[img]583|left|||no_popup[/img]Dr. Cornel West seems to have gone on a shameless mission to disparage anyone in the black community who tends to overshadow him.
Now he is after music mogul and entrepreneur Jay-Z regarding his business holdings (http://wattree.blogspot.com/2012/12/cornel-wests-attack-on-jay-z-prime.html). West seems determined to demonstrate to the world that Jay-Z's business holdings aren't as impressive as his credit warrants.
What Jay-Z owns or doesn't is not the point of this piece. The issue is the pettiness of a mind that can become so fixated on such a trivial point. Considering West's, fading, yet substantial, influence in the black community, the possible impact of such a mind when we are fighting for our very existence is frightening.
Love, Not Criticism, Is Needed
When powerful forces are hell-bent on establishing an era of corporate feudalism, how does Cornel West's attack on Jay-Z show “love” for the black community? How does it help to reinforce the black community and abolish poverty, as West insists is his primary goal?
It does not. That is my point.
Cornel West's fixation on the extent and source of Jay-Z's wealth, on why a baggage handler could get inauguration tickets over his own illustrious personage, and why the President of the United States failed to return his personal phone call, demonstrate that poverty and suffering within the black community, and America, is less than his primary concern. These assertions are a tool to gain personal attention, to promote his self-aggrandizing agenda.
West's all consuming penchant for attacking high-profile black people – in racially drenched terms – suggests more than what many attribute to West's exaggerated sense of self-importance. It is black-on-black racism, an intense disdain, a condescending attitude toward his own people.
Black people don't take a close enough look at this syndrome. We need to because it is one of the most toxic maladies in the black community. It has been killing us for 400 years.
When discussing with a friend the other day, she insisted, “It is not racism. It is self-hatred.” I beg to differ. People like Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, Larry Elder (whom Smiley recently had on his show), Clarence Thomas and Herman Cain, do not hate themselves. They look down their noses at the black community.
We Showed Cain
During the Republican primaries, Herman Cain said black people were not supporting him because they were brainwashed. That is politispeak for stupid. As things turned out, being stupid notwithstanding, with respect to Cain, it seems that the black community was way ahead of the Republican party.
The black community needs to start wrapping its head around the fact you don't need to be white to have racist attitudes towards black people. For evidence, ask yourself the last time you heard of a drive-by being perpetrated by a shooter wearing a sheet?
I've been observing black racists most of my adult life. I worked for the United States Postal Service for 28 years. For years I was a union rep. who specialized in EEOs. I witnessed black managers and supervisors engage in the most vicious forms of racism against other blacks I have seen. A white manager would not have gotten away with it.
The postal service incorporates that fact into its business model. It is almost impossible for a black employee to file a successful discrimination complaint against another black person. Part of the postal service business model is to elevate black people to rob, steal, intimidate, harass, and fire other black people.
I have an Asian friend with a Master's degree being stepped over by black people who barely made it out of high school. Their only qualification is they are willing to abuse other black people.
Listing West’s Sins
Regarding West, ask the following questions. With everything the Republican party is trying to do to black people – obstructing our right to vote, trying to destroy our educational system, attempting to take away our parents’ and grandparents’ access to Medicare and Social Security, trying to destroy our future by making higher education beyond our children's reach – why is West focused on something as unimportant to our welfare as what Jay-Z is doing? Since the most direct road out of poverty is to ensure that our young people obtain a quality education, why has Dr. West has failed to teach at any school that more than 1 percent of black students can even afford to get into?
We have to understand black people are the product of the same racist environment as white people. Many of us are as racist toward other black people as any racist hillbilly. West is demonstrating it must take a backseat to America's favorite pastime, dragging a successful black man through the mud. West’s attack on Jay-Z is not an aberration. He has done the same to President Obama, Dr. Melissa Harris-Perry, Dr. Michael Eric Dyson and the Rev. Al Sharpton. Yet he seems fine with Wal-Mart and the others trying to cut the black community's throat.
No other group of people thinks that way about its own. For that reason, black people are at the bottom of the social and economic ladder. We need to stop tolerating this, regardless of how we feel about Jay-Z's wealth.
We shouldn't be doggin' Jay-Z. We should take pride in what he has accomplished. Whether you are a hip-hop fan or not, the brother has demonstrated the intellect to rise to the top –without Wal-Mart.
Don't be bamboozled by wooly head and hardcore rhetoric. While Dr. West has been hyped by the establishment as one of the black community’s premier intellectuals, he has shown the worst in black behavior. While it is appropriate, for the black community to despair over this public embarrassment, we should use it as a teaching moment: Always look beneath the hype. Never allow others to define our heroes.
Eric L. Wattree is a writer, poet and musician, born in Los Angeles. A columnist for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Black Star News, a staff writer for Veterans Today, he is a contributing writer to Your Black World, the Huffington Post, ePluribus Media and other online sites and publications. He also is the author of “A Message From the Hood.”
Mr. Wattree may be contacted at wattree.blogspot.com or Ewattree@Gmail.com
