A Leadership Adept at Passing the Buck

Given all that we know about governmental hanky-panky, it is not farfetched for black leaders to swallow allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency was involved in drug deals that resulted in South-Central suffering from a flood of crack cocaine. From the McCarthy era through the Vietnam War, then the counterintelligence operations of the Federal Bureau of Investigation used against the Black Panthers and other would-be “revolutionary” organizations, then Watergate, then the Iran-Contra mess, we have before us a stack of instances in which public servants have proved the good sense the Founding Fathers had possession of when they put together a social contract based not so much on a sentimentalized idea about humankind as on a recognition of its periodic willingness to abuse power. They knew you have to watch people in charge of things.

Of course, when race comes into the discussion, everything becomes more complex. Race is the magnet that draws all the social, psychological, cultural and political patterns into one form. The brightest and the darkest elements of our American story sing and scream forward. A good number of African Americans feel that very same discomfort in the face of the power that the Founding Fathers were worried about, because it has so often been exhibited in the world of skin-color prejudice. We have the long history of slavery, the years of segregation, the double-dealing, the police abuses, the prejudicial hiring patterns and whatever else we want to talk about that involves a set of policies, superstitions and customs bent on keeping Negroes outside of the basic rights of the Constitution.

In Los Angeles, a backwater town with a big budget, there is the rough-and-tumble history of law enforcement and minorities, the localized version of the decline of the public schools, the epidemic of gang warfare and the casual slaughter that attends the drug trade. All these things are great challenges to black leadership, because the machinery necessary to bring about serious change moves in and out of the traditional founts of power and policy.

Those who carry that burden of leadership have to figure out how to arrive at the kinds of experiments that might actually change things in the wake of social programs, spun out over the last 30 years, that have spent more than a trillion dollars on poor people but have made no dent in poverty whatsoever, ending up with more poor Americans than ever before. This partly explains why the country has soured on many of the purported entitlements for the poor: as so many have noted, poverty becomes not only a reality of class and color but has also, until recently, been an occupation and a form of identity so debilitating that millions of Americans have grown up--and now grow up--in households where they have never seen anyone hold a job. As Jesse Jackson said during his second presidential campaign: “Even if I were elected president, I couldn’t legislate against poor performance in school. I couldn’t legislate against irresponsible sexual behavior. I couldn’t legislate against the loss of civilized community values.”

So black leadership that assumes that all solutions inevitably come from the kind of governmental response that Franklin D. Roosevelt made to the Depression has now created a version of the world in which the flip side of good, social-uplift-oriented government functions in two parts. One is Republican disdain for the downtrodden, the other formed of government agencies that wait in the shadows of the Senate for the underclass Caesar to arrive so that they can poke him as bloody as Ronald L. Goldman on Bundy Drive. While it is not impossible to believe that the subterranean war fought between the espionage agencies of the Soviet Union and America--rife with kidnappings, assassinations, topplings of governments, the installing of puppet leaders of nations, and so on--could slide all the way down to drug dealing, I think there is a very different reason why people are so hot to believe that the source of crack can be found in some smoke-filled room full of slithering public servants hiding behind the masks of supposedly necessary secret-service anonymity.

That reason is the astonishing degree of frustration that such people feel when they look at the magnitude of what is wrong in the black community. What has to happen is change from the outside as well as the inside. But when we fumble down into the idea that every activity within the black community is the result of forces from the outside, it is easy to wave the bloody shirt of all-encompassing blame at the government, the system, the majority, big business, etc.

Surely, we cannot remove all those elements from the body of things that influence the way each of us goes about doing what he or she does to make a living. Even so, we must achieve a much more sophisticated level of assessment and an equally sophisticated way of going about working at handling these problems. Pretending that all in society breaks down to the influences of God or the devil might play well in some places, but to remove the truth of free will is to be unconscionably naive.

There is a culture of spiritual rot as real in the underclass as it is in the worst pockets of big business, governmental wheeling and dealing, excessive use of force by law enforcement, prejudicial hiring practices and the rest of it. The same kind of lower-class, black person who sells crack would pollute the environment if it made possible equally large or greater profit. Our problems are collective, and we have to develop a single standard of behavior. Folly, corruption, incompetence and mediocrity mean the same thing wherever they appear. Seeing how they function across race, class, religion, sex and sexual preference will be a tall order for a country in which so many now speak for purportedly separate realities. But ours is a country capable of coming through hell and high water, even if both are of our own making.

Andrew Young said to the National Press Club earlier this year that we need to get to the place where all truly concerned Americans can talk about the troubles we face and that will, eventually, touch us all, one way or another. He used the Moynihan report as an example. Thirty years ago, Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a White House aide, talked about the dissolution of black families, teenage pregnancy and almost all of what have become common ills in the black lower class. He was reviled by black leadership because those in charge assumed that such a report would add to the stereotypes already in strong position. Young, speaking as a hero of the civil-rights movement and a two-term mayor of Atlanta, told the assembled that everything Moynihan discussed in that report is now worse and that if black leadership and the country had been able to move on those problems back then, we would be far better off now.

Once we step up to what Young is calling for, we won’t solve our problems anywhere near as rapidly as we would all like, but we will be much closer to truly working them out than we are now--when buck-passing is a tendency as rife on the inside as it is on the outside.