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THE OFFICIAL WEB SITE OF THE MADISON TIMES WEEKLY NEWSPAPER |
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OPINION |
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Cosby and his pals could do more – Part II By Ron Walters In my column last week on Bill Cosby, I suggested he recognize that the corrective is not just a matter of people changing their minds. If we publicly admit that Black people and some of their elders are practicing deleterious values, then we also have to privilege Ted Shaw's comments (as he followed Cosby to the rostrum) that Black people didn't create the conditions to which they have had to respond. Change, then, is the question. Knowing what we know about the odds against Black people who at a large level have struggled up from either ghetto conditions or the rural areas of the country, we have to be proud of the culture — even the ''Hip Hop'' culture — that they have created. We have had to make bread from straw, fighting more powerful detractors at every step of the way. So, the first step toward change is understanding and appreciating who you are and how things came to be. But if our fight has to be a public Black fight, then I want to call the question on all of our classes. While Cosby has done much to empower the Black community, many of his friends with enormous financial resources also need a cussing out. I am now witnessing Blacks contribute millions to Harvard University, Wharton School of Business, and others, rather than to Howard, Morris Brown, and others. I am looking at rap stars and old-school entertainers with money do “benefits” that produce chump-change rather than building financial institutions in the Black community. I am witnessing Black basketball, football, and other ball players with hundreds of millions of dollars put up sham, tax write-off projects in the Black communities rather than serious financial entities. I am witnessing bishops of Black church denominations with millions of people come to Washington, D.C. to beg for donations from political parties and other entities to turn on our voting power at election time. This is one of the reasons why we have a leadership class that is financially in the pocket of the corporate structure. This is why we do not have more of our own independent policy think-tanks. We've got the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies while Whites have hundreds of such think-thanks. Our new Black middle class is not investing their money and time in politics, but in creature comforts — then they turn around and complain about the lack of “accountability” from Black leaders. Millions of dollars are flowing into politics this season, little of it from Blacks. There is plenty of blame to go around, but most especially, we have little economic leadership from those Blacks with money and no sense of strategy and priority in the use of their growing and substantial economic resources. I have always been proud of the Civil Rights movement, but lament the fact that money that brought Black leadership together came from sources outside of the Black community. It is much the same today. It has always struck me as ironic that the Black leadership structure is one of the most impoverished sectors of the Black community at the same time some in our wider Black community are amassing considerable wealth. I think we have not sufficiently made a demand upon the Michael Jordans or P. Diddys because we have the mind-set that someone else should pay for our freedom while they do what they want. If Oprah Winfrey, for instance, with her billions, had the correct mind set she could endow the entire infrastructure of the Black leadership with what to her would be relatively minor assets. Then, we wouldn't have to go to the corporate barons — the very people who in many cases we are fighting — for financial support. We could plan and strategize with a sense of security that our goals and our methods were our own and that they couldn't be stopped so easily by the lack of financial support. Most important, if our money people played a more vigorous role at the base of poverty in our communities, rather than cheering when Bill Clinton and his conservative coalition placed a five-year limit on government assistance, maybe we wouldn't need our churches to fight to get in line for “faith-based” crumbs from George Bush's administration. In short, if the entertainers, Black businesses, and athletes funded projects in their own communities, the culture of the community would reflect a positive set of values rather than the dangerous, thug-infested values that now infect it in too many places. Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, director of the African American Leadership Institute in the Academy of Leadership and professor of government and politics at the University of Maryland-College Park. His latest book is “White Nationalism, Black Interests” (Wayne State University Press).
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