Tavis…Tsk, Tsk, Tsk
For a couple of weeks now I have been letting my reaction to Tavis Smiley’s documentary “Stand” or should I say “Get On The Bus” 2.0 marinate. I am trying to formulate my opinion and use words other than expletives to describe my disappointment in not only Tavis (not really because I wrote him off years ago) but in two of the other riders on the bus; Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West. I felt I needed a little help articulating my feelings about “Stand” and I found that help in Melissa Harris-Lacewell. She wrote a wonderful article, some of which I will include later in this post.
This documentary and its participants made me feel as if unless you are a part of the Black Intelligentsia, you are an ignorant, Dumbass Black citizens of these United States and can’t think for yourself, or speak for yourself and need those assholes to do it for you.
Okay, sorry, I couldn’t help myself, I just had to curse.
I am really pissed that Tavis exploited Dr. Martin Luther King in this way and those two young men who were invited to be a part of that Tavisity. Tavis, Michael and Cornel should be ashamed of themselves and using Michael’s brother as the example of black men who are in jail and are dare I say “innocent” and have not let “the white man” enslave their minds. That is such fucking bullshit, he is a fucking criminal period.
Dammit, I am such a dumbass for not being able to express myself without cursing.
Well, I’ll stop here and let you read an intelligent woman express exactly what I feel intelligently and without expletives. 
On May 24, TV One aired the latest installment of 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.
The film and its participants (two of them my senior colleagues at Princeton University) appropriated the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to implicitly claim that they, not Obama, are the authentic representatives of the political interests of African-Americans. They used King’s images and speeches, gathered on the balcony where King was assassinated, and explicitly asserted their desire to play King to Obama’s LBJ, and Frederick Douglass to Obama’s Lincoln.
On its face, this is not a bad model. Presidents are deeply constrained by the structural and political limitations of their office. A robust administration needs an active and informed citizenry to engage, push, cajole, criticize and applaud its efforts.
But this appropriation misrepresents rather than preserves King’s legacy. King was a powerful questioner and, at times, ally of President Johnson because he was at the helm of a massive social movement of men and women who were shut out of the ordinary political process. It was not King’s intellectual capacity or verbal dexterity that made him an effective advocate for racial issues; it was his own accountability to that movement.
This is not true of Smiley and his “soul patrol,” who are mostly public personalities and tenured professors largely unaccountable to the black constituency. King’s meager income, though supplemented by the lecture circuit, was grounded in the voluntary contributions of black churchgoers.
Smiley is backed by powerful corporations, like Wal-Mart and Nationwide, that have troubled relationships with these communities. The college profs on the bus are comfortably supported by well-endowed universities. This does not invalidate their views on race, but it does make the analogy with King a poor fit.
Further, Smiley and his “soul patrol” seemed to have missed the intervening 40 years between the era of King and the election of Obama. African-Americans are no longer fully disfranchised subjects of an oppressive state.
African-Americans are now citizens capable of running for office, holding officials accountable through democratic elections, publicly expressing divergent political preferences and, most importantly, engaging the full spectrum of American political issues, not only narrowly racial ones. The era of racial brokerage politics, when the voices of a few men stood in for the entire race, is now over. And thank goodness it is over. Black politics is growing up.
It always takes a black woman to show black men how to really love each other. Get off the bus assholes, the ride is over; black people are politically savvy we don’t need another civil rights leader. Stop speaking for us, we can do that for ourselves.
As always, be well
CF
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