Unfinished Business

Perhaps the greatest social tragedy of our moment is that the civil-rights establishment, symbolized by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, is consistently removed from the greatest problems weighing upon the communities it purportedly represents.

We are accustomed to seeing Jackson attach himself to controversies, specious and real. Jackson, along with the Rev. Al Sharpton, jumped into the middle of an academic squabble at Harvard set off when university President Lawrence H. Summers questioned black-studies Professor Cornel West’s commitment to traditional academic pursuits. West, who is a scholar in the university’s W.E.B. du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, hardly needs Jackson’s help. On the other hand, Jackson and the civil-rights establishment rightfully decried the murder of James Byrd Jr., who was dragged to death in Texas by white racists in a pickup truck.

What we are not accustomed to seeing, however, is either Jackson or any prominent civil rights organizations taking on problems facing Afro Americans that are far greater than threats of racist murder or police homicide. Though we surely have a sturdy black middle class and the role of the black in America is far too complex to be restricted to issues of skin color, it is also true that the Afro-American community suffers from an unprecedented crisis of violence, decadence, will and confusion.

Yes, recent books on racist lynchings--James Allen’s “Without Sanctuary” and Philip Dray’s “At the Hands of Persons Unknown,” for example--are profoundly harrowing and should not be swept aside. But were anyone to write a study of how many black people have been killed at the hands of the young monsters who began rising to street power in the early 1970s, we would discover that there has never been slaughter on this level. Between 1994 and 1999, 45,000 black men and women were murdered in this country.

Do we ever hear the civil-rights establishment address this? Hardly. What we hear about is “warehousing” young black men in the penal system, the racist nature of our courts, “stigmatizing black youth” or “the stereotyping our young” by mass media. This suggests that the only lost black lives important to our professional protesters are those taken at the hands of white cops or white racists. Had 2% of those 45,000 mentioned earlier--1,125 people--been killed by white racists in just six years, the civil-rights establishment would have marched away its feet, its calves and would now be hopping along on its knees, waving placards, singing and giving speech upon speech upon speech about how government had to stop “this genocide of our young black people.”

There is also a crisis of ethnic identity that infects not only the black lower class but too many of the black middle-class young as well. Both groups have been convinced that being “authentic” does not allow for high-quality intellectual engagement in school, something that John H. McWhorter addresses in his book “Losing the Race,” but is a subject that has been written about and discussed for more than a decade.

In a debate over affirmative action at the University of Texas Law School in the 1990s, Lino A. Graglia, a professor at the school and an opponent of preferential admissions policies, said the question was not one of the innate inferiority of black students, but that the problem was cultural and no one ever wanted to address that.

He was right. A few years ago, the Washington Post carried a story about black middle-class kids in a wealthy Midwestern suburb. While constituting more than half of the students in public schools that spent more than $10,000 per pupil, they comprised only 10% of the top students and 90% of those who performed most poorly. This is a complete reversal of a long, long Afro-American recognition of the absolute importance of education to personal growth and social advancement. The unconscious absorption of anti-intellectual defensiveness and minstrel ideas of authenticity can be understood by reading Robert C. Toll’s “Blacking Up.” Fox Butterfield’s equally profound “All God’s Children” argues that traditional attitudes among Scot-Irish in the South that sanctioned extreme violence in response to trivial insults began infecting Southern black men in the 1890s and are the root of the black violence we see nationwide today.

But as the problem applies to the black lower class, the so-called “inner city” black, we should now face up to something else that ought to be clear in hindsight. The central concerns of the U.S. civil rights movement were equal protection under the law, fair employment practices, open housing and voting rights. No one understood that high-quality pubic schools were a necessity if black people were to capitalize on these revolutionary policy changes. Had such schools been an issue around which people organized and seriously battled from the late 1960s until now, public education might not be the awful mess it presently is. It should be a central civil-rights issue right now.

Then there is the cultural question, an issue that Jackson himself understood well years ago. During the 1980s, he raised questions about black popular music that hypnotized kids with its beat and urged them to “get up off your ass and smoke some grass.” He warned that such material was potentially dangerous and could lead to serious problems. So, Jackson was one of the first to recognize what lay ahead and what has now created a growing controversy as more and more black people, some of them former hip-hoppers, understand that there is a strong connection between the worst of rap and the anti-social attitudes that have eroded the quality of lower-class black life. The celebration of thugs and freelance prostitutes, the touting of violence and murder, the crude materialism and the defining of being “real” as essentially ignorant, hedonistic, anti-social and obnoxious--all have done so much harm that, as one black record executive told me, “The handful of black millionaires created by rap doesn’t make up for all of the people who have been killed, beaten and terrorized by all of those kids who take this garbage too seriously.”

Had those images of black youth been created and propagated by white record executives, the civil-rights establishment would have run rap out of the world 20 years ago for “stereotyping our black young people and promoting negative values.” Only now and then has anyone said anything about it--but never for long. There are rumors that rap moguls have learned that sprinkling some bucks among these organizations provides a free pass to continue profiting from the new minstrelsy. As for those who say that white kids are the biggest rap fans and are equally influenced by the gangster-rap ethos, let’s compare body counts. No one wants to do that. We would then see who takes it seriously and who doesn’t.

When running for president in 1988, Jackson told his followers, “We have lost more lives to Northern dope than we ever lost to Southern rope.” He also said that, were he elected to the Oval Office, he could not legislate against irresponsible sexual behavior, poor performance in school, laziness and those uncommitted to their communities. Echoing the famous speech Shakespeare gave to Henry V, he laid down a challenge to blacks down in the dungeon of poverty and dissolution: “The first step in changing our condition is to change our minds.... By your mind, you are transformed. Nothing is more powerful in the world than a made-up mind.”

What the civil rights establishment needs to do is make up its own mind and free itself of any conventions that reduce its effectiveness at identifying and addressing the problems of its constituency. This is particularly hard at this time, because courage is quite important, something that has too often waned since the death of Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership must lead, must take chances, must be willing to take hits for “airing dirty laundry,” for “attacking black people,” for “alienating our youth,” for “helping white people believe we’re inferior.” None of those things should be feared, because taking stands against the anti-intellectual posture that Spike Lee now describes as “suicidal,” or standing up for young people and for all others who are terrorized by the criminals among them, or calling to the carpet popular culture that serves only to inspire decadence and irresponsibility, would do much not only for one ethnic group but also for the country as a whole. To maintain the conventions might not convince anyone that black people are doing just fine except for all this white racism out here, but it could surely maintain the proof that the civil rights establishment is not up to providing the kind of heroic leadership our nation needs from it right now.

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Stanley Crouch is a New York Daily News columnist and the author of “Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome,” a novel about interracial relationships.