THE BRIDGE: The Black Activist Is A Dying Breed
By
Darryl James
"How
long shall they kill our prophets, while we stand aside and look?
Some say it¹s just a part of it, we¹ve got to fulfill the
book."
--Bob Marley
Someone emailed me the other day to ask why there are so few Black
men and women who speak the truth with conviction and stand against
apathy and the attacks of the ignorant.
My response was sad, but true: The Black Activist is a Dying Breed.
My name is Darryl James and I am a Black activist.
I¹ve known it since I was in the first grade and my teacher asked
me for my favorite color. It was Black. Not just because I knew it
was the strongest color in the box, but because it was the color of
my people, and I loved them immensely even then.
I wore the pick with the fist when I had hair. I¹ve been flashing
a fist over my heart since I was a child, and I¹ve been in the
streets putting in work since I was a teenager. I¹ve marched,
organized enlightened, empowered, hired and inspired more brothers
and sisters than I can recall.
I¹ve taken the weight even when it cost me more money than many
people ever see in a lifetime. There were times when I really thought
it was going to cost me my life.
I am a revolutionary and I know why we are a dying breed.
Quite simply, it¹s because we already know coming into it that
we will be attacked and possibly even killed. Sadly, we will be attacked
and killed by our very own.
Blacks want anyone who stands for anything to stand for everything
we need. We are still looking for a hero, but won¹t support him
when he flies to the rescue. Many Blacks see a shining Black Superman
and are quick to bring him Kryptonite (and, no, white women are not
the Black man¹s Kryptonite.)
Many of us claim to want to work for progress and call ourselves activists
or revolutionaries but we have no real idea what that means.
Why is this an issue? It¹s an issue because too many young people
are looking up to sports and entertainment figures in a time when
leaders are few and far between for any race, but especially for the
Black race.
In the vacuum of leadership, walking anachronisms such as The Rev
Al Sharpton have stepped up to anoint themselves. Self-serving, irrelevant
clowns such as The Rev Jesse Jackson are still being viewed as "leaders,"
even though they are leading nothing, while looking out of place and
speaking out of turn.
We are at such a paucity of leadership that anyone can step up and
appear to be leading, including Bill Cosby, an innocuous comedian
who creates movies rife with ignorant, negative Black stereotypes,
while blaming the "lower economic people" for not holding
up their end of the Post-Civil Rights burden.
Yet, he looks good to the crowds who praise him. Those are largely
people who ignore the real work that needs to be done while attacking
the real soldiers putting in the work.
As a result of three decades of permissiveness, selfishness, window-dressing,
dumbing down and the rewarding of weakness, we have no real movement
to coalesce around, yet many still speak about being warriors and
soldiers. We demand leadership, even though we would tear down a leader
before he or she gets down to work.
Why would anyone want to step up and lead Black people? The question
is valid and becomes even more valid when all the hateful people attack
me for asking it, but let¹s be real: Asian, Hispanic, and Jewish
leaders may take guff from other races, but not much from their own.
Black leaders take the heat from everyone else and then have to deal
with it from other Blacks.
And it¹s only getting worse.
Right now, in 2005, comfortable idiots are discussing and evaluating
the relevance and importance of Dr. King¹s mission, value and
purpose while mulling over his personal "failings." How
dare any of us do that with any leader who literally gave his or her
life to a specific purpose that involved a people and not an individual?
It¹s a sad statement for Blacks to malign Dr. King or any other
leader in a retrospective manner. We can evaluate the leaders of today,
but only based on what we are doing ourselves. We have no business
evaluating past leaders, particularly when we benefit from their lives
and mostly their deaths without doing anything to interrupt our way
of life, sacrifice our comfort, or jeopardize our safety.
To cast posthumous aspersions on his name is just plain silly and
an insult to his entire cause. But it is also an insult to yourself,
because it means that you have no real perspective of where we were
then and where we are today, except that which you read about.
No one is denying you the use of toilets or dining counters and no
one is loosing dogs upon you. No laws are on the books where you live
that allow you to be spit upon in public, or deny you the right to
vote (maybe).
However, I want to see what you do about the things that do affect
you. If you are in college, what are you doing about the evaporation
of Affirmative Action? If you are on a job, what will you do when
the retarded nephew of your supervisor is given your job simply because
you are Black?
My point is that it is far too easy to sit in relative comfort and
in the virtual lack of intrinsic opposition and desecrate an entire
movement, because you favor the methods of another.
Finally, the old discussion of Dr. King¹s flaws is so tired and
weak that we really should let it go. The man allowed his life to
be dedicated to our freedom no matter the method and what he did in
private is the business of God and his wife, and not ours.
I take such attacks personally, because I am a real warrior. I have
placed my life on the line many times, for real. That¹s why I
find it hard to stomach armchair warriors and passive commentators
who want to malign real leaders simply because they disagree. Let¹s
be real--Do you disagree merely in thought and principle or in action?
To be real, that¹s why we don¹t have too many warriors standing
in the light anymore. True soldiers of this race are far too often
tossed to the wolves, desecrated, defamed and despised by the very
people for whom they fight.
At this stage in our history, because so many of us have sold out
while talking about what "we" need to do, real warriors
keep their actions silent. There can be few press releases or public
meetings because many of the people we love and would die for would
sell us out in a heartbeat for cash, privilege or for nothing at all.
Many of us desire leaders whom we would have die for a national holiday
or a movie with promotional hats. We find it hard sometimes to even
engage in productive dialogue because emotions step in and people
who won¹t ever dare fight for real start launching verbal or
written attacks.
The sad reality is that half of you chicken and biscuit eating fools
walking around with an old X shirt would have hated on him. And before
you try to split he and our Brother King, you would have hated King,
too.
I love both Malcolm and Martin. Different methods, but similar results,
and if you really knew them, you would realize they were fundamentally
one and the same.
But the real question is, do you live your life in service and discomfort,
or does it just make you feel good to talk about it?
We still have work to do. Are you down?
