This morning while on my way to my minimum wage job that’s supposed to help me support my family and pay my tuition AND pay for my graduate school applications I heard on the Tom Joyner Morning Show that Tavis
Smiley, a PBS news show host, was booted from speaking at a Martin Luther King Day celebration. The reason cited by Smiley and others was because of his remarks about President Obama.
Smiley has been, along with Cornell West, one of the few black public personalities who have been critical of President Obama’s presidency. Smiley’s major criticism is that Obama has failed to do anything of substance for the black community since he’s been in office. Now after announcing this, Tom and the other co-hosts make a few quips about Tavis amounting to “he should have not talked so much in the first place.”
That actually set me off quite a bit and I’ll tell you why.
President Obama since he’s been in office, politically, has occupied the same space that President Bush had for the earlier 8 years. He’s started wars, continued and expanded the ones we already got, helped erode our civil liberties that we pretty much never had, and on top of that reneged on many
of his promises he made during his campaign. Now one can (and alot
of you will) argue it’s the Republican’s fault blah blah blah but it still stands that there’s a serious issue with this whole thing.
Smiley, a person with freedom of speech, was barred from speaking at an event about Martin Luther King because he criticizes President Obama…in simpler terms, Person A can’t come to party for Person B because they don’t like Person C who has nothing to do with Person B and it’s not even clear that Person C will show up to the Person B’s party.
Oh yeah and Person B is dead so they don’t care anyways. I think that’s perfectly logical (#sarcasm).
What this seems to point to is some perceived notion that MLK’s legacy and ideology he left to us had anything to do with President Obama’s whatever and the concept of a black president. As many of you know MLK’s legacy has been whitewashed, quite literally by America to fit into its narrative of “we’re all free now, all that bad stuff done pass” (something many have talked about in the past). MLK contrary to the image of non-violence Jesus was actually quite radical back in his day. Here’s a piece from MLK on the Vietnam War, something that could be applied to Obama’s new and continued efforts in Iraq (we still have people and private soldiers there), Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Iran, Somalia, Uganda, and the Congo:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-jg7baiY5Vw]
Many of you were probably like “wow, he was amazing” because MLK said it. Many of the people who didn’t want Smiley to speak at the MLK event would probably say the same thing. Unfortunately for them, this is the same basic argument Smiley is making to Obama, that he’s spending resources that can help the poor and black people with these banks, corporations, and on war. Unfortunately for Smiley, he’s not MLK and thus can’t get a pass…heck in his day MLK didn’t get a pass either, when he began to speak about capitalism and Vietnam many of his former allies left him.
The lesson here is that if you’re black, there is no “bloc” that regardless you can count on support from anymore. Black people in America like everyone else is split on class lines and for people like Smiley, to be a public personality and to not fall in line behind the Obama gravy train is inexcusable. That is why he and Cornell West (who has been more radical than Smiley) have been thrown under the bus by most of the black political and cultural community. In a way they got what they deserved, trying to run with these thieves in the first place. My suggestion to both, especially Smiley since he’s more “mainstream” and has more to lose, is for them to drop that crowd and get back into the streets with the rest of us. Don’t allow your voices to be silenced by these little shows of force by the house servants of America, cause as MLK said, ”History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people” and “He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.”
- William Richardson, Red Sociology
Word, amen, and thank you for letting a sistah exhale. Another spot-on critique from POCO.
Thanks sista. I appreciate those kind words from you. I was surprised after writing this article to see that the popular sentiment in the Twitterverse was actually quite supportive towards cutting Smiley from the program. People were saying things like “he got what he deserved” and “that what happens when you talk so much junk”. Not one person I have mentioned the story to ever saw the disconnect between an MLK event and what one thinks about a politician who isn’t even participating in the event in question. Shows the shallowness of our people’s minds right now and the need for more websites like POCO!
Refreshing! So many have forgotten or didn’t know about MLK’s approval rating the year he died. This is such a beautiful piece considering it’s MLK weekend.
I am afraid for people of color. We are so happy to have a black president that we don’t think that we should say anything about him. What do we do as a people when we look up 4 years from now in a sittuation worse than ever?
Our POTUS could be the greatest president in history, if we push him into it. ORGANIZE!