THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 1, 1995 TAG: 9509300045
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E6 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY ANN G. SJOERDSMA
LENGTH: Medium: 88 lines
NOT LONG AGO I was criticized for using the term ``black community'' in an editorial. I am white. My critic is black.
``Black people are not monolithic,'' he repudiated; and I agreed, never meaning to imply otherwise. Every black person is an individual, and therefore unique.
But my perception of racial inclusivity is hardly without cause. Black leaders - politicians, journalists and ministers - have long argued that African Americans should be treated as individuals and not as stereotypes or statistics, yet have persisted in grouping themselves indiscriminately into the ``black'' or ``African-American'' community, or more sweepingly, ``Black America.''
Their contradictory message: One community, one voice. ``Black'' is a collective, not individual condition.
Of late, however, three black men - Clarence Thomas, Louis Farrakhan and Colin L. Powell - have challenged the majority ``community'' with their diversity of viewpoint and experience, and have met with intolerance, hypocrisy or oppression. The irony is inescapable.
No black American has been more maligned by other blacks than Clarence Thomas, who begins his fifth term on the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday.
Appointed by President Bush in 1991 to fill the ``black seat'' vacated by Thurgood Marshall, Thomas survived a messy confirmation process that disappointingly concentrated more on his relationship with Anita Hill than on his legal scholarship or his abysmal civil-rights record while head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
Ironically, racial ``unity'' prevented politicized blacks from seriously challenging Thomas and his well-known up-from-the-bootstraps ideology when they had the opportunity. It is now too late.
When civil rights activists hold Thomas, and none of the white justices, personally accountable for a perceived Supreme Court rollback in gains achieved by black Americans during the 1950s and '60s, they only demean themselves. Just last month, the Rev. Al Sharpton and other black ministers led a two-hour, 400-person-strong protest, called a ``prayer vigil,'' outside of Thomas' Fairfax residence. Their intolerant message: A black man must promote the ``community'' viewpoint, however ill-conceived he believes it to be. If he insists on adherence to individual conviction, he will be publicly vilified.
Ironically, Thomas symbolizes the proud, self-determined, empowered black man whom Louis Farrakhan, hate-mongering minister of The Nation of Islam, exhorts to join him Oct. 16 for ``The Million-Man March'' in Washington. Thomas won't be there, of course; he'll be responsibly working.i
Neither he nor a vast number of other black men, also working, raising families, living quiet lives, need a ``Holy Day of Atonement and Reconciliation.''
For the sake of ``unity,'' however, the ``black community'' has been reluctant to point this out. And so Farrakhan's message has been allowed to spread: The failings of individual black men are the failings of all ``Black America.''
The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson declined to support Farrakhan, but hypocritically endorsed the ``ecumenical spirit'' of the march. The Congressional Black Caucus, mindful of future votes, but not of church and state separation, also lent its uneasy approval. To its credit, the NAACP, under the leadership of Myrlie Evers-Williams, a black woman, has not capitulated.
While Thomas rejects affirmative action and other governmental racial classifications as an admission of inferiority, Farrakhan promotes images of racial failure (the criminal, the absent father) to further his grass-roots movement. Yet Farrakhan, ironically, is the more popular.
Poised between these two men may well be Colin L. Powell, whose potential presidential candidacy has already shaken the overwhelmingly Democratic ``black community.'' Not only has Powell been successful with Republicans and within the historically racist military establishment, but this son of Jamaican immigrants has cross-over racial appeal: Newsweek already has pronounced him a ``tough sell'' to black voters because he may not be ``black enough.''
Just what exactly is black?
The truth is the ``black community'' has long stood as a monolith for liberalism, civil rights, and the politics of poverty and discrimination. But times have changed: Black Americans are speaking out in new voices that emanate from higher economic, social and educational status. I would like to believe that their opinions can be as varied as those of Thomas, Farrakhan and Powell, and that pride, dignity and honesty can be cornerstones of all of their communities.
But when individuality is compromised for the sake of racial unity, and the oppressed becomes the oppressor, then the fight for freedom is meaningless. MEMO: Ann G. Sjoerdsma is a lawyer and book editor for The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB