I Am Somebody

Well, the Sunday night football game is bordering on depressing, (sorry Kristina), so I figured I’d move on to something slightly less so. How about politics. (Hey, the key word was slightly.)

So far I’ve tried to avoid discussing election politics, due to the fact that the election still more than a year away. But something caught my eye this past Thursday that tweaked me the wrong way. It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed the comment, but I guess Thursday must have been a slow day because here I am talking about it now.

Last Thursday thousands of people rolled into Jena Louisiana to protest the treatment of six black teenagers charged in the beating of a white classmate. A few days before the rally, everyone’s favorite activist, the Reverend Jesse Jackson made a statement critical of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama for essentially what amounted to Obama’s refusal to turn himself into a screaming raving lunatic denouncing the situation in Jena and leading the march with pitchfork and torch in hand.

Again, I don’t want to give much time to election politics as it is still 2007, but I do want to make this point. If people who claim to support Obama’s candidacy are looking for a way to destroy their candidate, turn him into an angry black activist. News flash people, the angry black man has not, does not and will not ever play well in national politics. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to any activist – they’ve been running the same game for thirty-plus years and will admit to any one who will listen that they are still fighting for the same things now that they were back then. But sometimes the vision of the activist is so myopic he is unable to picture anything outside of the bright red bulls-eye on the chest of their target. If African-Americans are waiting for a black activist president, they are going to be waiting for an awful long time.

I am in no way suggesting that black people should simply roll over in the face of real or perceived injustice. There is a place for the angry black man in the body politic. He can bring attention to issues; bring face and focus to injustice. But rarely – if ever – can he affect lasting institutional change. To accomplish that you need someone on the inside. Someone who can be trusted by and work together with those who hold the power. Barack Obama is the first black presidential candidate with a semi-legitimate chance to be that inside man. Transforming him from a serious, clean cut, clear thinking, likable and, God forgive me, well-spoken candidate into an angry black man is a sure-fire way to run a positive, well-orchestrated campaign straight into the ground.

What’s the definition of insanity? Repeatedly performing the same action while expecting a different result? For far too many years civil right leaders have employed the same tactics, usually with the same results. Let’s face it. If the old ways were working, we would be fighting different battles now. How about we try something different. How about a change of course. Instead of endlessly beating on the walls of the fortress, why not try opening the drawbridge from inside.