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Time for Jackson, Sharpton to Step Down
Pair See Potential for Profit, Attention in Imus Incident

By JASON WHITLOCK
AOL
Sports Commentary

I’m calling for Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, the president and vice president of Black America, to step down.

Their leadership is stale. Their ideas are outdated. And they don’t give a damn about us.

We need to take a cue from White America and re-elect our leadership every four years. White folks realize that power corrupts. That’s why they placed term limits on the presidency. They know if you leave a man in power too long he quits looking out for the interest of his constituency and starts looking out for his own best interest.

We’ve turned Jesse and Al into Supreme Court justices. They get to speak for us for a lifetime.

Why?

If judged by the results they’ve produced the last 20 years, you’d have to regard their administration as a total failure. Seriously, compared to Martin and Malcolm and the freedoms and progress their leadership produced, Jesse and Al are an embarrassment.

Their job the last two decades was to show black people how to take advantage of the opportunities Martin and Malcolm won.

Have we at the level we should have? No.

Rather than inspire us to seize hard-earned opportunities, Jesse and Al have specialized in blackmailing white folks for profit and attention. They were at it again last week, helping to turn radio shock jock Don Imus’ stupidity into a world-wide crisis that reached its crescendo Tuesday afternoon when Rutgers women’s basketball coach C. Vivian Stringer led a massive pity party/recruiting rally.

Hey, what Imus said, calling the Rutgers players "nappy-headed hos," was ignorant, insensitive and offensive. But so are many of the words that come out of the mouths of radio shock jocks/comedians.

Imus’ words did no real damage. Let me tell you what damaged us this week: the sports cover of Tuesday’s USA Today. This country’s newspaper of record published a story about the NFL and crime and ran a picture of 41 NFL players who were arrested in 2006. By my count, 39 of those players were black.

You want to talk about a damaging, powerful image, an image that went out across the globe?

We’re holding news conferences about Imus when the behavior of NFL players is painting us as lawless and immoral. Come on. We can do better than that. Jesse and Al are smarter than that.

Had Imus’ predictably poor attempt at humor not been turned into an international incident by the deluge of media coverage, 97 percent of America would’ve never known what Imus said. His platform isn’t that large and it has zero penetration into the sports world.

Imus certainly doesn’t resonate in the world frequented by college women. The insistence by these young women that they have been emotionally scarred by an old white man with no currency in their world is laughably dishonest.

The Rutgers players are nothing more than pawns in a game being played by Jackson, Sharpton and Stringer.

Jesse and Al are flexing their muscle and setting up their next sting. Bringing down Imus, despite his sincere attempts at apologizing, would serve notice to their next potential victim that it is far better to pay up than stand up to Jesse and Al James.

Stringer just wanted her 15 minutes to make the case that she’s every bit as important as Pat Summitt and Geno Auriemma. By the time Stringer’s rambling, rapping and rhyming 30-minute speech was over, you’d forgotten that Tennessee won the national championship and just assumed a racist plot had been hatched to deny the Scarlet Knights credit for winning it all.

Maybe that’s the real crime. Imus’ ignorance has taken attention away from Candace Parker’s and Summitt’s incredible accomplishment. Or maybe it was Sharpton’s, Stringer’s and Jackson’s grandstanding that moved the spotlight from Tennessee to New Jersey?

None of this over-the-top grandstanding does Black America any good.

We can’t win the war over verbal disrespect and racism when we have so obviously and blatantly surrendered the moral high ground on the issue. Jesse and Al might win the battle with Imus and get him fired or severely neutered. But the war? We don’t stand a chance in the war. Not when everybody knows “nappy-headed ho’s” is a compliment compared to what we allow black rap artists to say about black women on a daily basis.

We look foolish and cruel for kicking a man who went on Sharpton’s radio show and apologized. Imus didn’t pull a Michael Richards and schedule an interview on Letterman. Imus went to the Black vice president’s house, acknowledged his mistake and asked for forgiveness.

Let it go and let God.

We have more important issues to deal with than Imus. If we are unwilling to clean up the filth and disrespect we heap on each other, nothing will change with our condition. You can fire every Don Imus in the country, and our incarceration rate, fatherless-child rate, illiteracy rate and murder rate will still continue to skyrocket.

A man who doesn’t respect himself wastes his breath demanding that others respect him.

