Stop dividing, stop shouting and start talking

In 1963, the same year Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, a 29-year-old chemist from Harlem joined the Congress of Racial Equality.  Five years later, he was elected its National Chairman.  And for the next nearly 47 years, he has fought for racial equality, equal opportunity, and freedom for all Americans of every color.  His name is Roy Innis, and he is my father.

Over the past five decades, dad faced opponents of all kinds, and not once did he back down.  In 1988, he found himself in the midst of two televised shoving matches – one with a white supremacist named John Metzger, and one with a divisive huckster who had falsely accused a New York prosecutor of raping a young woman named Tawana Brawley.  The huckster – whom a jury found liable for defamation – was Al Sharpton.

{mosads}On this Martin Luther King Day, there is perhaps no better symbol of the betrayal of Dr. King’s dream than the fact that the most vocal and widely recognized civil rights leader of our era is the same man my father challenged so many years ago.  Sharpton is treated with respect and deference, even though he has a long record of saying and doing exactly the kinds of things Dr. King struggled against.  In 1991, a year that saw riots against Jewish New Yorkers, Sharpton said, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.”  Several years later, he referred to gays as “homos” and mocked Mormons by saying of Mitt Romney, “As for the one Mormon running for office, those who really believe in God will defeat him anyways, so don’t worry about that; that’s a temporary situation.” 

Whereas Martin Luther King was inclusive and fought against violence, Sharpton has been known to inflame it.  When a black-owned business was informed that it would be evicted from a store called Freddie’s Fashion Mart in 1995, Sharpton led a protest and said, “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that some white interloper can expand his business.”  One of the protesters set the store on fire, killing seven people.

Today, we are suffering from the Sharptonization of American politics.  “Leaders,” particularly liberal leaders, divide us on racial, gender, and other identity-politics lines.  They tell us that people who look different from you are to blame for your problems.  They tell us that people who disagree with you are not just your opponent, but your enemy.  And they circulate election materials that even the New York Times recently called “striking for how overtly they play on fears of intimidation and repression.”

President Obama is a part of the Sharptonization of American politics.  Whereas he rose to fame by rejecting notions of blue states and red states and proclaiming that there are only the United States, his presidency – and particularly his reelection campaign – did little to unite us.  He defeated Mitt Romney with a campaign that tried to scare women into believing there was a “war on women,” tried to scare seniors into thinking they would lose their Medicare, and tried to scare lower-income Americans into buying into class warfare rhetoric that demonized not just wealth, but the wealthy.  Obama divided women from men, the old from the young, and the poor from the rich, and he did it all to win an election.

African American leaders like Sharpton and Obama have made big promises to the African American community, but under Obama, African American wealth has fallen more than under any other president since the Great Depression.  It is long past time to stop giving the Sharpton, Obama, and the Democratic Party a near-monopoly on African American electoral support.  It is instead time to ask, “Is the black community better off than it was eight years ago?  Is the United States?  Is the world?”

If we are going to restore Martin Luther King’s dream – of a nation whose citizens are not judged by the color of their skin, and whose black community enjoys unqualified access to the American dream of economic opportunity and a better life for the next generation – we are going to have to stop dividing each other and shouting at each other, and instead start talking with each other about the kind of policies that can provide the real opportunity for Americans that President Obama has failed to deliver.  Those policies include education reform, individual freedom, and free-market solutions. 

Fortunately, there is good reason for optimism.  Last year, I had several meetings in North Carolina and Ferguson, Missouri, with African American leaders.  I found that many of them were eager to work to create greater opportunity for their communities, even if it meant working with conservatives like me.  My most surprising meeting in Ferguson was with state senator Maria Chapelle-Nadal, who is known for her bold candor, as well as her strong roots in the Democratic Party. 

Chapelle-Nadal was open minded enough to sit down with me and my colleague, Dr. Alveda King, and what we found might come as a surprise to those who are always trying put labels on people and divide us.  We found common ground – particularly in the area of education reform.  All of us saw education as a key civil rights issue for the twenty-first century, and senator Chapelle-Nadal was understandably frustrated that her party’s governor had vetoed her education bill. 

Meetings and conversations like that are the foundation for hope – not the false hope behind “hope and change,” but the real hope that Dr. King dreamed about, and that we celebrate on his holiday today.

Innis is the national spokesperson for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the executive director of TheTeaParty.net. TheTeaParty.net is a national non-profit 501(c)(4) organization created in 2009 for the education and advancement of the constitutional conservative values of the tea party movement.