problem with tavis and dyson has always been the pedestal on which they hold themselves, their self importance, and opportunistic aura. i said early on that the reason so many of them were upset about obama's candidacy was because they'd be out of a job if black people got behind a black man who could actually do something and hold some kind of power and make real change. they want to be consulted. for what? obama sought the advice of people who could actually help him advance and get him in this position. i ain't mad at him for it. if he had gone to the state of the black union, he probably would've lost. it's sad that they would rather have a white woman in power and hold their own self imposed status than help a brother help society.
i'll leave you with harris-lacewell's perfect conclusion: "[this accountability crusade] seems determined to stand in the way of the maturation of african american politics in order to maintain personal power."
read her full piece: http://bit.ly/dSMBx
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