To the recent question raised – should there be an African American agenda for the White House to consider – the answer is a resounding ‘yes,’ according to participants in Saturday’s We Count: The Black Agenda Is The American
To the recent question raised – should there be an African American agenda for the White House to consider – the answer is a resounding ‘yes,’ according to participants in Saturday’s We Count: The Black Agenda Is The American Agenda forum hosted by commentator and author Tavis Smiley. Asking President Barack Obama to consider and address the state of affairs within the African American community is only fair, panelists said at the forum held in the Emil and Patricia A. Jones Convocation Center on the campus of Chicago State University. The group of political, academic, faith and community leaders said that the 97 percent of the Black electorate that cast a vote for Obama in 2008 deserve to have the president take a look at high crime, increased poverty, above-national-average joblessness, inadequate affordable housing, cuts in public transportation and other factors that often disproportionately negatively affect African Americans. Also participating in the forum was Brainwashed author Tom Burrell and Angela Blackwell. The panel was quick and clear to point out that the forum was not about Obama-bashing. In fact, a white cube with the word “love” spelled out all around it, sat in the middle of the table during the more than two-hour long discussion to remind panelists that things said were done so in a spirit of love. “We want, we need this president to success,” said Bennett College for Women President Julianne Malveaux. “This president is a victim of very high expectations.” But, she added, the president has to pay attention to the needs of the African American community. Panelists said pointedly that the luster of Obama’s win can’t cast shadows on the president’s accountability to African Americans who broke election records in some areas to land the former Illinois senator in the White House. Former 3rd Ward Alderman Dorothy Tillman said the needs in the Black community are so dire that people are “fearful…scared…in pain…don’t know what to do about it…scared to do anything about it.” “There is no other community in American that is suffering more than us,” she said. She has long called for reparations for descendants of slavery. Saturday, she called Blacks “America’s dirty little secret.” The forum caused a national stir and spawned a public verbal tussle between Smiley and some other Black leaders who were supposedly invited to participate in the forum but didn’t attend due to scheduling conflicts. Rev. Al Sharpton was noticeably absent after it was reported by Smiley on a morning radio show that the National Action Now organization leader would participate. In announcing the forum and Sharpton’s participation – which the reverend said was unbeknownst to him – Smiley criticized Sharpton, NAACP President Ben Jealous and National Urban League President Marc Morial for supposedly giving Obama a pass after they emerged from a meeting with Obama on the jobs bill saying that there was no need to separate African American needs from a collective list of woes facing the country as a whole. Sharpton refuted Smiley’s claim and the consensus of the panel was that a Black agenda was necessary. The group agreed that though Obama is the leader of the country, he’s not the one governing it. “No president runs the political system,” University of Maryland Professor Ron Walters said. He explained that there would be nothing patronizing about the nation’s Black president paying attention to the Black people. Outspoken professors Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson participated on the panel and offered succinct arguments for holding Obama accountable to the Black community. “To deal with the Black agenda is what every president before you has had to do,” Dyson, a Georgetown professor and author of 16 books, said of Obama. “You must deal with race.” He dismissed the notion that a call for attention meant “hating” on the president. “We love you,” he said of Obama, “we just want some love back.” Dyson’s comment that, “Obama is not Moses, he’s Pharoah,” drew a cacophony of boos from the audience. But Dyson clarified that Moses was a prophet while the latter was a politician. But perhaps the most poignant and crowd-stirring comments during the forum, which was streamed live on the Internet and taped to air March 29 on C-Span, came from Min. Louis Farrakhan. The Nation of Islam leader had, over the course of Obama’s presidential campaign, invoked a self-imposed gag order where he declined to speak on the historic candidate for fear the minister’s words would hurt Obama’s efforts. The gag has been lifted and Farrakhan hardly bit his tongue. He encouraged the president to “think about us.” The minister said Obama should use his bully pulpit to help garner support for initiatives and other things that would aid the African American community. “Out of love for our brother, we’re calling on him to fight for justice” for African Americans, Farrakhan said. But the minister also called on African Americans to be more self-sustaining and to put their expectations from the president in perspective. To that end, Farrakhan pointed to Black mayors and governors who, he said, have changed little for African Americans. “Our people need repair,” Farrakhan said. “He (Obama) can create the atmosphere but we have to do the job of fulfilling the Black agenda.” His passion escalated – as did is voice – as he questioned: “How long are we gone keep begging white people to do for us what we haven’t done for ourselves?” Many on the panel called for African Americans to galvanize and help push an African American agenda. Smiley, himself, called for African Americans to become a “committee of one,” doing what they can, individually, to organize and create a movement for change. Raven Curling, president of the Student Government Association at CSU, was also a member of the panel, and said that young people have become complacent. “We are not only living in fear, we are living in laziness,” she said, adding that young Black America need to “step up.” Rev. Jesse Jackson said what needs to be addressed in the African American community has already been put forth. “The agenda is already there,” the Rainbow/PUSH president and civil rights leader said. “Let’s stop looking for a baton to be dropped, there is no baton. We are all leaders.” The panel admonished the media and others to maintain the context of their discussion, saying that their call for accountability from the president should not be used as a weapon to politically – or mortally – assault Obama. “We have to protect our brother,” West said. Farrakhan took it further. “Don’t play with what we did here today and make mockery (of it),” Farrakhan said. He cautioned that the forum was not a “stamp of approval for a death warrant on our brother.” He called the threats against Obama “real.” “We need to pray for our brother and his family and warn America, leave that brother alone,” Farrakhan said. “We can lose an election but we cannot bear to make (First Lady) Michelle and her children fatherless and husbandless.”
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