We don’t respect ourselves right now. If we did, we wouldn’t call each other the N-word. If we did, we wouldn’t let people with prison values define who we are in music and videos. If we did, we wouldn’t call black women *****es and hos and abandon them when they have our babies.

If we had the proper level of self-respect, we wouldn’t act like it’s only a crime when a white man disrespects us. We hold Imus to a higher standard than we hold ourselves. That’s a (freaking) shame.

We need leadership that is interested in fixing the culture we’ve adopted. We need leadership that makes all of us take tremendous pride in educating ourselves. We need leadership that can reach professional athletes and entertainers and get them to understand that they’re ambassadors and play an important role in defining who we are and what values our culture will embrace.

It’s time for Jesse and Al to step down. They’ve had 25 years to lead us. Other than their accountants, I’d be hard pressed to find someone who has benefited from their administration.

DarrylS

Well written, but it is fine to criticize them and their knee jerk responses are tiring, but who will replace them?

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"Being the best doesn't mean you always win. It just means you win more than anyone else".. tweet from Kurt Warner to Tom Brady.

wistahpatsfan

How about no one? Maybe Chris Rock and Troy Brown?

DarrylS

About a good a choice as anyone, but really do not care about these race thread all that much usually descend into some type of chaotic, name calling thread with no value.

__________________
"Being the best doesn't mean you always win. It just means you win more than anyone else".. tweet from Kurt Warner to Tom Brady.

Real World

I think there's value, but the retards/bigots on both sides resort to name calling, since they have no logical position to descend upon, which ends up pushing sensible people to their limit of tolerance.

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"The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him."
Leo Tolstoy, 1897

Harry Boy

Jessie/Al
How did these two street corner bums get to the point where when somebody screws up and says something stupid about black people they go to the likes of a racist like Al Sharpton to aplogize (Imus).

That is truly disgusting.

PS
Snoopy Doopy Dog calls his Black Sisters "HO'S & B!tches" daily and when he does many of his Black Brothers and Sisters start Dancing!

__________________
Harry Boy (Genius)

In The Absence Of Law And Order Society Will Surely Destroy Itself

PatsWSB47

Excellent piece. I'm afraid they won't be impeached from office any time soon though. They both have managed to thrust themselves back into the lime light and have already been further empowered with their success in getting Imus fired. Now everyone is jumping on board to prove they're not racist which will encourage them even more. I applaud Whitlock for his courage to write this exposition of jackson and Sharpton.

See Patters, that is real courage. See the difference between that and hiding from Fox News debates?

Now I'm holding my breath waiting for the righteous outcry for the horrible characterization coach Stringer herself made of her team. She called them "articulate" yesterday. A month ago that was about the worst thing you could call a black person. The outcry for that was led by none other than Al Sharpton himself. What a phony!

Patters

Old timers like Falwell, Robertson, Jackson, Sharpton continue to command a place in center stage because no one has stepped up to replace them. The sad fact is that moderates are hardly ever effective at rallying people.

At least, Jackson and Sharpton helped expose lies about double-standards and race obsessions of right wingers. In that way, they still serve a purpose and remind us that the right-wing is on the constant lookout for any transgressions by black leaders, while constantly forgiving their own. Some would call that obsession a mild form of racism.

I'm still waiting for someone to show me why the criticism of Imus showed a double standard. Can't you find any major black media personality who said awful things about whites and suffered no consequences? When it comes to race, the many right-wingers are very dishonest about their true feelings.

PatsWSB47

What did you think about the piece?

pats-blue

Are you reading the posts? Most posters are stating that Blacks(rappers, comedians) say many times worse things about thier own race, women yet nothing is said. I think thier point is that rappers call women 'Ho's all the time and say much worse, show videos with degrading things in them yet Imus needs to be fired for "nappy headed 'ho's"? Who do you think has a more pervasive influence on Black America..Imus or a multi Platinum selling rapper? I personally have probably heard 2 minutes of Imus my entire life but have heard plenty of rap.


Yeah, yeah it isn't a major media personality. Again who has more influence on the plight of the African American? Imus or rappers and comedians propagating the sterotypes to make money? How many people emulate Imus? How many emulate rappers? Jesse and Al don't callout the rappers for hurting the Black community or demanding that they be fired. You really stick to your guns don't you even if you have to put blinders on and then a blindfold. Read Whitlocks article he is 100% right.