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Recent events
affecting the national leadership level of the NAACP brought
vividly to my attention the question of the 21st century Black
elite role in “outreaching-to-Black-lower-class-crises.” After
just under two years as executive officer of the NAACP, Bruce
Gordon resigned from that office in December 2006. On March
6, 2007, Bruce Gordon presented a “Memo of Resignation” to
members of the NAACP National in which he discussed the core
reasons underlying his resignation. A copy of Gordon’s memo
was made public through a Black-affairs website named “Afro-Netizen”,
in its issue dated March 10, 2007 and later in its issue dated
July 16, 2007.
I received
a copy of Bruce Gordon’s resignation memo in mid-July and
after reading it, I had no doubt about its significance to
the issue of the role of the 21st century Black elite sector
in “outreaching-to-Black-lower-class-crises.” Or to put this
matter in the conceptual terms that are implied in Gordon’s
resignation memo, his memo relates to the issue of fashioning
a new post-Civil Rights Movement leadership identity for the
NAACP, an identity that interconnects that great organization’s
historical “civil rights advocacy function” with a 21st century “Black
social-crisis reformation function.”
Bruce Gordon’s
resignation memo also has a special significance owing to its
intellectual candor, by which I mean the straightforwardness
with which Gordon lays out issues surrounding his resignation. It
is also significant, therefore, in regard to what the memo
reveals about the leadership character of Bruce Gordon. His
leadership personality is not given to obfuscation or circumvention,
not given to narcissistic pettiness of “one-upmanship behavior” vis-à-vis
his professional peers in the institution of which he’s a part,
in this case the NAACP — that great warhorse of Black people’s
freedom and their struggle against the White supremacist juggernaut
in 20th century American civilization.
Furthermore,
Gordon’s resignation memo is significant in regard to what
it reveals about what might be called a “can-do ethos” that
informed his decision-making while executive officer of the
NAACP for two years. This “can-do ethos” aspect of Bruce Gordon’s
leadership style caught my attention during the course of the
Katrina Hurricane Crisis in 2005. During the early weeks of
watching the television reports on the events of that horrible
Katrina crisis unfold — especially as the lives of working-class
and poor Black families were being devastated — I remember
saying to my wife Marion: “I hope Black national organizations
like the church denominations, the Urban League, the NAACP,
and professional associations mobilize relief efforts to assist
Black families in New Orleans.”
Within a week
of saying this, we received an e-mail from the NAACP national
office notifying people that it had set up an NAACP Katrina
Relief Fund, and I returned the NAACP’s appeal message saying
that the Kilson family would contribute $2000. Happily, I filed-away
a copy of the pledge-letter, dated Sept. 8, 2005, I sent to
the NAACP Katrina Relief Fund in which I remarked to the Fund’s
director: “It is truly marvelous to have the NAACP under your
new executive officer Mr. Bruce Gordon out-front in aiding
the thousands of Black citizens, and White citizens too, whose
lives have been smashed by the Katrina hurricane.”
Deconstructing
Bruce Gordon's Resignation Memo
In his resignation
memo Bruce Gordon discusses two plans stemming from what I
call his “can-do leadership ethos”, or what also can be called
Gordon’s “outreach-to-Black-crises-ethos.” One plan responded
to the horrific Katrina Hurricane crisis and especially to
massively incompetent response by President Bush’s Republican
administration to the Katrina crisis, a crisis that ravaged
the lives of thousands of Black families, and White families
too. As Bruce Gordon informs us of his plans in his memo:
I convened
a meeting of national high profile [black]leaders from
across the country. The purpose of the meeting was to
develop a unified position on post-Katrina government response.
Bruce Gordon
also mentions in his memo a second plan that stemmed from
what I call his “outreach-to-Black-crises” leadership mindset.
Namely:
We initiated
a Medicare Part D enrollment effort and enlisted
Bill Crosby and Danny Glover to create public service announcements…
However,
Bruce Gordon mentions that neither his plan for a “unified
position [by black leadership groups] on post-Katrina government
response”, nor his plan for a “Medicare Part D enrollment” ever
got off the ground. Why?

