What is wrong with Tavis Smiley?
John Calvin Jones, PhD, JD
www.virtualcitizens.com
2008-03-24

http://www.virtualcitizens.com/articles/What_is_wrong_with_Tavis_Smiley

Mendacity, Hypocrisy, and White Supremacy

Currently, millionaire, Tavis Smiley, and professor/social critic, Cornell West, head up a panel that purports to address topics, problems, and struggles in Black America. The two men have long examined said problems and co-authored or contributed to books on the subject – the latest theme drawing on the biblical idea of a “covenant.” Now these distinguished men are leading a discussion about the Kerner Commission – 40 years later.

While the men, and their team of resourceful people are well-meaning, brilliant rhetoricians, and passionate, their diagnosis and prescription fails at a most fundamental level. Sadly, when I take their ideas on their face, I am left to conclude that these men perpetuate the very notions of what Dr. West sees as the core problem in American politics today: Mendacity, Hypocrisy, and White Supremacy.

Playing at the Edges, Addressing the Symptom

In a presentation about the Kerner Commission report, its limits, its audience, and its intent, which intertwined themes about the State of Black America and by extension the state of present-day America, Dr. West explains that much of the problem is centered in a politics and set of social policies and programs filled with mendacity, hypocrisy, and White supremacist ideology. Two examples flesh out the point: Iraq and Katrina. On the one hand, we have an illegal war and occupation based on lies about WMDs and or Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda. As recent policy statements and mainstream articles show, the invasion and occupation was and is central to the project of American hegemony over people and resources in the Middle East. When it comes to Katrina, we see a dismissal of Blacks and the poor of the Gulf Coast and New Orleans. In a repeat of the great floods of 1927, we see abandonment of peoples in desperate need and overt government transfer of wealth and resources for the few, while Blacks are dispossessed and disenfranchised.

But of course, the American occupation of Iraq and abandonment of Blacks in New Orleans is symptomatic, not a cause of America’s decay and by extension not the cause of the long suffering endured by Blacks. The core problems for Black America, and hence all Americans, are America’s military-industrial complex, the drug war, corporate welfare and privatization of heretofore state services. The ideologies, politics, and rhetorics which support these programs of: (a) wealth redistribution from the poor to the mega-rich (e.g. sub-prime bailouts for millionaire bank execs and foreclosures for the common people qua rabble); and (b) expansion of the police state into a fully functioning military-security state, depend upon complicity and obedience – especially from elites who should know better. But instead of seeing the elephant in the room, the effects of the 800lb. gorilla, or the metamorphosis of Kafka’s Gregor into a giant cockroach, Tavis Smiley and Dr. West talk around these fundamentals of social oppression in America.

In one recent address to a predominantly Black audience – of church goers, Tavis Smiley spoke about hope, and the paucity of Black journalists who “ask the tough questions” of governmental officials. But instead of asking even rhetorical questions – to a sympathetic audience, Smiley gleefully invoked the misleading Obama reference to the “audacity of hope” – a book which is better read as “an apology for White Supremacy” (note: in his book, Obama declares that Black people are 90% of the way toward equality with Whites in this society, though incomes for Blacks is not even 68% of comparable Whites, and net worth for 50% of Black families is zero). Smiley also omitted references to media consolidation and how the FCC no longer shows a commitment to holding the airwaves in public trust as to promote local and community news. Why did Smiley avoid such obvious structural impediments to social justice and equality?

So while Smiley and Dr. West discussed ethereal promises and the socio-political realities [sic] of “hip-hop culture” (whatever that is) and made references to biblical ideas about aiding the poor, these thinkers voice platitudes commonly heard from mainstream politicians. Just like Obama, and every other mainstream politician who is beholden to corporate wealth and the right-wing echo chamber called the mainstream media, Smiley and West never address Black problems along the lines of political economy and grounded in a political and social that considers Black men as sources of prison labor or cannon fodder.

Manifest Destiny and the New World Order?

When testifying before the Senate in 1986, Oliver North explained that his interaction with and support of a band of terrorists in Nicaragua, with U.S. government money, resources, and assets was authorized by President Reagan and Vice President, G. H. W. Bush. As he defended himself in the face of express Congressional prohibition (the Boland Amendment) to fund the covert war, the soon-to-be convicted felon and war criminal expressed the idea that “silence meant consent.” North insisted that had there been disapproval for his scheme, Bush or Reagan should have said something, but they did not. So too, must the omissions by Tavis Smiley and Dr. West be read as consent for U.S. imperialism, the Drug War, and massive corporate welfare that guts our cities, fills our jails, and robs youth of hope and opportunity.

In his Beyond Vietnam speech of 4 April 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr., provided what I think is one of his most incisive observations:

    “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Can we not see versions of these three vices in practice today? And are these vices not largely supported by the silence of Smiley, West, and thousands of Blacks in the U.S. military, Blacks wearing police uniforms, and Blacks holding elected office?

