What the Black Agenda is Not

What the Black Agenda Is Not

By Tara Bynum, Ph.D.

“What is the ‘black agenda’?” It is the question that opens Tavis Smiley’s latest summit, “We Count! The Black Agenda is the American Agenda,” to hold an elected official—namely, President Barack Obama—accountable to the needs of the Black community. In asking it, Smiley attempts to define the terms of the conversation that will proceed among his 12 highly esteemed guests, including Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr., Dr. Cornel West, Dr. Julianne Malveaux, Angela Glover Blackwell, and Dorothy Wright Tillman. Even as his panelists wrestled with the terms of their engagement, the question remained largely unanswered over the course of the four-hour program.

What became clearer rather was the converse of the question—“what is not the Black agenda?” With only 4 women at a table of 12, it was clear that the “Black agenda” is not one that has room for women to participate equally in the discussion. Even the idea of the “Black agenda” assumes that race exists separate and distinct from the experience of gender. Implicit in the idea of a “Black agenda”—a plan of action that addresses a singular, homogenous collective—is a gender neutrality that does not actually exist in the everyday lives of Black women and men. The “Black agenda” is not one that confronts the sexism that overlooks women’s issues like rape, domestic violence, or the increased rates of incarceration and infant mortality among Black women. To do so would admit that which is not spoken—sexism exists even within the Black community.

The “Black agenda” is not yet ready to confront the gendered privilege that allows Minister Farrakhan to describe chutzpah as a “testicular fortitude” and permits Dr. Michael Eric Dyson to respond mockingly with the seemingly more gender friendly definition, “ovarian audacity.” Even as Dr. Malveaux admonished Minister Farrakhan for using “genderized” language, the awkward chuckles of the panelists and audience members masked the curious ways in which women’s issues—particularly those related to issues of reproduction—seemed shut out of the conversation.

Just as Tavis Smiley calls upon us to hold our elected officials accountable, it is time to hold our non-elected leaders, those public intellectuals, accountable as well. We cannot continue to imagine the Black community as a one of men with a singular history and political agenda. Our leaders do us a grave disservice when they create opportunities for and participate in discussions that do not speak to the very diversity that is Black America. Though I commend Tavis Smiley for organizing this roundtable, I am nonetheless dismayed that Black women remain marginal to the conversation despite the varied ways in which our concerns have been downplayed against those of Black men. I am disheartened by the lack of younger scholars, activists and students at the table.

Though there is still much to be done, it is time to recognize the ways in which this new generation has used the technology of this age to advance its political agendas and organize its peer groups. It’s time for intergenerational conversations that build bridges within our community rather than point the blame. It’s time recognize that the Black agenda is comprised of many agendas that reflect the complexity that is so much a part of our various lived experiences. It’s time to admit, as Zora Neale Hurston does, that we are not “tragically colored” women and men, but instead we bear a legacy that allows us to dream and achieve on a grand scale—without which there would be no clear agendas for the Black women and men that strive daily to change their communities.

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Tara Bynum, Ph.D is an Assistant Professor of African-American literature at Towson University.

Tavis Smiley, Barack Obama and the Black Left

Tavis Smiley Ends State of Black American Union Show;
Continues Media Lockdown of Obama's Black Left Critics
by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

Tavis Smiley announced on January 6 that he was ending SOBU, the annual State of the Black Union. For ten years, SOBU drew black academics, civic, political, labor, religious and business leaders together each February for a day-long discussion of the current status and future hopes of African America. Each year thousands attended in person and millions more watched the event live on C-SPAN. SOBU had grown so large and popular that it spawned secondary events for the live attendees, along with book and lecture tours.

Tavis's cancellation announcement, a brief video on his tavistalks.com web site is long on folksy introductions, self-congratulation, thank-yous, and goodbyes. The reasons he offers for ending the annual event are brief and unconvincing. Ten years ago, he offers, “...there was only one syndicated black radio show... there was only one black TV network... we didn't have an African American president... (and) we no longer have to wait for one day a year in February to discuss issues that matter to us...” on TV.

Tavis is talking nonsense here. The so-called black TV and radio operations feel no obligation to field news operations because they don't view African Americans as a polity with opinions worth informing, sharing or airing. To these station owners, black or otherwise, African Americans are just another marketing target to be sliced, diced, age and income stratified and delivered up to corporate sponsors. A master marketer himself, Tavis knows this better than anybody.

As a marketing contraption SOBU was a runaway success. Corporate sponsors like Wal-Mart, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Exxon-Mobil and McDonalds got their logos and corporate messaging, and even some of their spokespeople in front of millions of black eyeballs. C-SPAN, which the cable TV monopolists offer as a pitiful substitute for the thousands of public, educational, governmental and local news channels they ought to be funding with the trillions they make of public subsidies, public resources and the use of the public rights of way, got to pose as a kind of “public service.” Of course SOBU manufactured and magnified the celebrity status and earning power of Tavis Smiley. SOBU spawned a number of spinoff ventures, sold millions of books and videos, and made household names in black America of people like Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson.

But the State of the Black Union did things for millions of ordinary African Americans too, people with an urgent hunger to hear some of their unique experiences taken into account, their longings for peace abroad and economic justice at home validated, and more. Millions of ordinary African Americans privately question why jobs can't be created in their communities even in good economic times, and why the only model of urban economic development is moving poor people out and richer ones in. They know at close hand the devastating effects of our society's policy of racially selective policing, prosecution and mass incarceration, and marvel at why no discussion including their viewpoint on such matters can be found in the mass media, including the so-called black media.

Read the Full Essay @ Black Agenda Report

Melissa Harris-Lacewell Takes a "Stand"

Commentary: Don't Hold Obama to Race Agenda
by Melissa Harris-Lacewell

On May 24, TV One aired the latest installment of [Tavis} Smiley's accountability campaign: a two-hour documentary titled "Stand." Recycling Spike Lee's Million Man March film, "Get On the Bus," Smiley assembled a group of prominent black male public figures for a bus ride through the South.

Ostensibly, this bus trip would provide Smiley, professors Cornel West and Michael Eric Dyson, Dick Gregory and others an opportunity to reflect on the meaningful upheavals in American society and politics in the summer of 2008. "Stand" was an enormous disappointment.

Its low production value, wandering narrative, flat history and self-important egoism did little to reveal the shortcomings of the Obama phenomenon. Instead, the piece exposed and embodied the contemporary crisis of the black public intellectual in the age of Obama.

Read the Full Essay @ CNN.com

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Melissa Harris-Lacewell is associate professor of politics and African-American studies at Princeton University. She is the author of the award-winning book Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought, and writes a daily blog titled The Kitchen Table.

Lamenting the Loss of Tavis

from NewsOne.com

Tavis Pays Price for Criticizing Barack Obama
by Mark Anthony Neal

Last week Tavis Smiley officially announced his departure from the Tom Joyner Morning Show, where he has offered twice-weekly commentaries for the past 12-years. Joyner leaked Smiley's departure to the public amid rampant speculation that Smiley was running for cover from the increased criticism over his very public spat with Senator Barack Obama. (This was the second year in a row that Obama decided not to attend Smiley's annual State of Black America gathering.) However, regardless of how many feel about his relationship with Obama, Smiley's departure from the Tom Joyner Morning Show represents a real loss for Black America.

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