Bashing Al Sharpton (Was: Re: Chomsky News Network)

Kendall Grant Clark kendall at monkeyfist.com
Fri May 31 10:07:10 PDT 2002



>>>>> "doug" == Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> writes:

doug> The Transition interview is very impressive, but I'm kind of a Sharpton

doug> fan anyway. The guy is very smart, and lots of white liberals and

doug> leftists seriously underestimate him.

Yes, but white liberals and leftists also tend to dismiss and actively bash him for what always seem very bad reasons.

I confess to being a rather reflexive supporter of Sharpton's myself, so Justin's throw-away bashing of him rubbed me wrong. A couple of things I liked from the Transition interview:

* the bit about the hypocrisy of white leftists *and* young hip-hoppers strikes

me as spot-on right

* he handles his relation to Jesse Jackson very deftly; he's generous almost to

a fault with his acknowledgment of Jackson's influence. I don't think at this

point he *has* to be that effusive, and so it comes across as rather sincere

* his "Big Left & Liberal Tent" microstrategy for running for prez in 04 comes

across, at least for me, as rather inspirational; I'm not sure it's terribly

realistic or will be a winning strategy, but it strikes me as a better

strategy than Nader's in '00 (well, for some value of 'better')

* as far as I can tell, Sharpton deserves a large chunk of credit for making

police profiling and police brutality national issues, credit which he is

confident enough to take explicitly, and well he should

* his discussion of surviving the assassination attempt in Crown Heights in '91

is powerful

The Brawley affair was disgraceful

doug> - race relations in NYC in the late 1980s and early 1990s were pretty

doug> toxic. But it was a long time ago, and he has changed. From reading the

doug> interview, it sounds like he believed Brawley's story at first, and then

doug> got so wrapped up in it that he couldn't retreat.

And he was relatively young (33) and politically inexperienced, factors which ought to count for something when coming to a reasoned evaluation of his career.

Best, Kendall Clark



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