LOS ANGELES TIMES INTERVIEW : Tony Brown : Black Empowerment--via a Computer

Tony Brown sounds like a Republican--which he is. He preaches black self-help and economic independence. His advocacy didn’t originate with the current welfare debate. It dates back decades and includes his famous “buy black” campaigns. His views are now emblematic of a new black agenda independent of political affiliation.

Witness the Million Man March, which Brown supported philosophically and attended as a journalist. He says the march signaled a sea change: African Americans are no longer interested in petitioning the government for redress or demanding that whites “do for us what we refuse to do for ourselves.” He counts the march among the nation’s greatest public events, second only to Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 March on Washington. But he is no civil-rights leader, and doesn’t put much stock in traditional black leaders. Brown insists he has got enough civil rights. He wants equality.

He believes the fastest ticket to equality for the black community is a computer. He prescribes a computer in every home and is only too pleased to announce that his on-line service will start Feb. 20. It will join NetNoir and other black-oriented Internet services.

He is an unlikely cyberspace guru. Computers are a young man’s passion. But Brown, who will only own up to being fiftysomething, hosts a “cyberspace club” on his popular talk show on WLIB, a New York radio station, and often touts computers on his nationally syndicated TV program, “Tony Brown’s Journal,” the longest-running talk show on PBS. That weekly show routinely attracts about 5 million viewers, including many non-blacks.

Consistently controversial, Brown shrinks from no subject. He is provocative but rarely less than thoughtful--though he does assert that the AIDS outbreak derives from drug abuse, not the HIV virus. Sometimes scolding, sometimes just explaining, he warns that unless problems of the inner city are solved, there will be no white winners nor black winners, only American losers.

Born poor in segregated Charleston, W.V., to a single mother who had been abandoned while pregnant, Brown was rescued, when he was 2 months old, by two “angels.” Elizabeth “Mama” Sanford and her daughter, Mabel Holmes, who were domestic workers, raised him until he was 12, when he rejoined his natural family. He dedicates his new book, “Black Lies, White Lies: The Truth According to Tony Brown,” to these two good Samaritans. He himself is the divorced father of an adult son.

Could a black boy born today into similarly harsh circumstances achieve as spectacularly as he has? He believes the road to success would be harder today--but anything is possible, especially with a computer.

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Question: What’s your civil rights agenda?

Answer: If you mean by civil rights, equal rights, then I am interested in being equal. We have civil rights. I don’t think we need to continually fight the civil rights battle. I think we need to become equal. Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, the people who went through that era, the people who struck down the laws of segregation, who created opportunities for us, have done that. I don’t know how many more civil rights we need. I don’t need civil rights. I need equality.

Q: Do you oppose integration?

A: Integration is a subterfuge. The concept of sitting beside someone to be equal is insulting. The idea that the only way I can be educated is to live in an area dominated by white people is insulting. The idea that I have to depend exclusively on employment from people who are white is insulting.

I want to live in a desegregated society, “de”--a prefix meaning to move away from segregation, in which all institutions are open equally to everyone. If a school is predominantly black, and it is a good school, any child should be welcome to come to it. If a neighborhood is predominantly black, and its schools are good and its streets are safe, then everyone should live in that neighborhood.

I want to live in a society in which black people can own companies like Microsoft and General Motors, and not wait for Bill Gates so that we can get a job.

Q: Do you oppose affirmative action?

A: No. I think affirmative action is the salvation for this country . . . . What we have today for affirmative action is not my model . . . . As long as upper-income, middle-class black people can qualify because they are black, as long as 80% of what’s called affirmative action goes to middle-class white women, as long as Asian Americans, members of the highest family-income group in America, can qualify for affirmative action simply because they are Asian Americans, we’re not practicing affirmative action according to what I think.

Affirmative action should be need-based . . . . If the black middle class does not understand that, it does not deserve to be preferred--and the poor and disadvantaged in the black community should be preferred; the black community will never become equal, because we will never put the resources where they are needed. What we do now in the black community is we prefer those of us who are educated and those of us who are doing well, which drains the resources away from those at the bottom.

Those of us at the top need to be protected by stronger government. This is one area in which the government is not strong enough. The EEOC [Equal Employment Opportunity Commission] has no teeth. What we need as black and Hispanic people, and women, we need protection so we can go into the work force and we will have the opportunity to move up and make our contributions and punish, seriously punish, any interference with our professional pursuits because we are already qualified. We do not need preference. We need protection. The people at the bottom need the preference.

Q: Is wealth the cure of all ills?

A: No, . . . human capital is the greatest investment any business makes . . . . The extent to which we move people into the middle class with education is the extent to which we become a healthy and wealthy society.

I was here in Los Angeles on my book tour at the Eso Won Book Store (in Inglewood). I talked about how anybody could go from poverty to the middle class with a computer, how we could break the poverty cycle, how, for the first time in the history of America, the black community could not only catch up with any other group but leap over--just by having a computer in every home.

