AL SHARPTON: THE HAPPY NEGRO

Beneath the Spin*Eric L. Wattree

EXCELLENCE IS THE KEY TO BLACK EQUALITY
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AL SHARPTON: THE HAPPY NEGRO 

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I hate the video below. While Sharpton is out partying in the street, Trump supporters are arming themselves to the teeth. This nation is in the most dire straits that it’s been in since the Civil War, and this guy is out dancing in the street, the epitome of the happy negro. The behavior of Al Sharpton – this so-called civil rights leader – sends the exact wrong message to the people. It says that everything is cool, don’t worry, we’ve got this, everything’s under control so let’s party.

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So, why should Black people care what people think? The way people profile us is extremely important. It can have an negative impact on a young Black person's ability to get a job, or whether or not a cop blows our brains out during a traffic stop. Bigotry is not simply based on the color of our skin, but the hostility that bigots harbor towards our cultural traditions and our way of life. So there are many components to bigotry. It's just like the attitude that Black people have towards White people. We don't hate all White people, we simply dislike White people who have traditions that we don't approve of. Every White person from the South is not a bigot, for example, but hearing a Southern drawl tends to turn many Black people off. That's due to the profile we have of them in our minds. We make assumptions about them without even knowing them. That's exactly the way many White people profile us. 
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My late wife used to tell me, I don't understand why no matter how wrong you are, you never get a ticket. It's simple. On the one hand, I don't show any hostility towards the police, and on the other, I don't suck up to them either. I simply talk to them like I would talk to my neighbor, and they respond to that vibe. 
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But with respect to Sharpton, one lady told me, "Relax. He's just having a good time!" I can understand that, but if he wants to have a good time, he should do it at home, not in public. Since he professes to be a Black leader, he should carry himself like one, with dignity and class. He needs to remain cognizant of the fact that many people are already under the impression that all Black of people's intelligence is confined to below the neck. So it's important that we defeat that impression, and as a so-called Black leader he should be in the very forefront of that battle. 

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If he genuinely cared about Black people, he’d be sending out videos shouting, “Fire!” instead of videos featuring him boogying down like a geriatric teenager. Once again, he’s sending out the exact wrong message. He should be hard at work preparing the people to face the worst situation they’ve ever faced in their lives, because the demographics clearly indicate that this is White supremacy’s final stand, and they know it. That’s why they’re pulling out all stops - they’re stacking the courts with bigots, building walls to keep non-Whites out of the country, the Supreme Court is making it legal for the GOP to gerrymander and demand voter I.D. and then closing down every public office in the minority community where the required I.D. can be obtain, and at the same time, they’re purging Black people from the voter rolls in droves, and that's just to name a few of their devices. So, those are the things that Sharpton should be putting out videos about, yet, he's out there dancing. There’s a phrase for what he’s engaged in, it’s called, “Fiddling while Rome burns”.  He's just waiting around for another atrocity so he can grab him a headline.

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That’s why we can’t trust many of these so-called “leaders” – their judgment is clouded by their own self-interest. He’s more interested in gaining applause by showing the people that he can “get down” than he is in addressing the urgent issues of those very same people. Jesse Jackson betrayed that very same kind of selfish attitude when it looked like Barack Obama was going to be successful in his run for the White House. Jesse was overheard saying, “I’d like to cut his nuts off”. If Jesse’s concern was actually for the people instead of himself he should have been delighted that a Black man was going to become President of the United States. And I won’t even get into Tavis Smiley and Cornel West’s envious asses – by the way, where are they now that we need someone to badmouth the President? I guess they’re comfortable now that a White man is back in office.
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We wouldn't even know who Al Sharpton was if he wasn't such a headline chaser. He's been a distraction for Black people for years. Yes, Black people should get out and demonstrate grievances, but we need to spend more time educating ourselves. So, what turns me off most about people like Sharpton, is he claims to be for Black people, but he's really out for himself. He'll ride an issue as long as it captures the headlines, and then he’ll walk away once it grows stale. A true Black activist would be using these issues to emphasize the need for Black people to learn to out-think the White man.
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Black people need to make knowledge the new "soul". The very same creative intellect that created Ray Charles and Areatha Franklin can be put into distinguishing ourselves in math, business, and the sciences. So the time for dancing is over while Trump is still looking for a match to light the ovens.  It's time to start stimulating our minds, instead of shaking our asses.

