Two revs don't make it right

The supposed tensions between Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson made headlines again recently. What's it all about?

When a Fox News reporter questioned whether fallout from the Tawana Brawley case would negatively affect his possible run for the presidency, Rev. Sharpton – incarcerated for his protest of the Vieques bombing – lashed out at both the reporter and Rev. Jackson. Referring to the oft-repeated stories that after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, Jackson smeared his shirt with King's blood, which hounded him during his own presidential bids, Sharpton declared, "I think the Brawley case pales in comparison. Did I take the blood of the guy I loved and put it on my shirt?"

After the Daily News and others trumpeted the remark as further evidence of a Sharpton-Jackson rift, Sharpton apologized to Jackson but pointed out that the story was an effort "to divide leadership as we come together on the critical issue of Vieques."

But, back to the question, what's it all about? Though the pundits' interpretation is a Sharpton-Jackson struggle to be the preeminent black leader, my view is that it's less about their differences and more about the ways that they're the same. Both Jackson and Sharpton made their names by going outside of the black establishment with a more militant black agenda and created an unmediated relationship to the black community. While this strategy helped both succeed, it ultimately trapped them in a narrow political universe with nowhere to go.

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In 1984, Jackson undertook an insurgent run for the Democratic presidential nomination, against the advice of most black elected officials in the country. His core message was this: The black establishment was insufficiently black. Its loyalties were to white party bosses and a white agenda. The black community had to assert its own interests.

The response was earth shattering. Three and a half million Americans – mainly black – voted for him. Jackson, previously a well-known yet marginal figure, became the preeminent leader of black America. But Jackson – and black America – paid a price for his essentially racial appeal. While it brought him fame in the black community, it also laid the basis for his own political isolation.

In his second run for the presidency, Jackson attempted to broaden his appeal with a more class-based politic and polled 7 million votes. He was viciously sidelined by Democratic Party hierarchs who refused to reward his efforts on behalf of the party and beat him back to the second-class status he has been held to ever since. Jackson was helpless against the onslaught. He returned to his black base, but refused to break with the Democrats. He was thus consigned to the endless regress of the black political ghetto. Any time he attempts to break out, the media is there to resurrect the stories of smearing Dr. King's blood and of "Hymie Town."

Dr. King went a different route. Though a black leader with an overwhelmingly powerful connection to ordinary black Americans, King established himself as a fighter against prejudice and poverty, an opponent of the Vietnam War and made a moral appeal to create a society that brought all Americans together. For this reason, Dr. King was both loved and was controversial in the black community. He didn't confine himself solely to black empowerment. He was willing to run the risk of challenging the black community to accept him as a leader of more than black America. His followers – like Jackson, and later Sharpton – were not.

Just as Jackson challenged the national black establishment, Sharpton took on the New York black Democrats. His grass-roots movement against police brutality and racial violence put him in the forefront of the black cause. By the time Sharpton ran in the Democratic primary for mayor in 1997 – nearly forcing a runoff – he had become the city's most popular black leader.

Yet, Sharpton is also trapped in the same box that Jackson is. Any time he sets out to "cross over" – as he is certainly contemplating in considering a run for the presidency – the Tawana Brawley issue is raised. It was his own frustration with that trap which prompted his explosion at the Fox News reporter and his fellow "political prisoner" Jackson. They are stuck in the same race-based boat, with nowhere to go.

I have tried to take a different road. While I am a black woman with a deep anger over the continued poverty and mistreatment of our community and a deep desire to assert our interests and achieve our liberation, I have not gone to the black community with the message that we must first and foremost assert our oppression as black people. Rather, I believe we must assert our political power by breaking out of the Democratic Party and
building new alliances.

Black nationalist positions are now so co-optable by the Democrats that even Alan Hevesi, the mayoral candidate who has race-baited both Rev. Sharpton and me, came out in support of reparations. But a $5,000 one-time payment to a black family does not address the structural economic arrangement that makes black America poor. That's why a redistribution of economic wealth and political power – away from the corporate-run two parties and to ordinary Americans – is fundamental. That is why I have built an independent movement to connect us with those who are politically, ideologically, economically and racially distinct from us – a classwide movement. That does not make us any less black. It can make us more powerful.

I have paid a price in the black community for this. In New York, I am not nearly as popular as Rev. Sharpton. I challenge the black community's narrowness and parochialism. This has made me almost as controversial in Harlem and Bed-Stuy as I am in the pages of the New York Post.

As for the Revs. Sharpton and Jackson, they are important black leaders who succumbed to the understandable pressure to organize on the basis of our oppression. But when you do that, your past efforts to take up the black cause are used to prevent you from going beyond racial politics to something more inclusive and ultimately more powerful. Such is the real racism of American political life.