With regard
to Gordon’s first plan, he informs us that “I was faulted
for attempting to ‘set policy’.” This response by elements
on the NAACP National Board strikes me as bizarre because
what else should an executive officer of the NAACP with first-class
managerial skills like Bruce Gordon do but “set policy”?
His policies or programs-of-action may prove effective or
ineffective, but surely it’s his basic function “to set policy”,
or at minimum “to propose policy”.
With regard
to Bruce Gordon’s second plan (“Medicare Part D enrollment”),
Gordon says that he was “told that this was a service initiative
and we are an advocacy organization.” Furthermore, some
members of the NAACP National Board even sought to influence
day-to-day operation in the executive’s office. As Bruce
Gordon put it:
Some
Executive Committee members want to be directly involved
in how I manage the staff. They want to approve organization
structure. They want to make hire and fire decisions. They
want to influence the vendor selection. I view that as
micromanagement.
Clearly,
the former NAACP executive officer experienced what might
be called a “condition of systemic disarray” during his
two-year tenure. Something equivalent to micromanagement-run-amok
generated this “condition of systemic disarray” during
Bruce Gordon’s brief reign as executive officer of the
NAACP.
When reading
Bruce Gordon’s resignation memo, I took special interest
in how the former NAACP executive officer evaluated his
sometimes quite testy policy battles with the NAACP National
Board. In this regard, I was quite surprised to encounter
in Gordon’s resignation memo evidence of something I would
call “high-order gentlemanliness” about the man. Rather
than enter a kind of face-off defense of his policy
initiatives and thus a face-off critique of the
opponents of his policy positions, Bruce Gordon reports
in a non-judgmental manner on the policy-fissure between
himself and a majority on the NAACP National Board. Here’s
how Gordon put it:
I
have come to accept that my view of my role and the
association’s role is not aligned with the board. I am willing
to accept that our points of view regarding governance
and strategic direction are in conflict. This is
not about right and wrong…this is about difference.
After
this fair-minded and even-handed reporting of a serious
policy fault-line between the NAACP executive officer and
presumably the majority on the NAACP National
Board, Bruce Gordon’s summary observation in his resignation
memo sustained a fair-minded argumentative posture, one
that was even self-critical. Here’s how Gordon put it:
We
can agree to disagree. We also could have found a way
to blend the best of our respective points of view but in
19 months that did not happen. It could be said that this
is all about a failure to communicate. I agree. Maybe we
can all learn something from this experience. I have written
more than I intended. Hopefully you now know more about
what happened and why.

The concluding
section of Bruce Gordon’s presentation of policy differences
between him and the NAACP’s National Board reinforced my
view of him as a fair-minded administrator. First, he told
the NAACP National Board that his “public statements [following
his resignation] have not involved any “finger pointing”.
He then made reference to his interview on the PBS Television Tavis
Smiley Program, an interview which I saw and considered
resplendent with evidence of what I view as Bruce Gordon’s “high-order
gentlemanliness.” Here’s how Gordon characterized his
Tavis Smiley interview:
My
public statements [since resigning] have not involved finger
pointing. I have been consistent in my position that this
decision is about “lack of alignment" and not about “right
and wrong.” My interview with Tavis Smiley and Soledad
O’Brien have been balanced and accountable. My assessment
was validated by an e-mail from Chairman [Julian]
Bond regarding the Tavis interview that said: “By all
reports, you were magnificent on the [Smiley] show tonight.”
The evaluation
of Bruce Gordon’s interview with Tavis Smiley by Julian
Bond (BC Editorial
Board member), chair of the NAACP National Board, was
right-on-target. I saw Bruce Gordon’s interview with Tavis
Smiley and I can report that his performance and comportment
were supremely magnificent. There is another aspect of
Bruce Gordon’s fair-minded leadership persona worthy of
mention. Namely, nowhere in his resignation memo did Gordon
identify the NAACP chairperson, Julian Bond, as part of
the National Board members who opposed his policy initiatives.
