Confederate Flag Fight Dodges Bigger Battles
Earl Ofari Hutchinson
When ex-rebel state South Carolina defiantly waved the Confederate flag over
its statehouse the issue became a red flag for NAACP leaders. They have
galvanized a flock of politicians, college and professional athletes, black
frats and sororities, hip-hop, rock and movie stars to march, rally and
boycott the state until it lowers the flag.
Yet they make no mention of the ugly fact that South Carolina blacks have
close to the highest poverty, school drop, infant mortality, and victim of
violence rates in the nation. The NAACP has been mum on the dreary plight of
hundreds of black South Carolina farmers whose farms have been foreclosed on
by bankers and government agencies in the past decade.
Even the much touted
boycott the NAACP boasts has drained $100 million from the state's tourist
industry, has been a curse for some blacks. Historically black college
presidents, black politicians, food and service company owners and
entertainment promoters privately grouse that the boycott has badly pinched
their purse.
Even if South Carolina capitulated and dumped the flag in a museum where it
rightly belongs it would be a pyrrhic victory. Configured and reconfigured
designs of the Confederate flag fly over public buildings in nearly every
deep South state. Are NAACP leaders going to demand that blacks march, rally
and mount tourism boycotts until they remove the flags in these states?
The Confederate flag fight in South Carolina is a near textbook of this
example of the NAACP's strategy of elevating side-show issues to a life and
death struggle for African-Americans to grab maximum media and public
visibility. It also uses this strategy to shut up black critics who blast the
NAACP as a do-little, rudderless group more interested in lining its coffers
with corporate dollars than fighting hard racial battles.
The strategy is
simple: Pick the softest target possible, make a lot of fuss about it, and
take minimal action on the piles of crisis issues that devastate poor and
working class black communities. NAACP leaders employed the strategy when
they threatened boycotts against the TV industry, law suits against gun
manufacturers, and squawked about the paucity of black Supreme Court clerks.
The NAACP's often blatant inattention to the big ticket issues that
sledgehammer the black poor make me wonder again whether the nation's oldest
civil rights group can really be the big player in the battle against racism
and injustice that it has been for most of its long history. I wondered about
this because the NAACP has spent the better part of the 1990s in a monumental
retreat from visible cutting edge social activism.
That retreat can be
directly traced to the collapse of legal segregation in the 1960s, the class
divisions that imploded within black America, and the greening of the black
middle-class. This is a process that has been slowly evolving since the death
of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders in the 1960s.
By the close of the 1960s the civil rights movement had spent itself. The
torrent of demonstrations, sit-ins, marches and civil rights legislation
annihilated the legal wall of segregation. With the barriers erased the black
middle-class had a field day. They were starting more and better businesses,
marching into more corporations, and universities, spreading out into more of
the professions, winning more political offices, buying bigger and more
expensive homes, cars, clothes, and jewelry, taking more luxury vacations,
and joining more country clubs than ever before in the history of the
country. The first chance they got many packed up their bags and started
their headlong flight to greener suburban pastures.
None of their success had even the remotest bearing on the lives of the black
poor, who had become even poorer, and more desperate. Many of whom turned to
crime, drugs, and gangs as their only way out.
NAACP leaders are trapped in the middle by the twisting political trends and
shifting fortunes upward of the black middle-class and downward of the black
poor.
A tilt toward an aggressive activist agenda carries the deep risk of
alienating the corporate donors that they have carefully cultivated the past
few years. They depend on them to gain more jobs, promotions, and contracts
for black professionals and businesspersons and to secure contributions for
their fundraising campaigns, dinners, banquets, scholarship funds and
programs.
The Confederate flag fight poses no threat to the NAACP's cozy relationship
with its corporate backers. And since the public believes that only rabid,
unreconstructed race baiters defend flying the Confederate flag, NAACP
leaders can claim that they are striking a mortal blow against racist
oppression. But scrapping the flag won't save black farms, improve abominable
schools, stop racial profiling, fight the crime and drug plague, or help
poor, malnourished mothers. These are the battles that the NAACP aren't
fighting to shut down South Carolina over.
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