Held to answer

Cornel West and Tavis Smiley ended their national poverty tour in August without a stop in Portland or Oregon.

Too bad. Apparently they haven’t heard that Oregon is becoming the Mississippi of the West. And Portland — where better to see how the Democratic Party has failed the poor.

They could have seen why there will be no revolution, why a call for civil disobedience in the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jr., will be greeted with applause but not much else.

When the memorial to King recently opened on the National Mall, West wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times that a statue isn’t what King would have wanted. Given the times we live in, he would’ve wanted a revolution.

“As the talk show host Tavis Smiley and I have said in our national tour against poverty, the recent budget deal is only the latest phase of a 30-year, top-down, one-sided war against the poor and working people … Our two main political parties, each beholden to big money, offer merely alternative versions of oligarchic rule.”

With no King-worthy narrative to inspire and unite the poor and working class, West said, right-wing populists have seized the moment with legitimate claims about government corruption, while making ridiculous claims that tax cuts for the rich will stimulate growth.

“King weeps from his grave,” said West.

If King were alive, he would call for “a revolution in our priorities, a re-evaluation of our values, a reinvigoration of our public life and a fundamental transformation of our way of thinking and living that promotes a transfer of power from oligarchs and plutocrats to everyday people and ordinary citizens.”

West lays out in concrete terms what this revolution means: “support for progressive politicians . . . extensive community and media organizing; civil disobedience; and life and death confrontations with the powers that be. Like King, we need to put on our cemetery clothes and be coffin-ready for the next great democratic battle.”

You go first, Cornel West. Show us what part of your comfortable life as a Princeton professor you’re prepared to give up for the revolution.

West is a popular writer, but he doesn’t follow through on where his own words would lead. He falls back on familiar rhetoric.

“Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse,” West complains.

Racism? Prison? Police? These are subjects “rendered invisible” in public discourse? They are more like a chronic rerun.

The catastrophe today is the failure of black leaders like West to see how their excuses for criminal behavior in the black community has bred more crime and helped perpetuate a permanent underclass.

If West wants working-class America – of all skin colors – to join in his revolution, here’s what he has to do: Disown a few brothers, maybe even a lot of brothers. Stop demanding that the prison cells be opened. The occupants won’t be coming to his neighborhood. They’ll be preying on the poor and working-class people he claims to speak for.

Thirty-two years ago this month Ebony Magazine produced a special issue, “Black on Black Crime. The Causes, The Consequences, The Cures.”
Among the titles of the stories under “The Cures” section: “PUSH for Excellence Can Be a Cure,” “Return to Spiritual Values,” “Stop Coddling the Hoodlums.”

Of course, there is also this from a leading Democratic black politician of the day, Congressman John Conyers: “Main Solution is National Plan Correcting Economic Injustice.” Conyers objects to the label “black on black crime” and blames crime in the black community on joblessness.

The real cure, says Conyers, is a full employment policy. Accompanying his story is a photo of President Jimmy Carter signing the Humphrey-Hawkins bill supporting full employment. Looking on, smiling, is Coretta Scott King.

What has changed in the three decades since that Ebony special issue? Conyers is still a Michigan congressman. That full employment bill that Carter signed was followed by a steady growth in black gangs and the glamorization of thug culture, which has spread to white suburbs. And we don’t use that genteel term, hoodlums, anymore. They’re gangbangers.

Three decades later, black leaders like West and Conyers are pushing a new agenda: end the war on drugs, which West calls the new “Jim Crow.” The drug dealers who’ve made money off other people’s misery and helped destroy lives are now considered victims. Crime is no longer crime.

Imagine what King would make of the cultural decay that now includes black hip-hop stars who have enshrined drugs and the pimp life at the expense of black girls and women.

Nevertheless, had West and Smiley brought their 16-city poverty tour to Portland they would’ve found many sympathizers agreeing that racism is terrible, prisons are overused and drugs should be legalized.

But civil disobedience? Not many serious takers in this economy. People who have jobs want to hang on to them. And many of the jobless are hardly in a position to risk having an arrest record turn up on Google.

West and Smiley played it safe.

A true poverty tour would have included stops in Beverly Hills, Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Georgetown and maybe Martha’s Vineyard, where those who control the fate of the poor reside.

– Pamela Fitzsimmons