Gordon's
Resignation Viewed in NAACP Historical Perspective
On the
basis of my reading of Bruce Gordon’s resignation memo,
it appears that he came to the NAACP executive post with
a keen — and I believe correct — understanding that the
NAACP’s historic “civil rights advocacy function” did not
preclude it from performing what I call a “social-crisis
reformation function.” I use the term “correct” in characterizing
Gordon’s understanding of the interconnectedness between
an NAACP “advocacy-cum-social reformation function” for
a very basic reason. Because it was the progressive leadership
strand — not the centrist-minded leadership strand — during
the activist development phase of the NAACP in the 1930s
who exhibited an understanding of an interconnection between
an NAACP “rights advocacy-cum-social reformation” leadership
paradigm. That progressive leadership strand in the 1930s
NAACP revolved around James Weldon Johnson (who retired
in 1932 to teach at Fisk University and died in a car accident
in 1938) and W.E.B. DuBois, while the centrist leadership
strand in the 1930s revolved around Walter White (who
succeeded Johnson as executive secretary) and his assistant
Roy Wilkins.

An interesting
account of the 1930s NAACP progressive/centrist leadership
strands can be found in David Lewis’ second volume on DuBois’ biography — W.E.B.
DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century
,1919-1963 (New York: Henry Holt Co., 2000). As Professor
Lewis informs us, by the middle 1930s when the NAACP’s
twenty-odd years of challenging the American White supremacist
juggernaut did not have many viable successes to celebrate,
W.E.B. DuBois began rethinking the basic ideas that informed
the NAACP integration civil rights leadership paradigm.
He settled
on what might be called a one-step-backward-two-steps-forward
political vision for the leading ethnic-bloc organization
among Black Americans. Recognizing that White ethnic groups
such as Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, and Jewish-Americans
used their ethnic-bloc patterns to generate what might
be called intra-Irish or intra-Jewish ethnic agencies for
social advancement of their communities — a kind of “ethnic-communitarian
advancement”, let’s call it — DuBois, a keen student of
American society in general, suggested a somewhat similar
vision-and-strategy for Black people.

In late
1933 and early 1934, W.E.B. DuBois put forth this suggestion
in a series of articles in The Crisis — the NAACP’s
official journal which he founded and edited. He proposed
that Black American civil rights leadership might place
less emphasis on its integration or desegregation strategy,
on the one hand, while on the other hand mobilizing Black
ethnic-bloc resources (churches, civic associations, trade
unions like A. Philip Randolph’s Brotherhood of Sleeping
Car Porters, women’s organizations, etc.) along the lines
of intra-Black communitarian social advancement.
In an
article titled “Segregation” that appeared in The Crisis (January
1934), W.E.B. DuBois expressed a deep pessimism on when
viable interracial or integration concord would evolve
in what was then a rigidly White-supremacist delineated
American civilization. “It is impossible to wait for the
millennium of free and normal [integration] intercourse,” DuBois
lamented in regard to the tenacity of Negro-phobic White
behavior in American life. Accordingly, DuBois suggested
that Black Americans’ eventual social advancement would
increasingly depend upon “the race-conscious black cooperating
together in his own institutions and movements,” the purpose
of which would be especially “to organize and conduct enterprises.”
W.E.B.
DuBois observed — correctly I think — that such an intra-Black
communitarian thrust was nothing new. Why? Because, as
DuBois put it, “the vast majority of the Negroes in the
United States are born in colored homes, educated in separate
colored schools, attend separate colored churches, marry
colored mates, and find their amusements in colored YMCA’s
and YWCA’s.” (This sentence, by the way, sounds familiar
to the post-Civil Rights Movement era African-American
ear, save the phrase “find their amusements in colored
YMCA’s and YWCA’s”, a situation now replaced — sadly — by
Hip Hop entertainment). And it should be remarked that
W.E.B. DuBois had a cogent understanding of the tenacity
of the Negro-phobic ethos, nay virus, in American civilization. Research
on the history of racist segregation in housing, for example,
reveals this tenacity of Negro-phobic White American behavior.
For instance,
in the study American Apartheid: Segregation and the
Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1993), Professors Douglas Massey and N.A. Denton
uncovered that whereas what they termed the “segregation
index” for housing patterns stood at 46% in the city of
Philadelphia between 1860 and 1910 (a city in which the
young DuBois undertook his first sociological research
between 1896 and 1899 resulting in the classic study The
Philadelphia Negro (1899)
), by 1940 the “segregation index” increased massively
to 88.8%, and forty-odd years later in the 1980s the “segregation
index” fluctuated between 77% and 79%. (Massey’s and Denton’s “segregation
index” of 0% is equivalent to no segregation, while
100% represents total segregation).
Not surprisingly,
a rather taut ideological fissure surfaced in the NAACP’s
leadership circle following DuBois’ public proposal in
1934 to supplement the organization’s official integration
policy with what might be called a two-tier or dualistic
Black social advancement program. A program combining
the historic “civil rights advocacy” function with a “intra-Black
communitarian uplift” function. Not only did W.E.B. DuBois’ critics
among the NAACP leadership circle — especially Walter White
and Roy Wilkins — vigorously oppose a two-tier policy strategy
for the NAACP (what today I characterize as a “civil rights
advocacy-cum-social reformation” strategy). They went from
policy opposition to maneuvering to have W.E.B. DuBois
dismissed from his longstanding editorship of The Crisis (since
1910), an outcome that was officially effectuated as the
year 1934 closed down.
In W.E.B.
DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century,
1919-1963 (1993), Professor David Lewis’ treatment
of the policy fissure between DuBois and the NAACP centrist-minded
leaders like Walter White and Roy Wilkins in 1934 is,
from my perspective, rather problematic. Lewis relates
in a favorable tone the Byzantine maneuverings by Walter
White and Roy Wilkins that closed the door on W.E.B.
DuBois’ intellectually and politically outstanding role
in the official ranks of the NAACP as founder-editor
of its great journal The Crisis. For David Lewis, DuBois’ embrace
of an intra-Black communitarian policy perspective for
the NAACP marked the nadir of DuBois’ leadership career.
Lewis,
for instance, refers favorably to an insulting commentary
on DuBois’ intra-Black communitarian proposal by the conservative
Black columnist for The Pittsburgh Courier, George
Schuyler, who remarked: “Imagine the Top Sergeant of the
Talented Tenth [W.E.B. DuBois] fouling like a punch drunk
pugilist despairing of victory.” For David Lewis, George
Schuyler’s infantile, tacky, and profane commentary on
DuBois’ Black communitarian ideas “was [an] apt judgment.” (p.104)
In proposing
a two-tier NAACP leadership perspective, W.E.B. DuBois
was not indulging in typical one-dimensional separatist “black
nationalism nostrums”, as Professor David Lewis claims. Nor
was he throwing-in-the-towel on the historic “civil rights
advocacy” NAACP role against American racism. Quite the
contrary. Rather, DuBois’ Black communitarian ideas were
premised on an insightful understanding by DuBois about
Black American’s generic socio-cultural attributes in American
life.
Namely,
that Black Americans are both a “racial group” and an “ethic
group”. As a “racial group” Black Americans can be thought
of as a defensive ethnic group, which is to say
as a group shaped in part by oppressive White supremacist
dynamics in American civilization. As an “ethnic group” Black
Americans can be thought of as an offensive ethnic group,
which is to say as a group like Irish-Americans and other
White ethnic groups who are fashioned by organic historical-cultural
patterns, such as religion, folk beliefs and heritage,
cultural-expressive practices, familial authority practices,
and linguistic patterns.
Accordingly,
when W.E.B. DuBois promulgated his two-tier policy perspective
(civil rights advocacy-cum-Black communitarianism) in his
famous essay titled “Segregation” in The Crisis (January
1934), he introduced what might be dubbed a “new civil
rights rhetoric”. This new civil rights rhetoric sought
to place the plight of the dark-skinned working-class majority
of African-Americans in the pre-World War II era at the
center of the mainline civil rights organization’s policy
agenda — the NAACP’s agenda. After all, by the 1930s — despite
a quarter-century emphasis on integration policies by the
NAACP and its allies among liberal White Americans — the
plight of the dark-skinned working-class Black masses in
cities and in agrarian areas remained one of precarious
jobs when they had jobs, poor education opportunities,
and poverty-level living conditions. U.S. Census Bureau
data for 1940, as World War II commenced for the United
States, reported some 90% of African-Americans classified
as living at poverty-level.
