‘State of the Black Union’ Ends; Black Social Posturing Mourns It’s Greatest Loss
Finally, the State of the Black Union has reached a quiet and shadowed demise. Tavis Smiley, who for so long pined and begged for political and social minds to come take part in his soapbox revival for everything wrong with Black America, designed specifically for the choirs and music ministers of the culture, says other folks are doing his work for him.
Sad part is, many people have been doing his kind of work far longer and far better than he, and his money is just now allowing it.
Tavis’ opportunistic greed and self-aggrandizing aside, it’s high time for this and all other Black America forums to end. Nothing anyone can do can fully encompass the problems and possible solutions for Black America, because Black America’s membership is too diverse to attack these problems from a series of sermons every year.
Tavis always envisioned a 1960′s approach to problems plaguing black people; he longed for mobilization and mass buy-in on issues like public health, disparate resources, the education gap, economic empowerment, and a multitude of other problems that keep Black folks from living normal lives. His only problem was that he always managed to attract educated, employed, home owners whose closest contact with a police officer’s billy club was a slow Saturday night watching ‘Cops’ on location in Dade County.
There was always this inefficiency attached to this programming, an inefficiency that rendered Smiley’s presentation unattractive to down-to-Earth Black folks, and untenable and foreign to those that genuinely would’ve benefited from the forum. He would’ve been better off naming 12 Kappa disciples and traveling to Boulet bullroasts every summer.
What no one ever figured out, and its admittedly difficult to do so, is how to get the disenfranchised and lethargic members of our culture to care about doing better. It’s not enough for Smiley to bluster and have Hillary Clinton and Louis Farrakhan on stage backing the plight of the American Negro, a plight that has made the country more money through entertainment, education and social programming than it ever has through slavery. It has to go straight to the people.
It has to be identified as American problems, not just those of Black people living in America. It can be more than an annual convention to justify the secession of Black America from the USA.
Just like this blog – I would hope that brothers and sisters in dire straits would be inspired by a message or two on this site, but they aren’t the intended audience. Most of the people who read this do so to ease their cultural conscience, to add provocative commentary to what they hope, internally, is an effort to make themselves more available to social progress.
At least, that’s why I write. I volunteer, I tithe, I offer help when I can. But I know fully that its not enough. So I write to ease the burden.
Thank God that between me and Tavis Smiley, his burden was light enough to ease up on the ineffective and honey glazed impact of the State of the Black Union on the people he supposedly intended to help.
