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