Al Sharpton Gets a Strange Stamp of Approval

What a difference access to money and tailored suits and the likes of Donald Trump and exclusive men’s clubs and expensive cigars and, oh yeah, the White House, makes. Al Sharpton has re-invented himself so many times since I met him in the 1980s when he was rotund, had hair permed on a regular basis as a homage to James Brown, wore shiny neon jogging suits and a huge Martin Luther King medallion around his neck. He has now done it again. But what’s really scary is that he has let Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal re-invent him and present him as what once was called “a safe Negro” who is acceptable in polite company and can be counted upon to bring blackfolks, specifically Democrats, to the voting booths in November. Check out a front page article in today’s (3/17) Wall Street Journal: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/03/16/obamas-new-partner-al-sharpton/

President Obama is mistaken in thinking that Sharpton, like Booker T. Washington so many decades ago, can speak for blackfolks and influence how they vote and how they live. Washington, an accomodationist, was an adviser to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft during the segregation era. Sharpton, an unrepentant opportunist, is an adviser to President Obama in what is supposedly the “post-Civil Rights” era.

Many blackfolks remember -- not fondly -- the Sharpton of the garrish jogging suits and the incendiary language; the man who actually paid people to show up at his rallies to bamboozle gullible media into thinking he had a larger and more loyal following than he did. Those people are not likely to follow his lead in today’s political climate.

I may have a cup of tea with Sharpton or appear on his syndicated radio program, but for President Obama there is more at stake. He does not want to be known, as the WSJ declared today, as Sharpton’s “partner.”

Sharpton and Tavis Smiley, the broadcast host who is as good as Sharpton in the self-promotion arena, have tangled over Sharpton’s Obama connection. Smiley says, in the WSJ article, that it is hard “to speak truth to power about the suffering of black people on the one hand, and then be running in and out of the Oval Office and trying to run the president’s agenda or express White House talking points.” Professor Cornel West of Princeton is quoted as saying that Sharpton risks becoming “a symbolic insider.”

And this is part of the reason: The Wall Street Journal is a linchpin in Murdoch’s conservative communications empire that includes The New York Post and the Fox News Channel. Sharpton is a frequent guest on Fox shows hosted by Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity.

The French have a saying: The more things change, the more they remain the same. As Billie Holliday sang: Them that’s got shall get. Them’s that’s not shall lose. Sharpton’s got; a whole lot of blackfolks will lose because of his latest re-invention of himself as someone who no longer believes in the power of well-directed protest politics -- independent of those to whom he should be speaking truth.