Dr. Boyce & Yvette: Whatever Happened to Al Sharpton’s Black Agenda?

Dr. Boyce Watkins recently had a discussion with political expert, Yvette Carnell to discuss this topic. The discussion is below:

Dr. Boyce:           Hi.  I’m Dr. Boyce Watkins from YourBlackWorld.com.  Today I was thinking about something as we start the New Year.  I was watching MSNBC and I happened to catch some of Al Sharpton’s new show, “Politics Nation.”  The show seems to be doing really well.  The ratings are really high and I think it’s because Reverend Sharpton is a sharp guy.  He’s smarter than most people give him credit for.

But, one of the things I can also say is that I noticed that the rhetoric has adjusted since the election.  I noticed that the engagement with black folks was at an all time high right before the President was attempting to get reelected.  Much of the prodding resulted from this constant conversation about, “Oh, they’re trying to take away your voting rights.  Dr. King died for your voting rights,” and all this other stuff.  But, when black people showed up and said, “Well, what about our unemployment rate?  What about our mass incarceration issue?  What about the other things that we have concerns with but the politicians don’t have time anymore?”  So, I think the ultimate measure of whether or not the Democrats and the Obama administration care anything about you is how they are responding to you right now.

So, to talk about this issue, I wanted to bring in my homegirl, my partner in crime, Ms. Yvette Carnell.

Happy New Year, Yvette!

 Yvette:                 Happy New Year.  How are you doing?

 Dr. Boyce:           I’m doing very, very well.  Now, I wanted to ask you about something.  About two months ago, I had become very frustrated with these meetings that were happening in the White House with Ben Jealous, Al Sharpton… the usual suspects.  Nothing seemed to come out of these meetings.  It almost seemed as if they had these meetings so that people could say that they had meetings.

 Yvette:                 Well, I’ve observed the same thing.  I mean, right before the election there was sort of a rallying cry in terms of, “Black people, you have to go out and vote.  You have to vote for this guy because if you don’t go and vote for this guy then we’re going to have a problem.  You voting rights…people died for them.”  Just like you said before, that was the rhetoric.  They were intentionally targeting black people.

But, what you notice here is that it’s almost as if Al Sharpton is just doing what he has to do.  There are enough black people now who say, “Okay.  There’s some credence to what Yvette Carnell’s been saying.  There’s some credence to what Dr. Boyce has been saying.  We do need an agenda.”  So, what they came out and did in order to respond to that is they had a meeting and said “We’ve come up with an agenda.”  Which included a lot of things that were just kind of general.  First of all, some of it mentioned the fiscal cliff.  Okay.  They set up this fiscal cliff, but that’s not a black issue.  The fiscal cliff is an American issue.  They said something about, “It impacts black people.”  Well, yeah, that’s true.  But that’s not black stuff.  We need targeted issues.

So, it’s almost as if they used that meeting just as window dressing to say, “Yeah.  We’re doing something.  We do have a plan.”  But, there’s no plan to put that plan into action and quite frankly, I don’t think there ever was.

 Dr. Boyce:           I think it’s funny that we often accuse black Republicans of being poster children for their party, basically being puppets or being used by their party just so they can save face.  Honestly, it seems that this happens also on the Democratic side. You have these black individuals who are chosen by the powers that be, to allegedly represent the black community and, effectively, they don’t have any power.  They can’t walk into a room and command much of anything because, ultimately, their overseers don’t respect them very much.

And, I think that when you talk about what Sharpton, and Morial and Jealous . ( and I’m not as critical of Morial because I actually like Morial ,) in terms of what he’s trying to do with the Urban League,) but Sharpton and Jealous I have some serious concerns with.  When you listen to the way they approach the black agenda and the way they approach the African American issues, it’s incredibly sad and timid.  And, you notice there has been a dramatic shift in the rhetoric since before the election.  Before the election, all the Obama surrogates where going into every black church, every black organization they could find, gathering as many black people as possible, warranting every black media outlet, and literally poking at us and saying, “You know what, those white people are trying to take your voting rights.  Dr. King died for you to have the right to vote.  Are you going to let them take your right to vote?”

