After some of the comments left here, I decided such links amount to encouraging bad reasoning.
And right now I'm feeling the need to drop on eof those reminders Dr. King left laying around:
The white establishment is skilled in flattering and cultivating emerging leaders. It presses its own image on them and finally, from imitation of manners, dress and style of living, a deeper strain of corruption develops. This kind of Negro leader acquires the white man’s contempt for the ordinary Negro. He is often more at home with the middle-class white than he is among his own people. His language changes, his location changes, his income changes, and ultimately he changes from the representative of the Negro to the white man into the white man’s representative to the Negro. The tragedy is that too often he does not recognize what has happened to him.I learned a lesson many years ago from a report of two men who flew to Atlanta to confer with a Negro civil rights leader at the airport. Before they could begin to talk, the porter sweeping the floor drew the local leader aside to talk about a matter that troubled him. After fifteen minutes had passed, one of the visitors said bitterly to his companion, “I am just too busy for this kind of nonsense. I haven’t come a thousand miles to sit and wait while he talks to a porter.”
The other replied, “When the day comes that he stops having time to talk to a porter, on that day,I will not have the time to come one mile to see him.”
To put as fine a point on it as possible, if what you're doing is bringing a message to Black folks that says we need to conform to folks who have demonstrated their disdain for us, or if you're just spewing rhetoric or if you really haven't thought your conservative thing through, you probably don't want to have a conversation with me on race or politics at all.
Posted by P6 at June 19, 2004 09:58 AM
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Comments
I think you overestimate the differences between Negroes and non-Negroes. Isn't the the entire problem of racism?
We need to keep in mind exactly what the virtues of blackness are going to be and be mindful that they are not inclusive of all virtue. It IS easy to 'sell-out' and it's not always an immoral choice.
I don't underestimate the difference between Black folks and other. There's no real difference to estimate.
Neither do I underestimate the difference between the position most find themselves in, and how difficult those differences are to offset.
Whether or not selling out is immoral depends on the morality one chooses, I suppose. By my chosen morality, it is a problem. At best.