Plenty to Criticize, Plenty of Non-Black Critics

The U.S. military budget, which is largely buying toys of the Cold War to support diseconomic industries making tanks, bombs, land mines, comes at the expense of us all (even former Colin Powell aide, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson admits this). The Congress now awards more money to the wrongly labeled Department of Defense [sic] than that spent by the rest of the world combined. And what does this military do? Its 700 military bases are used to occupy 131 nations, American bombs and land mines send people into the stone age and separate limbs, recruiters find ways to enlist rapists, high school drop-outs, and members of the Aryan Nation. When Bush and other defenders of the status quo claim that these people in uniform “protect our freedom” our rejoinder is that such is nothing more than mendacity, evidencing hypocrisy, justified by White supremacy. And when too many Black people, especially college-aged youth, are joining this agency of death, leaders like Smiley and Dr. West need to explain how government policies are wrong-headed and often criminal, wrapped in corporate-capitalism, militarism, and the hegemony of White Supremacy. Instead, these champions of the people are silent.

In its nascent period from the 1870s to 1910, America's drug prohibition laws overtly targeted American Indians, Chinese immigrants, Mexicans, Blacks, and Caribbean workers. As the state and federal governments worked together over the next 30 years, Blacks were picked out as the scourge of the dope scene – which covered cocaine, marijuana, and heroin. Once the policy was ramped up under Nixon and then Reagan, the “sheets came off” as these Republican administrations openly declared that “Blacks were the problem” or passed laws that encouraged cops to target Black youth. As the Drug War has evolved and mutated, police around the nation understand that its “Giuliani time” and open season on any “hip-hop looking” sot, any non-White driver, any skateboarder. Whether it be the rape of Abner Louima or the execution of Sean Bell, at its core is a policing strategy and policy predicated on the notion that the Drug War is justified. Without eliminating the Drug War, Black men will continue to be sent to prison or shot by police - who hardly need an excuse. Those not lucky enough to suffer 41 shots will live a nightmare of prison abuse and then unemployment due to their criminal record. There is no doubt that the Drug War is a tool of White Supremacy, dripping with hypocrisy (even the Nixon Commission admitted that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco), and built on a century of mendacity (the FDA still refuses to admit any medical efficacy of marijuana).

In Free Lunch, his latest work of investigative journalist, David Cay Johnston, provides a long list of social abuses perpetuated by elected elites in Washington, legislatures and councils at the state, county, and city level across the land. In what can only be seen as a product of short-sighted self-interest, greed, or stupidity, elected leaders have taken taxes and resources from the many to enrich the few. Johnston shows a litany of subsidies which generate no net economic gain, but instead leave us to suffer economic costs. He explains how Wal-Mart, Tyco, and other economic giants are given welfare and kick backs – again look at the Fed’s gift of $200 billion in tax-payer backed securities for JP Morgan to buy Bear Sterns, i.e. buy it risk free. Additionally Congressional deals grant protections for telecommunication oligopolies, encourage boondoggles in the military-industrial complex, and support the scam of health insurance. Such policies and give-aways largely opposed by the majority reflect what Noam Chomsky and Ralph Nader call the “democracy-gap.” But the gap is tolerated due to what Johnston sees as a never-ending PR campaign that encourages people to transfer their rage from the political elites and toward matters of “gays, guns, and god.” (Note: This victory of Edward Bernays, of message over substance, and of corporate profits over people is captured neatly in a four-hour BBC series, The Century of the Self.)

Conclusion: It’s a Black Thang?

According to Johnston, gangs are growing in Los Angeles and elsewhere as a result of wealth transfer from social services, youth programs, parks, and community building for the common good into private wealth for the richest corporations in America and their directors. The question as to “what is wrong with Black America” and the answers are not complex. It has nothing to do with White producers pimping out Black artists to degrade themselves be it through music or screen. It has everything to do with laws and policies that redirect wealth, promote war and prisons, and leave urban decay. Why do we need White men, like Johnston, or Tim Wise, or Howard Zinn, or Ralph Nader to do both the leg work and present the message – where are Smiley and Dr. West?

While making subtle and not so subtle illusions to mainline Christian dogma, Tavis Smiley harps on the idea that American needs to live up to its promise. Such rhetoric fits well with Smiley’s not so subtle idea of a biblical covenant. (I remember now, Smiley is pimping his trilogy about said covenant, to church-going, wannabe Nabobs). Of course the Old Testament notion of a covenant is about a reciprocal promise, a bargain, by which God would protect a chosen few so long as they obeyed. How ironic. The only promise that captured Africans destined for America ever had was that they would be whipped, beaten, sodomized, and killed unless they were obedient to the dictates of Whites – master and child alike. What tenets does Smiley want us to follow and how can he deliver a promise of social uplift when the political and social structure is predicated on the abuse of Blacks, Latinos and poor Whites?

Corporate-capitalism, its war machine, and police-state are here and growing in power. Is it little more than a 21st century version of a feudal era gone by? Now that the systemic nature of the slavery has changed, is it so hard to see that laws and guns and cops are used to keep the rabble in place? When will Smiley, Dr. West, and other leaders open up this conversation? When will they stop with the mendacity, hypocrisy, and White Supremacy?

John Calvin Jones, PhD, JD
www.virtualcitizens.com