Chris Hedges --- So Much for the Promised Land

LeAlan Jones, the 30-year-old Green Party candidate for Barack Obama’s old Senate seat in Illinois, is as angry at injustice as he is at the African-American intellectual and political class that accommodates it. He does not buy Obama’s “post-racial” ideology or have much patience with African-American leaders who, hungry for prestige, power and money, have, in his eyes, forgotten the people they are supposed to represent. They have confused a personal ability to be heard and earn a comfortable living with justice.

“The selflessness of leaders like Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Harold Washington and Medgar Evers has produced selfishness within the elite African-American leadership,” Jones told me by phone from Chicago.

“This is the only thing I can do to have peace of mind,” he said when I asked him why he was running for office. “I am looking at a community that is suffering because of a lack of genuine concern from their leaders. This isn’t about a contract. This isn’t about a grant. This isn’t about who gets to stand behind the political elite at a press conference. This is about who is going to stand behind the people. What these leaders talk about and what needs to happen in the community is disjointed.”

Jones began his career as a boy making radio documentaries about life in Chicago’s public housing projects on the South Side, including the acclaimed “Ghetto Life 101.” He knows the world of which he speaks. He lives in the troubled Chicago neighborhood of Englewood, where he works as a freelance journalist and a high school football coach. He is the legal guardian of a 16-year-old nephew. And he often echoes the denunciations of black leaders by the historian Houston A. Baker Jr., who wrote “Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era.”

Baker excoriates leading public intellectuals including Michael Eric Dyson, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Shelby Steele, Yale law professor Stephen Carter and Manhattan Institute fellow John McWhorter, saying they pander to the powerful. He argues they have lost touch with the reality of most African-Americans. Professor Gates’ statement after his July 16 arrest that “what it made me realize was how vulnerable all black men are, how vulnerable are all poor people to capricious forces like a rogue policemen” was a stunning example of how distant from black reality many successful African-American figures like Gates have become. These elite African-American figures, Baker argues, long ago placed personal gain and career advancement over the interests of the black majority. They espouse positions that are palatable to a white audience, positions which ignore the radicalism and structural critiques of inequality by W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. And in a time when, as the poet Yusef Komunyakaa has said, “the cell block has replaced the auction block,” they do not express the rage, frustration and despair of the black underclass.

much, much more at the link:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090803_hedges_the_new_racism/?ln

"I am looking at a community that is suffering because of a lack of genuine concern from their leaders."

He has apparently decided that all of our "leaders" are men, including from generations past. With these kinds of blinders on, I'm not too sure that I can take anything this brother says all that seriously although statements like this:

"Professor Gates’ statement after his July 16 arrest that “what it made me realize was how vulnerable all black men are, how vulnerable are all poor people to capricious forces like a rogue policemen” was a stunning example of how distant from black reality many successful African-American figures like Gates have become."

have the definite ring of truth.

I wholeheartedly agree that successful black folk should give back to their community. To claim that all black successes who do not follow the MLK or Malcolm X blueprint are sell outs who have "forgotten the people they are supposed to represent' is a stretch.

If Obama had run as the black people's candidate, he would never have been elected to the senate, much less the presidency. Damn, two weeks ago he stated that a cop who had acted stupidly had acted stupidly and some called for his impeachment. Still, I think his contribution to our community is huge: older black folk have witnessed what many had considered an impossibility, and the young see someone who looks like them in the White House. While he is not actively pounding the civil rights' pavement now, IMO he has not abandoned our, and his, interests.

Our community is well served by those who are fighting injustice. It is also served by the successful and influential. I think we need both. And, as long as they have not forgotten their roots, I think we should celebrate their achievements, not deem them sell outs.

I am in total agreement. However, some of the frustration we've experienced is of our own making. When Number 23 asked, in response, if there are no black female leaders worth discussing, Oprah Winfrey came to mind. Not as a 'leader' necessarily but as a wealthy, accomplished black woman who attempted to give back to her community only to find some distorted values of black youth. As a result, she gave her millions to the youth in Africa. Such are the consequences of a diminishing value system within our community and I don't think we can totally put the blame on successful, accomplished black people.