Unique
Social Crises Facing Today's Black Lower Class - The
Crisis Context
Returning
our discussion to present-day circumstances, in our early
21st century contemporary era it has become indisputably
clear that the multi-layered social crises plaguing the
African-American lower-class sector have impacted the
affairs of the NAACP in unique ways. In fact, these crises
impact the affairs of Black leadership in general. After
all, the social crises plaguing lower-class African-Americans are
systemically and culturally tenacious crises.
Among
them are the following:
-
joblessness
crisis
-
family
breakdown crisis
-
school
dropout crisis
-
unwed
motherhood/fatherhood crisis (over 60% of Black children
are born to single parents!)
-
macho-male
violence/homicide crisis
-
Hip-Hop
influenced macho-male “gansta-culture” crisis
-
and,
last but not least, the high incarceration rate crisis
These
post-Civil Rights Movement era social crises that are
now ravaging the life-cycle and life-chances of lower-class
African-Americans have brought forth a new type and range
of claims upon the mainline African-American leadership
institutions, and especially on the premier of these leadership
institutions — the NAACP. I for one have enormous faith
in the leadership resilience and innovativeness of the
great warhorse of Black people’s freedom that the NAACP
has been and remains today. So I am in full concord with
the “can-do leadership ethos” that former NAACP executive
official Bruce Gordon demonstrated during his all-too-brief
two-year tenure.
Be that
as it may, in order to gain a sharper understanding of
the current depth-and-range of social crises now plaguing
the life-chances of today’s weak-working class and poor
African-American families, let me discuss several facets
of these social crises that have been cogently portrayed
in articles by one of the major columnists writing today
in top-rank national newspapers — namely, The New
York Times columnist Bob Herbert.
Bob
Herbert’s Cogent Discourse On Black Social Crises
It is
clear that from the early 1980s onward, African-American
society has experienced a kind of two-tier bifurcation
of its social class pattern. Within this bifurcated class
pattern entailing a “static-stratum” sector (e.g., weak
working-class and poor families) and a “mobile-stratum” sector
(e.g., middle-class and professional-class families),
what might be termed a “troubled Black America dynamic” can
be found. For example, while middle-class and professional-class
African-Americans inhabiting the “mobile-stratum” (around
60% of Black Americans) have advanced up the American
social mobility ladder, those African-Americans inhabiting
the “static-stratum” (weak- working-class and poverty-level
ranks) seem to dwell in a “vegetated state-of-social-crises”,
so to speak. What the articles by the African-American
columnist for The New York Times have uniquely
provided over the past decade is a cogent and sharp vista
on the “troubled Black America dynamics”.
Bob
Herbert’s cogent and sharp vista on contemporary Black
American social crises can be found especially in his New
York Times columns that appeared March 5 and March
15, 2007. These articles (one titled “Education, Education,
Education" — March 5 — the other “The Danger Zone” — March
15) discuss the nitty-gritty details of contemporary
Black American social crises, especially the Black-youth
social crises. The Black-youth social crises probed
by Bob Herbert are:
-
The
crisis in education opportunities and thus in education performance and outcomes.
- The job-market and job-opportunity crisis.
In his
March 5 column “Education, Education, Education”, Bob
Herbert details in graphic ways the education status
of Black males, showing first the education benefits
among Black males associated with education achievement,
and then showing the horrible downside associated with
high dropout rates. Herbert summarizes new research
from a study produced by the Center for Labor Market
Studies at Northeastern University in Boston as follows:
For
males in each of the three race-ethnic groups (blacks, Hispanics
and whites), employment rates in 2005 increased steadily
and strongly with their educational attainment. This was
especially true for black males, for whom employment rates
rose from a low of 33 percent among high school dropouts to
57 percent among high school graduates, and to a high
of 86 percent
among four-year college graduates.
From
here Bob Herbert discusses the consequences of poor educational
attainment among Black males. Here his tone is dire and
foreboding:
The fact that only
one of every three young black male high
school dropouts was able to obtain any type of job during
an average month n 2005 should be viewed as particularly
distressing, since many of these young men will
end up being involved in criminal activities during their
late teens and early 20s. [They’ll
face] severe economic
consequences for convictions and incarcerations over
the remainder of their working lives.