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The only way the Republican Party can survive is by dumbing down the population, so that provides Black people with the perfect opportunity to level the playing field. While the GOP is busy dumbing the rest of the population down, Black people should be focused like a laser on becoming the most knowledgeable people in the country. That way, the only way the nation can survive is to get Black people to run it. That’s the technique the Jews used to ensure their equality. Today, this nation couldn’t survive without Jews – or at the very least, without being severely hobbled.
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Black people need to keep in mind that the White man wasn't able to enslave Black people because he could beat us up, we were enslaved because he had a knowledge of gunpowder that we didn't possess. So we were enslaved due to ignorance, and the only way that we're gonna be able to free ourselves is through knowledge, and giving priority to shaking our asses is not going to provide that knowledge. No one has ever gained freedom through shaking their ass.

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In addition, being primarily known for engaging in frivolity is why nobody takes us seriously. When a young Black person goes to be interviewed for a job, I want the interviewer to say, “I want to hire this person, because Black people are known for their brilliance”; not, “naw, if I hire this guy he might distract the other employees by trying to start a Soul Train line in the lunchroom” - and the latter is exactly how many people view us. We simply don’t have an image of professionalism, and Sharpton's spectacle in the video below is contributing to that. We have an image - whether deserved or not - of disrupting the workplace, and coming to work with our head so bad from partying the night before that we can barely perform our job.
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I was a union rep for 20 years, and one day a brother came up missing from his assignment. I couldn’t find the guy anywhere, so finally I checked the parking lot and found him in his car asleep. I woke him up and told him he’d better get back to his assignment before they realized he was missing. He looked up at me and said, “If there’s two things I can’t stand, it's niggas and flies.” So, I left him there. This went on for a few days, and finally management noticed that he was missing after being unable to contact him by phone. Eventually security found him and he was placed up for removal. Then when he came to me, hat-in-hand. I told him I’d do what I could, but not to get his hopes up, because it was an open and shut case. But when we met on his case, management wanted to compromise. They wanted me to agree to a 14-day suspension of a guy in another case. The guy they wanted to suspend wasn’t guilty of anything, they'd just trumped up a charge because they didn’t like him. But they said if I agreed to the compromise, in return they'd simply have the sleeper sign a Last Chance Agreement. I refused, so the sleeper was fired.

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Thereafter, sleeper didn’t even want to take responsibility his own actions. He called me a sellout and everything under the Sun. He claimed that I turned on him to save a White boy – but, again, the White guy wasn’t guilty of what he was charged with - I didn't turn on him for a White boy, I turned on him in pursuit of justice, and justice is blind. Why should I make the White guy suffer for the sleeper’s irresponsibility? The last thing I heard about the sleeper was he'd lost his Cadillac Escalade, all his women and fine clothes, and he was living on Los Angeles' Skid Row, but I didn't feel a thing.
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The point of this story is, long after the sleeper was gone, his behavior tarnished every Black person in the unit. Every time I represented a Black person before management they would bring up the sleeper – and I mean, even 3 years later!  I had to ask them several times, "What did the sleeper have to do with the current case!!!?  But their attitude wasn't lost on me, and that attitude was, "You're all alike". So, I often wondered how many deserving young Black men were refused a job because one brother wanted to party and get his head bad all night and sleep on the job during the day. 

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Admittedly, while the situation is much different, the issue is the same. It’s all about not reinforcing the White man’s racist image of us. How dare Sharpton be out on the street shakin' his ass and profiling us? He’s supposed to be a Black leader! So, if he’s out on the street being frivolous and undignified, what message does that send about the rest of us? And what makes it even worse is he’s out there boogyin’ while innocent Black people are being murdered on the street by rogue cops all across this country. That’s why the White man's attitude is, "Aw, don't worry about it. They'll get over it. Their dumb asses will be back out on the street Twerkin' in a week." So, we've got to get serious, become more professional in our conduct, and stop profiling ourselves as happy negros.

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Image is everything. After seeing this video, when Sharpton tries to address a serious Black issue, his image in this video is going to be in the back of the White man’s mind. So who’s gonna take him seriously? I know I can't. If you're upset over the conditions that Black people are suffering, you can't turn your outrage off on a whim. I go to bed upset, and I wakeup upset - and I'm never in the mood to get out on the street and shake my ass. Can you even imagine Martin Luther King or Malcolm out there shaking their asses like that? Their careers would’ve been over. So while Sharpton might have garnered a little applause from the people on the street, all he's actually done was help the White man profile us as frivolous children who shouldn’t be taken seriously. 

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Eric L. Wattree

Http://wattree.blogspot.com
Ewattree@Gmail.com
BLACK WRITERS, INTELLECTUALS, AND INDEPENDENT THINKERS
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Religion: It's not that I hate everyone who doesn't look, think, and act like me - it's just that God does. 

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