A young woman, who appeared to be about 23 or 24, came up to me afterward . . . . She said, “No one ever told me that I could get off welfare with a computer. I am one of those welfare mothers you were talking about. Tomorrow, I am going somewhere to get trained . . . .” Now this is the way we can move people from one end of the spectrum to the other. We can only do it with human capital . . . . The only avenue for her to get out is for her to have information, and for her to have skills, not for her to have the right to stay on welfare for the rest of her life.

Q: You often prescribe computer literacy. How did you master computers?

A: I’m not a master of computers. I do understand the direction of the world. In my book, I talk about technological displacement . . . . AT&T;’s most recent layoff of 40,000 workers finally got the public’s attention . . . . The downsizing, and the rest of it, really struck a chord with the public.

People now understand that you will no longer finish high school, get a job, work there for 20 years and get a pension. That’s gone. The white middle class understands better than anybody else that the American Dream is no more than a myth . . . . Everybody understands the uncertainty we are going through and they understand how useless they can become very soon in this society. It is because we are being displaced as workers by technology. We’re going to have to adapt to that.

The 21st century will not be a century of blacks and whites. It will not be a century of racism and sexism. It will be a century of the haves and the have-nots. The haves will have a computer. The have-nots will not have a computer.

Q: Why don’t more blacks buy computers?

A: About 12% of blacks own a personal computer, about 13% of Hispanics, about 20% of Native Americans, about 32% of white Americans, and about 40% of Asian Americans own a computer. The reason is, the black community is close to being obsessed with civil rights and politics. Most of our great minds, our best minds, are concentrating and focused on politics and on civil rights. We need some of our best minds to be focused in those two areas--but not exclusively.

The world has moved to a point where the demands of technology are absolutely egalitarian. White people, even if they wanted to, could no longer fashion the future or control it. Technology is now in control of the dynamics of our world.

Q: How will your on-line service work?

A: It’s an information service, for the most part, providing a variety of programs, games, chat rooms, e-mail, those kinds of services. It’s like Prodigy . . . . In addition, it has an empowerment agenda . . . .

Q: Empowerment?

A: I have three areas of empowerment . . . . Education, which is the development of human capital and the retraining of adults in our community . . . . The black community can organize itself nationwide to train all children, as many children as possible, not just middle-class children, through the use of technology for 21st-century skills and retrain adults so that we will be needed in the 21st century.

Business . . . . Through this network we can buy from every black-owned business, and we can sit in our living room and do it. We can also create business opportunities for people at home. They can learn to use computers to conduct businesses, so that way we can use technology to retain a large percentage of our money . . . . Black Americans spend $500 billion a year, yet we spend only three cents out of every dollar on black businesses . . . .

The third area is family. We are falling apart in the black community, socially, as a result of the instability of a large percentage of black families. Many of our problems come from the fact that children are being raised in households where they do not get moral virtue. They do not get economic opportunity and, frankly, they give up and become gangsters . . . .

Q: You are including a dating service?

A: If there are 80% of black women in inner cities having babies with no husbands, the need is men . . . . If the problem is, women don’t have men, the solution is, find men for women and women for men. I don’t make any apology; we will have an entire section . . . . We can help women find men, and men find women, in order to stabilize families, to have healthy children, which create healthy communities. This is what technology can do. All we have to do is apply ourselves to it in that direction.

Q: Did you support the Million Man March.

A: . . . One million black men represented a collective consciousness of a change of the agenda of the black community to one in which we will no longer petition the government as our final source of change. We will no longer demand that the white community do for us what we refuse to do for ourselves. We will accept personal responsibility for ourselves, our families and communities.

That agenda is 180 degrees away from the assimilationist and integrationist agenda, which is that the only way we can be educated is to get on a bus and find white people; the only way we can have a good family and a safe family is to live in a neighborhood where white people predominate, and the only way we can have a job is to wait for white people to create opportunities and provide us with one. That’s 180 degrees from the current black-leadership agenda. That is the most profound statement the march made.

Q: You grew up poor, in a broken home, in a segregated city. Yet, you made it. Can someone from a similar situation today succeed in the same way?

A: . . . If I were born today, same human being, same talents, under the same circumstances, it would be harder for me to make it . . . .

Today, if you were born under the same circumstances under which I was born, you would learn, psychologically, to be poor. I was never taught I was poor. I was taught that I was temporarily without. I was taught--because I had a lot of talent and because this was not a fair country-- that white people were not going to do things for me, and that I had to work harder than white people . . . . If they got 80 on a test, I had to get 100 to get the same credit. Now, that is my mentality.

The mentality today of a Tony Brown would have been, “Tony, it’s not fair for you to work harder than white people and it isn’t fair that they don’t give you what they have, and it’s not fair that they have nice neighborhoods and they don’t share them with you. And, therefore, because it isn’t fair, don’t do anything for yourself; wait until they change, and let us just exclusively work on making the system fair first.” I make the system fair by outworking other people . . . . I don’t expect to be treated equally . . . . In the end, I get what I want; I’m satisfied.