…For anyone deluded
enough to question whether education is the ticket
to a better life for black boys and men, consider
that a black male who drops out of high school
is 60 times more likely to find himself in prison
than one with a bachelor’s degree. Black males
who graduate from a four-year college will make,
over the course of a ifetime, more than twice the
mean earnings of a black high school graduate…more
than a million dollars. [Also college-educated] black
males…are more likely to marry and live with their
children…. (Emphasis added)
Bob
Herbert concludes his Education, Education, Education article
with what might be viewed as an injunction to middle-class
African-Americans to outreach-to-Black-lower-class-crises. Here’s
how Herbert put it:
This
is not a close-call issue. It is becoming very hard
for anyone
to succeed in this society without a college education. To
leave school without even a high school education,
as so many
males do — specially black males…is extremely self-destructive. The
effort to bolster the education background
of black men has to begin very early. It’s extremely
difficult to turn a high school dropout into a college graduate. This
effort can succeed on a large scale only if there
is a cultural change in the black community — a
powerful change
that acknowledges as the 21st century unfolds that
there is
no more important life tool for black children than education,
education, education. (Emphasis added)
I might
add to Herbert’s discussion of today’s education crisis
that’s crippling Black youth another set of facts relating
to this crisis. These facts are from USA Today (August
6, 2007), reporting that “fourth-graders reading below
the basic level” number 59% among African-Americans,
compared to 25% among White Americans. Clearly, as Bob
Herbert observed, the “effort [to reverse today’s education
crisis] can succeed on a large scale only if there is
a cultural change in the black community….”

When
Bob Herbert takes up the subject of the job-market/job-opportunity
crisis facing lower-class African-Americans, he again
strikes a quite dire and foreboding analytical tone. He
commences his New York Times article “The Danger
Zone” (March 15, 2007) thus:
What
I’m talking about is extreme joblessness — joblessness that
is coursing through [black] communities and being passed
from one generation to another, like a deadly virus. …In
big cities, more than half [black male
youth] do not even graduate
from high school. Their employment histories are gruesome.
Over the past few years, the percentage of black male high school graduates
in their 20s who were jobless (including those who abandoned all efforts to find a job) has ranged
from well over a third to roughly 50 percent. Those
are the kind of statistics you get during
a depression. For
dropouts, the rates of joblessness are
staggering. For black
males who left high chool without a diploma, the real jobless
rate at various times over the past few
years has ranged
from 59 percent to a breathtaking 72 percent.
In the second half
of “The Danger Zone” article, Bob Herbert
discusses the faint beginnings
of federal-level leadership interest
in addressing the dreadful job-market-job-opportunity
crisis facing
Black males. This faint federal-level interest we
owe, no doubt, to the fortuitous Democratic Party
victory in the 2006 congressional elections, and
especially to the first-ever rise of 4 African-American
U.S. legislators heading major Congressional Committees and
16 frican-American legislators
heading Sub-Committees, and an African-American
chosen as Congressional Whip to boot. Herbert commences
this discussion by reference to new Congressional
Hearings held at the end of February 2007, by Congress’s
Joint Economic Committee on the joblessness
crisis among African-American males.
He quotes the chair
of that committee, Senator Charles
Schumer of New York:
“Seventy-two percent
jobless [for school dropout black males]! This
compares to 29 percent of white and 19 percent of
Hispanic dropouts.” Senator
Schumer described the problem of black male unemployment
as “profound, persistent and perplexing.” Jobless rates
at such sky-high levels don’t just destroy lives,
they destroy entire
communities. They breed all manner of anti-social behavior,
including violent crime. One of the main reasons
there are
so few black marriages is that there are so many
black men who
are financially incapable of supporting a family. “These numbers
should generate a sense of national alarm,” said Senator
Schumer. (Emphasis Added)
Bob
Herbert continues “The Danger Zone” article discussing
how little is being done by either the private economy
or public policy programs to address the unique and horrendous
job-market/job-opportunity crisis of Black males. “However
much this epidemic of joblessness may hurt,” observes
Herbert, “very little is being done about it.” In regard
to the private economy, he notes that “According to
the Labor Department, only 97,000 new jobs were created
in February [2007]…not even enough to accommodate new
entrants to the work force.” And even when there may be
a high number of new jobs in a month [e.g., over 300,000
in July 2007] or economic quarter, Herbert observes that,
according to studies by the Center for Labor Market Studies
at Northeastern University in Boston, “the only groups
that have experienced a growth in jobs since the last
recession are older workers and immigrants. …Steady
jobs with good benefits are going the way of Ozzie & Harriet.
