The Growing Rift in Black America:
Cornel West and Tavis Smiley Clash with President Obama
Journalist Tavis Smiley and Princeton Prof. Cornel West completed a week-long, 14-city "Poverty Tour" this week. As they traveled around the country, the duo highlighted the plight of America's poor and directly critiqued President Obama for failing to stand up for them.
Given the current political climate, which has rendered poor people invisible and untouchable, there is an indisputable need to shine a spotlight on our nation's most vulnerable citizens.
Still, there were critical flaws in the tour - and in black America's reaction to it - which speak to a troubling rift in the African-American community. We need to understand this growing divide as the 2012 election approaches.
First, the problems with the tour. Both West and Smiley have publicly expressed personal gripes with Obama that, like it or not, clouded their message. On multiple occasions, Smiley has complained about the President's failure to attend a "State of the Black Union" event in 2008. He has also pointed out that Obama is the first recent President not to invite him to the White House.
West, who actively campaigned for Obama in 2008, has voiced frustration over the President's failure to provide him with inauguration tickets or to thank him for his considerable campaign work.
In fairness to West and Smiley, their concerns were not merely personal. Smiley was challenging the President not to take the black vote for granted. West was trying to articulate a broader frustration with a President who fakes left and goes right more than a player on a Rucker Park basketball court.
Still, the two men cheapened their message by linking it to these complaints. In doing so, they unwittingly aligned themselves with a large cadre of opportunistic black leaders who publicly feign outrage over Obama's policies while privately seething over the loss of their own personal power and access. I hear these voices with disturbing frequency.
On top of this problem, the tour itself was less politically substantive than it could have been. West and Smiley visited towns, met with citizens and held public forums. While the events were ideologically on point, they were largely devoid of concrete and specific policy prescriptions, grass-roots organizing or voter registration. Without such activity, it became difficult to distinguish the tour from any garden-variety book tour or speaking campaign. As a result, the nation's poor wound up, yet again, serving as a media spectacle and political sideshow rather than the focus of much- needed support.
So West and Smiley's tactics were flawed. But did they warrant the vicious attacks they triggered from folks like Steve Harvey - who accused the two of "poverty pimping"? Absolutely not. That was outrageous.
Nor was Harvey alone; a shocking number of meanspirited insults were hurled at the two men by prominent pundits and academics. For example, talk show host Tom Joyner not only dismissed the duo as jealous opportunists but, in a bizarre leap of reason, managed to blame them for encouraging the kind of disrespectful climate that resulted in political analyst Mark Halperin insulting the President on MSNBC.
All this speaks to a strange divide in the black community. On the one hand are the likes of West, Smiley and even myself who are deeply troubled that the President has forgotten a critical portion of his base: the poor. On the other hand is a larger, reactionary contingent of the community that views any critique of the President, even a principled left-wing one, as an act of self-hate, jealousy or race treason.
We must demand that poverty be placed in the center of public conversation. But until we mature politically, it will difficult to effectively make this happen.
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Marc Lamont Hill is associate professor at Teachers College, Columbia University, host of the nationally syndicated television show Our World With Black Enterprise and the author of Beats, Rhymes and Classroom Life: Hip-Hop Pedagogy and the Politics of Identity.
