A Peculiar Mobilization
"It's time for everyday people to wake up and take power in the face of elite abuse of power." -- Cornel West
This is the seventh year that Tavis Smiley has brought together a cross-section of black intelligentsia and organizational leadership for the State of the Black Union forum, which can be found on C-SPAN's website. It has evolved from a forum dedicated to specific topics on African-American society -- the Black Church, health, and others -- into a media platform for expressing where the assembled believe that the community should go. In post-Katrina America, the forum struck a decidedly more combative tone than in previous years, from Cornel West asking "What will it take for us to wake up?" to Louis Farrakhan's striking juxtaposition of classical black nationalism and Armageddon.
Last year's forum marked a sharp departure from previous years, in that Smiley realized the need to move beyond mere talk into some form of concerted action. The realization of that need crystallizes this year in the publication of The Covenant, a document that proposes to delineate a Black Agenda for this age. That the document came together at all is a remarkable achievement. In an age when talking heads prevail and social and political action on a community-wide level are anathema in the Black community, a gauntlet of a sort has been lain down. Smiley and his collaborators are challenging the Black community to stop being reactive, and to be proactive.
To be sure, The Covenant's agenda could be seen as rather routine. Its 10 points are certainly ones that any progressive American would be in agreement with. However, with no national political organization seriously pursuing these objectives, other than the largely ineffective and marginalized Congressional Black Caucus, it sets into sharp relief how far out of relevance and power progressive values have fallen. In that sense, it serves as an important clarion call for communities of color, not of color, and otherwise, to focus on pragmatic solutions to the problems plaguing this nation. As such, there could be little dissent among the people agreeing to appear at the forum as to its objectives.
Still, perhaps the most striking thing about this year's forum is the closing of the ranks around The Covenant, in a community infamous for personal rivalry and intransigence among its leaders. Every panelist seemed to be personally invested in the document, although Smiley was careful to state that it is a public document subject to change by "the people." Whereas previous years saw the motley assortment of leaders fail to come to any concrete conclusions on how to advance, this one evinced a unanimity of purpose that is rarely seen among the black elite in the present day. In and of itself, the clarification of a clear set of goals is important both for the black elite and the black masses.
However, despite the noble intentions of the authors, it is quite unclear how much effect this covenant can have on the public policy debate in this country. Perhaps the clearest flaw in its early implementation is its dependence on "the people" to push for the agenda and implement it. Depending on the black masses in and of itself is an important route through which this covenant needs to travel. Yet it is unclear that Smiley or his collaborators are seriously committed to getting this covenant out to the majority of Black America, because their mechanisms of distribution seem to be lacking.
The first issue is that the book costs money. Although allegedly a public document, Smiley has gone to the lengths of publishing the Covenant in book form. To be sure, it isn't an expensive tome -- $12 at Amazon.com, plus shipping & handling -- but it seems contrary to the spirit of the project to restrict access in that way. The danger of the approach is that, in constantly hawking a product for sale, they risk reducing the project of creating a coherent Black agenda to an extended infomercial. It was dissonant, at the very least, for Harry Belafonte to denounce American imperial capitalism, on the one hand, and then to be implored to BUY THE BOOK on the other. Another issue with the book costing money is access. To be sure, major booksellers are on board with something being produced by a best-selling author like Smiley. Yet it is unclear how the creators of the Covenant plan to bridge the reader gap and get the book and its contents out to people who never set foot inside a Barnes & Noble or a Borders.
The second major issue flows from this issue of access. Smiley and his cohorts intend a 7-city tour to publicize the Covenant over the next week that seems somewhat unfocused in its outreach. Atlanta and Memphis? San Francisco and Oakland? The Midwest without hitting Chicago (which, ironically, is the home of the publisher of the book)? Whom is this tour supposed to reach? Why are so many major cities with huge black populations left out, if popular mobilization is the aim? Perhaps Smiley has already been assured that town-hall meetings of the type proposed on the Covenant website will take place in these cities and others; but it seems unwise not to, at the very least, try to hit the cities with the 10 largest black communities in the US with the frontline leadership for this launch.
Worse, there seems to be a glaring and frightful omission from the explicit agenda of the Covenant. In his opening remarks, Harry Belafonte was at pains to draw a connection between the launch of a Covenant with Black America and the rise of left-wing governance in South America. Another panelist, Ron Brown (who usually serves as co-moderator), drew a clear link between Black political impotence and American inaction in both Rwanda in 1994 and the Darfur region today. Yet, within the Covenant, nothing can be found that ties the Black community in America to the other African communities in the Americas or the continent of Africa itself. The former is problematic because it makes it clear that the authors don't see a connection between the fight for economic self-determination elsewhere in the Americas and the problems facing Black America. The latter is problematic because it makes it clear that the authors of the Covenant root themselves solely in an American context, without regard for the leadership role that the African-American community has long played in promoting progressive foreign policy toward that ancestral homeland (exemplified by the anti-apartheid movement). Without a clear mooring in a global context, the Covenant ultimately fails to contextualize itself or give itself any sort of unique relevance to this community.
Finally, one of the major problems with the execution of the Covenant is its continued marginalization of young leaders. The Civil Rights Movement, which all of the older panelists made sure to tie themselves to, was largely a youth movement, especially at its height in the mid-60's. Smiley has heard criticism about the absence of young leaders from the beginning, and did make a sincere effort to create a panel exclusively composed of young leaders. However, this panel was relegated to the very end of the forum, their time compressed because of the loquaciousness of older leaders. One of them made a very clear request that, next year, the young people be heard first. Viewers can only hope that Smiley heeds that call, if only because hearing from young people first is the only way that the leaders who populate the panel can hope to reach out to my generation.
Ultimately, the Covenant is a useful document for progressives of all colors, as noted by several panelists. However, can it spark a movement? That remains to be seen in the next few years. Can Smiley and his cohorts energize enough people to heed his call for town hall meetings to discuss the issues underlined in the Covenant? Will a top-down, semi-commercialized, media-driven, older-to-younger paradigm succeed in revitalizin the Black body politic? It seems unlikely. But it's a start.
posted by claimin true at 2:45 PM
|
0 comments
