The End of 'Bad Boy' Thinking

This has neither been reported clearly and consistently enough nor have any people in black or white media made anything of the fact that the letter Farrakhan read at the Million Man March to great effect and unfortunate influence was proven a fake, almost line by line, by Spelman scholar William Jelani Cobb. Famous among black people as "the Willie Lynch letter," it was supposed to be from an eighteenth century white slave explaining how to keep the slaves divided against themselves. No matter, Cobb's discovery has not had much headway and the letter is still cited by too many black students and non-students as an explanation of why black people have not been able to "unify." Even in the otherwise excellent film The Great Debaters, the protagonist cites the "letter" as a hard fact. Lies are always better known than scholarship.

When finding out that the exceptional South African singer Miriam Makeba died recently, I thought of how she destroyed her career here in America when the singer married Stokely Carmichael/Kwame Toure, who helped introduce a separatist version of black power that first challenged and rather quickly overtook the civil rights movement. As one super hip woman said to me at the time, "Those white people were not going to pay to hear her so that she could give the money to Stokely for weapons to kill them, like he says he wants to do."

The next stage of descent was identity politics of the most limited and insipid fashion, including the cartoon Afrocentric idea of Africa as a solution to all of the world problems. Carmichael/Toure popularized the word "honky" as an insulting term for white people, embraced the idea of armed Third World revolution, and became increasingly irrelevant. At the end he was packaging himself as something of a visiting rabble rouser whose only audience was black students North and South. His radical running buddy H. Rap Brown went to prison for trying to extort Harlem criminals, came out converted to a Muslim bore, and was finally sentenced to life in prison for murdering two black police officers in Atlanta. As you read this, he is probably misleading someone else.

Then there is the once influential Amiri Baraka, formerly a formidable literary talent whose birth name was LeRoi Jones. Jones/Baraka did his best writing before changing his name, becoming a black nationalist and an anti-Semite, then repudiating that "direction" as he had his former Jewish wife and the two children had with her. After leaving his first wife and his Greenwich Village home where the writer had been an avant garde poet and writer, he noisily moved to Harlem, incinerated his talent and transformed himself into an hysterical propagandist. Jones/Baraka soon left for another home, Newark, New Jersey, following one of the tribal wars that bloodied many black nationalist sects and "revolutionary" cults. As with the gang banging Bloods and Crips, the black nationalists and revolutionaries were far more dangerous to each other than they ever were to the whites whom they promised to overthrow and kill off.

When he was in his toxic cups, Jones/Baraka led the loud "Black Arts Movement," which produced a long list of now forgotten sub-talents who were not quite as illiterate as rappers but were parallel in their other limitations. Blood libel was a specialty, as was calling white people ugly and black people beautiful. They had a short list of "thoughts" that were, as the blues say, "built close to the ground." Failing at one evolution after another, Jones/Baraka now remains in the pasture a garden variety Marxist and neutered intellectual whose work convinces no one of anything other than his lack of importance and an unusual ability to write the very same thing over and over without losing addled heat.

In his recent and indispensible memoir Will You Die With Me?, Flores Forbes exposed in bloody detail the criminal creation that Huey Newton made of the Black Panthers, shifting the saber rattling group from its "revolutionary" Marxist pretensions to an extortion ring that was intended to take over all of the hoodlum enterprises in the Bay Area of California. Newton was a handsome, charismatic murderer and thug who remained so until a crack dealer for the Black Guerilla Family put three in his head one 1989 night in Oakland. No one died with him; it was another time. By then, pretentiously revolutionary political names had descended to the world of crack. Perhaps where they belonged.

While we’re cleaning house, we cannot forget the intellectual crack of black studies. Initially proposed on college campuses as an alternative to racist history texts, it was not the alternative it claimed to be. In far too many cases, black studies very quickly became a hotbed of paranoid bunk and intellectual buffoonery. Its specialty was feeding black students a diet of alienation, hopelessness, aggressive victimhood, and a fusion of racist and paranoid interpretations of all experiences with white people, especially Jews. Bogus but rabid clowns like New York's Len Jeffries were good at little more than porous logic, meeting purported racism with actual racism, and strutting about in ethnic getups as though African garb put one closer to some sort of truth. Clothes make the man, indeed!

Were they actually scholarly, they would have known that these robes and beads were yet another version of fashion and hair styles as symbols of being politically astute which actually goes back to the French Revolution. In our black studies version, black people realized that the greatest danger was becoming "westernized."