The Chris Moeller Archives

Run back to the movement, Jesse

Jesse Jackson is speaking out on behalf of Terrell Owens, and I shudder at the hideous plummet into irrelevance of one of our once-great public advocates. One of our great fighters for economic empowerment now stands beside a spoiled, selfish athlete who has never used his own privileged public platform for anything more than the re-negotiation of his multi-million dollar contracts. As one black columnist already put it months ago, "Jesse has gone from 'Keep hope alive' to 'Keep the cameras rolling.'"

Over the course of almost two decades since his strongest bid for the White House in 1988, Jackson has morphed from a progressive social activist into a surprisingly conservative shill for traditional and so-called "family values," an opportunist as likely to offer a scathing critique of ghetto culture as he is to ally with phony populist, pro-war Democrats like Bill and Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry. His political organizations, the Rainbow Coalition and Operation PUSH, have remained firmly entrenched behind the corporate-owned Democratic party despite numerous betrayals dating even further back than Bill Clinton's direct slap at Jackson-- the politically-calculated and callous welfare reform legislation signed into law just before the 1996 election. The party, in return for Jackson's support, effectively marginalized him.
True Progressives could just shake their heads with disbelief this past March when Jackson protested, along with Rick Santorum and Tom DeLay, outside a Florida hospital in which Michael Schiavo attempted to give his brain-dead wife a dignified death.

My heart sank the deepest for Jackson's legacy this summer when I read, in an Esquire profile, that Jackson was betraying even the cause of Civil Rights in his latest stump speeches. The Reverend can easily muster the courage to champion the liberties of Terrell Owens and Michael Jackson, but he apparently draws the line with gays and lesbians when he feels it necessary to incite and mobilize a gathering of bigoted minorities. "How many of you knew someone at your church who got married to someone of the same sex? Raise your hands," he demanded to know of his summer audiences, who were often rural and Southern. No hands would go up. "How did that get in the middle of our agenda? Where did that come from? That's somebody else's agenda giving us some false sense of morality when we need jobs. Say jobs!"

False sense of morality? It speaks to an inherent- and in many ways, tragic- consequence of a movement for Civil Rights married for decades to the church. Progressive faiths infused feelings of moral strength into the cause, along with the empowerment that comes from the promise of everlasting salvation through the pursuit of justice, but that same faith now also offers extreme paralysis and polarization to an increasingly-demoralized movement.

Jackson has lost his compass. If he can see a public relevance to removing a work-related suspension of a high-profile and wealthy professional athlete, than he has to see the even more relevant and far-reaching implications of recognizing and respecting same-sex rights. And if he wants to put himself back on the frontline of the battle for racial and economic justice, he should bail out of the corporate suite used today in Philadelphia and set up semi-permanent residence in New Orleans or Biloxi.

posted by CM @ 4:10 PM