Young workers, especially, are hurting, which diminishes
the prospects for the American family. And blacks, particularly
black males, are in a deep danger zone.”
Bob
Herbert concludes his “The Danger Zone” article (The
New York Times, March 15) with a critical jab at
the indifference of the Republican controlled Congress — through
most of the 1990s down to the November 2006 congressional
elections — to produce public policies that might help
remedy the joblessness crisis facing Black males. As
Herbert put it:
Instead of addressing
this issue constructively, [Republican]
government officials have responded by eviscerating
programs that were designed to move young people
from disadvantaged backgrounds into the job market.
Robert Carmona, president of Strive, an organization
that helps build job skills, told Senator Schumer’s committee
[Congress’ Joint Economic Committee] – “What
we’ve seen over the last several years is a deliberate disinvestment
in programs that do work.” What’s needed are
massive programs of job training and job creation,
and a sustained
national effort to bolster the education backgrounds
of disadvantaged youngsters. So far there has been
no political will to do any of that.
Crisis
Reformation and Black Elite today:
A New Perspective
That
Black America’s premier leadership agency — the NAACP — is capable
of redefining itself for what I view as a new facet
of its historic leadership function, I have not the
slightest doubt. From my perspective, the main problems
confronting this new metamorphosis in the NAACP stem
less from “The State of Black America” (to quote
the title of National Urban League’s annual volume
on African-Americans) than from present-day conditions
that define our 21st century oligarchic-capitalist
American society.
As
the Atlantic Monthly Magazine editor Jack
Beatty informs us in Age of Betrayal: The Triumph
of Money in America (New York: Alfred Knopf,
2007), today’s oligarchic-capitalist American democracy
is a sad country today, a “most distressful nation” (to
crib a term used by the University of Chicago sociologist,
Andrew Greeley, to characterize societal crises that
once plagued Irish-Americans). Which is to say, our
country today is a nation wherein top-level business
elites claim Gilded Age-type wealth advantage over
the typical American citizen, exhibit crude greed-type
orientations, and have greed-type economic privileges.
Worse
still, perhaps, in today’s oligarchic-capitalist
America, a corporatist-hegemony is exercised over
state and federal legislators, a hegemony that
crudely and massively manipulates and influences
public policy decisions and outcomes that affect
multi-layered spheres in daily American life. Under
this kind of oligarchic-capitalist American democracy,
it is a Sisyphean undertaking to remedy social crises
such as those facing the poor sector in African-American
life. Or for that matter any other gigantic American
crises, like America’s health care crisis, weakening
middle-class crisis, wealth gap crisis, decaying
physical infrastructure crisis (e.g., collapsed inter-state
highway bridge in Minnesota in August 2007), etc.
Interconnecting
Civil Rights Advocacy & Social Reformation
I
came away from reading Bruce Gordon’s resignation
memo with two main thoughts. One thought was that
both the national NAACP leadership ranks (e.g., the
executive officer, chair of National Board, and National
Board members) and local NAACP Branches should consider
fashioning more operational-connections with the
working-class and poor sector in African-American
life, perhaps 40% of African-Americans. In doing
so, I believe the NAACP can in fact kill-two-birds-with-one-stone,
so to speak. By this I mean, the NAACP can not only
continue to advance the longstanding historic “civil
rights activism/advocacy function”, but also help
advance a much needed national-level “Black social-crisis
reformation leadership function”.
These
two functions of Black ethnic-bloc leadership are
more interconnected than many members of today’s
African-American professional stratum have recognized.
I believe that former NAACP executive officer Bruce
Gordon uniquely recognized the importance of interconnecting the “civil
rights advocacy function” and the “social-crisis
reformation function.” He understood that the NAACP
national organization could eventually intertwine
these two leadership tasks in its operation.
