WASHINGTON
MALCOLM X would have cracked a smile at the words of John
Kerry. Kerry was asked last week at a convention for journalists of
color who was most responsible for the living conditions of low-income
African-Americans. This was in reference to Bill Cosby's caustic
accusations of parents buying $500 sneakers for mumbling, illiterate,
n-word "knuckleheads." "I think all of us are responsible, all of us,"
said Kerry, the Democratic candidate for president. "I understand
exactly where Bill is coming from in his comment. It may be excessively
exclusive in the breadth of it, in the sense that it sort of targets
just the responsibility side, but that's an important side."
But then Kerry talked about how the nation does not keep its end of the bargain. He said teachers at Boston's Jeremiah Burke High School once told him they spent up to $2,000 of their own money for learning materials. He talked about the lack of after-school programs. He talked about his Senate sponsorship of YouthBuild, where at-risk youth learn life skills building affordable housing. He talked about his frustration of being told there's never any money to increase funding for YouthBuild.
"If you have a school system that depends on the property tax and you have a community that doesn't have any property tax base, and it's dependent on the largess of either state or federal assistance, but the great ethic of the politics of our nation is no tax, no available resources because it's more important to give a tax cut to people earning more than $200,000 a year, we got a problem." Malcolm would have smiled because he said 40 years ago, "The schools in Harlem are not controlled by the people in Harlem, they're controlled by the man downtown. And the man downtown takes all of the tax dollars and spends them elsewhere, but he keeps the schools, the school facilities, the school teachers, and the school books, material, in Harlem at the very lowest level."
He would have also smiled because Kerry declined the cheap thrill of blaming the victim and answered with a nuanced duality that eluded many commentators and politicians when they rushed to either defend or condemn Cosby. The duality was ignored most notably by conservatives who suddenly adopted Cosby as a political pet, conservatives who oddly did not adopt Cosby when the family comedian endorsed Jesse Jackson in 1988 and Al Gore in 2000.
Barack Obama, who likely will become the only African-American in the Senate, declined the thrill in a recent interview on NBC's "Meet the Press." Obama said, "I think there are questions of individual responsibility, but I think that there are also questions of societal responsibility." He cited access to jobs and the economic security that black men need to build strong families.
With a presidential candidate, the stakes of this issue are of course much higher. In 1992, Bill Clinton won the White House by playing to the thrill, co-opting Republican stances on welfare and the death penalty and criticizing a black rapper, even though there are plenty of offensive white singers. As president, Clinton presupposed from the Memphis pulpit where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his last sermon that King would say, "I did not fight for the right of black people to murder other black people with reckless abandon."
Kerry's comments set the stage for intense debate in the campaign. Bush came to the same convention of journalists and talked about his faith-based initiatives that save people "one heart, one soul, one conscience at a time." All the while, he has cut many services and left his own No Child Left Behind ridiculously underfunded his entire presidency. In a nation of over 40 million uninsured people, it would take a long time to save America, one heart, one soul at a time.
No one denies that African-Americans have responsibilities. In Boston, where murders are running at double the number of last year, the Rev. Gregory Groover is absolutely right when he said, "We have to reclaim our community. This is our community. We have the power to turn this neighborhood around." But most people know that the power to turn a neighborhood around is blunted when the next day's headlines in Boston are about summer jobs programs running out three weeks before Labor Day.
No one was harder on black people than Malcolm X, who was famous for openly discussing self-hate. No one was also harder on white Americans to provide opportunity than Malcolm X. When he was accused of inciting violence, Malcolm responded that a city that lets people live in "rat-nest dens" and will not create employment opportunities is what incites violence.
Malcolm might also be smiling because the words came from a so-called white liberal. No one was harder on white liberals than Malcolm. Kerry said, "Bill Cosby's right, people in the community have to accept responsibility . . . But we also need to do the things that we need to do as a civil society to empower those people . . . It's all of us together." Now we'll see if Kerry intends to empower people by any means necessary.
Derrick Z. Jackson's e-mail address is jackson@globe.com.