Note: The following post contains language that might be offensive to some readers. Please understand the context in which a certain word is used before you take me to task for using it.
In 2004, in the Democratic primary in IL, I was one of only three or four people in my county, a rural, heavily Republican area, to vote for Sharpton. I did it partly because I did not like the front-runner, Joh Kerry. I thought he was a weak candidate, as he turned out to be. I also did it because, of all the candidates then in the race, only Sharpton had spent a lifetime fighting for justice the only way it can be done. One case at a time, one incident at a time, bringing to bear all his personality and media-savvy when an African-American was wronged.
I find the usual portrait of Sharpton to be a fascinating study of the unreflective racism that still ahunts so many of our institutions, including the press. Sharpton is typical of that one black man in a community who refuses to lie down to white authority. In the past such persons were called uppity niggers. Today, they are called ambulance-chasing, self-promoting, media-whores. Sharpton refuses to concede there is only one road to racial justice in this country, a steady "drip-drip-drip" pf non-violent non-cooperation, complete with wide-eyed white kids with the best intentions in the world holding hands and singing "We Shall Overcome". They are the real leaders, of course, not an uppity, I mean an ambulance chasing media whore like Sharpton. Sharpton is a combination of an old-style urban ward-heeler, an old style African-American preacher/community leader, and a very knowledgeable manipulator of public imagery and consciousness. What angers whites more than anything else is, unlike white America's favorite civil rights leader, Sharpton has built in NYC an organizaiton that gets results.
In the movie The Cotton Club, Laurence Fishburne plays Harlem gangster Bumpy Johnson. Johnson is accosted by the white overseer of the backstage area of the Cotton Club while he is trying to arrange a date with a dancer. When he is grabbed and asked what he is doing, he turns and says, "I am trying to talk to my friend Wilona. Who are you and what do you think you are doing?" The oversser grabs Johnson and calls him an uppity nigger, and prepares to beat his ass soundly. Two of Johnson's cohorts grab the man and drag him to the men's room where they shove his head into a commode, which Johnson proceeds to flush, saying, "This uppity nigger is buying you a drink." That is Sharpton; that is why the white American establishment hates him so much - he gives them a collective swirly time after time, and no matter what they try to do, he keeps dragging them, kicking and screaming and swearing, into the bathroom.
In his book, A Dream or a Nightmare? Malcolm, Martin, and America, James Cone shows that, rather than offering opposing ways of fighting white supremacy, King and Malcolm X were in fact complementary to one another, and that both were correct and incorrect in the ways they chose to fight. Sharpton has taken that lesson to heart, and refuses to concede that there is only one way to beat a system that is structured to defeat him at every turn, because by so conceding, one already admits the game is fixed. He plays, and wins by his own rules.
Sharpton is indeed a "controversial" figure, but that is because he shows us, again and again and again, the worst of who we are as America, and forces us to deal with it. He drags in to the light all the filth and stink of our racism and makes us confront it. That is why we hate him so. He is a threat to our sense of ourselves as good, honest, hard-working, tax-paying, rules-playing, racially-sensitive enlightened individuals. He knows the seedy underbelly of America, because as one of its victims, that is what he has been exposed to. God bless him, and all the uppity niggers out there who buy us drinks time and time again, dragging us into the bathroom to teach us a lesson.