The
successor to Bruce Gordon’s office — whoever he or
she might be — must, I believe, fashion a leadership
methodology to institutionalize the interconnection
of the combined “civil rights advocacy” and “social-crisis
reformation” functions at the top-level of the NAACP,
and thereby down through the ranks of its numerous branch
offices. There is today plenty of anecdotal evidence
suggesting the existence of a broad-based desire
among African-Americans for this to happen. Such
as a letter published in the July 17, 2007 issue
of USA Today (America’s largest circulation
newspaper) from a middle-class African-American named
Pamela Hairston of Washington, D.C. Ms Hairston
wrote:
In a mock funeral
in Detroit, the NAACP [at its annual conference] recently
laid to rest the infamous n-word. People shouldn’t
use this
word, and I’m glad the NAACP is recognizing
this. But instead
of all the funeral fanfare and focusing on
just one slur, I would like to
know when one of the oldest and most influential civil
rights organizations in the nation is going to
take a real stand
on the real issues that plague so many black
Americans?
When will the NAACP
lead the charge to decrease the number of HIV/AIDS cases, black
Americans who are killing
other black Americans,
high school dropout rates,
teenage pregnancies
etc…
I
have already drawn attention to the important role
that Bob Herbert of The New York Times has
played in informing
the country
on the social
crises now
ravaging the
life-chances
of weak working-class
and poor African-American
children and
youth. In
his article
in The New York Times (July
14, 2007), Bob Herbert, without being too explicit
about it, is addressing our national-level Black
leadership regarding the epidemic of fratricidal
violence plaguing Black youth in Chicago this summer
of 2007:
Since
September [2006]…dozens of this city’s public school
students have been murdered, most of them shot
to death. As of last week, the toll of public schoolchildren
slain in Chicago since the opening of the school
year had reached 34, including two killed since
the schools closed for summer vacation. …This should
be a major national story, of course, and it would
be if the slain children had come from more privileged
[and white] backgrounds. But these are the kids
that most of America cares nothing about — black,
Latino and poor. …But most people know (and take
for granted) that boys and girls growing up in America’s
inner cities often have to deal with conditions
that can fairly
be compared to combat.
Herbert
continues this candid account of an epidemic of violent
deaths among inner-city school children in Chicago
by noting “the tremendous amount of passivity and
lack of public outrage.” This lack of outrage is
found among the African-American community both in
Chicago and elsewhere, a situation Herbert’s article
alludes to but doesn’t explicitly mention. Be that
as it may, clearly Chicago’s epidemic of violent
deaths among school children along with the national-level
crises plaguing lower-class African-American life
are situations that today’s Black elite sector is,
I believe, obligated to address in a substantive
manner. Also clearly, the primary ethnic-bloc leadership
organization representing African-Americans — the
NAACP — is also obligated to address the multi-layered
crises facing African-American life.
Today's
Black Elite Sector Has New Capabilities
In
light of the multi-layered crises facing African-American
families, children, and youth, we must confront candidly
the issue of the obligation-and-responsibility of
today’s middle-class and professional sector — the
Black elite sector — to assist in fashioning solutions
to these crises. There is available among today’s
Black elite sector a much greater capacity to outreach-to-Black-lower-class-crises
than has ever been available to previous generations
of African-Americans who fell into the Black elite
sector.

We
can deduce the existence of today’s new Black elite
capabilities from data on the upper-stratum occupational
growth among African-Americans during the post-Civil
Rights Movement era. A survey of U.S. occupations
by the Department of Commerce in 2000 reported that
within the ranks of white-collar jobs, African-Americans
were increasingly penetrating the upper-tier of white-collar
jobs. In the Department of Commerce report, the upper-tier
of white-collar jobs were defined as “management,
professional, and related occupations.” Accordingly,
by 2000 some 25% of employed African-Americans held
upper-tier white-collar jobs, which amounted to nearly
4 million African-American individuals. This compared
with 18% of Latino-Americans employed in “management,
professional, and related occupations.” (See U.S.
Census Bureau, Occupations—2000 (Washington,
D.C.: Department of Commerce, August 2003) p.6)
Furthermore,
the categories of African-Americans throughout white-collar
jobs were reported in a U.S. Census Bureau survey
in 2002 as follows - out of 14, | |