 What people don’t understand is that while you’re getting pumped up and saying, “No, I’m not going to let them take my right to vote,” guess what?  They’re pushing you to fight for your right to vote so you can keep them in power.  So, my question is:  That same rhetoric; that same energy that they had before the election when they were pushing us to go out and vote, do they have that same rhetoric now when they’re trying to fight for our right to get a good education, fight for our right to have a job, fight for our right to get out of prison?  When you’ve got all these black men in prison over laws that are no longer in effect.  You have laws from the war on drugs that having been adjusted when they changed the crack to powder disparity, but there are still people who are still in prison under the old laws.  So, if you are going to come into the church and fight for us to go out and vote for you, you need to go into the church and fight for the right for us to go out and vote for ourselves by getting things done that are going to actually help our community and not just help you.  Yvette?

 Yvette:                 Well, I agree.  But, here’s the issue that all black people need to face: You have to face the fact that your leadership is a representation of you.  And, we have to face the fact that too many of us are not serious people.  Let me just say what I mean by that.  People are going to say, “No, we are serious.  We’re just like every other population.”  No, we’re not because when you look at the Jewish community; when you look at the gay community; when you look at other contingencies; when you look at the Latino community, these people judge their leaders by their effectiveness.  It’s not about how many times you’ve marched.  That’s wonderful.  That’s great.  We appreciate your service.

 But, in terms of what we’re doing right here and now, everything you do is about your effectiveness as a leader.  What have you moved to the goal post?  What have you achieved for us?  Show me the legislation that you have pushed through.  Show me the legislation that you forced the President to sign and other members of Congress to develop.  Show me that.  And they can show you that.  They gay community can say, “Look, we got Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, that we’ve been working on”. The Latino community’s leaders can show you, “Look, we got the dream back.  We’ve been working for our people.”

 Al Sharpton and Ben Jealous can’t show us anything and yet, we rally around them as if they have achieved some monumental level of success.  It is our fault that they are still able to have that spotlight and still go to meet with the White House.  In any other community, they would be finished.  There would be someone else who’s holding that job.  They would have been given their pink slips and the people would say, “You know what, we appreciate that you’re a part of this community, but you’re no longer leaders of that community.”  The fact that we can’t say that; that we can’t look at them with clear eyes and say, “Yeah, they may be good people but they are not the people to lead the black community in the 21rst century.”  That’s a problem that we have and we need to face that in our community.

 Everything isn’t about who can give you a good sermon, who can give you a good speech, who can tell you what they used to do in the 1970′s and where they marched, and tell you about when they moved into Harlem.  All of that stuff, that’s not leadership.  So until we get to the point where we can understand what leadership is in terms of what leadership is supposed to get us, in terms of the exchange, then we’re going to be here.

I think that black people have to face that.  I do hold Al Sharpton accountable 100 percent because I don’t know whether he did this on purpose or whether he’s just ineffective.  The only thing that it tells me is that he shouldn’t be the one to speak for black people; to go to the White House and speak for black people about policy initiatives.  He’s not that guy.  So, I think the black community has to face that and be like, “We like you but you’re not that guy.”

 Dr. Boyce:           I agree with you 100 percent.  I think that we all are owed an explanation.  We need to know what happened with your so-called black agenda that you came up with magically a few weeks ago, or a couple of months ago, (whenever they did this stuff), which I think was just reactionary.  I don’t think there was any intention to push this.

 I also have a question for Reverend Sharpton:  Are these Democrats, your political buddies, going fight as hard for us on specific issues as they expected us to fight when it came to voting and keeping them in power?  It’s very easy to go into a church and invoke the imagery of a civil rights movement and to leverage that to your benefit.  We will not allow the civil rights movement to be exploited for the benefit of those who seek to keep us in oppression.  And, when you buy out the leaders at the top and try to control them, then effectively you are pressing a mess that we cannot accept.

 So, I’m going to keep speaking on this.  I know that we are going to get criticized for this but, honestly, anybody who knows anything about us knows we just don’t care.  Because, when it comes to telling the truth, somebody has to do it because we’re in an era where the BS just piles to the ceiling.  We can’t allow this to continue because too many people are struggling.

 Thank you, Yvette, for your time.  I really appreciate it.

 Yvette:                 No problem.

 Dr. Boyce:           Thank you all for checking us out at YourBlackWorld.com.  Until we meet again, please, stay strong, be blessed, and be educated. Peace.

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