Thoughts?
Is Tavis Smiley a corrupted corporate shill?
posted by GBREY @ 11:20 PM
Thursday, February 24, 2005
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3 Comments:
I am not a huge fan of Tavis the journalist, mostly because he comes off too soft ad most of the time is unwilling to ask the hard questions. In the past, in one of my rampages, I may have even gone so far as to call him out as a corporate sellout. But I think I would have been, and Minister Paul Scott is, out of line. Let's not mix the issues. THERE IS A HUGE VIOD IN RADICAL BLACK THINKING! But it is not Tavis' responsibility to fill this gap. It is the people like myself and Paul who constantly talk about this void to begin to take proactive steps to fill it. The crux of Minister Scott's article is this question:
Do the middle class Black folks that are given all the air time truly represent the feelings of the masses of Black folks or are their ideologies more closely aligned with the white middle class?
Of course Tavis and others like him don't speak for the black masses demanding radical change. If they did, they wouldn't be on the mainstream airways. One would be an idiot if you thought they would get away with this. Gleaning from Malcolm and Garvey, as you should Minister Scott, to fuel and inform a black radical movement we should not turn to mainstream media to serve that end and instead focus on developing our own strong sources of alternative media. Anything else is begging for scraps at the master's door. Blaming Tavis is just wasted breath. He has made a career decision that is not in line with your radical ideas; deal with it. He is the black equivalent to Charlie Rose, a bit conservative, yes, but that does not make him a corporate stooge, just a black man with different goals than you. And besides, anyone who is going to expose Don Cheadle's amazing performance in Hotel Rwanda to a broader audience is playing a role (and is at least halfway cool in my book), no matter how minute it is.
"Gleaning from Malcolm and Garvey, as you should Minister Scott, to fuel and inform a black radical movement we should not turn to mainstream media to serve that end and instead focus on developing our own strong sources of alternative media. Anything else is begging for scraps at the master's door."
While I agree with the above statement, isn't it true that Malcolm X got mainstream media to pay attention to him? I think another question beyond the one asked above is to figure out what caused Malcolm to get that attention that eludes the current radical Black spokesmen (prepares a surging movement behind him that made them pay attention and give him a platform?)? Are their true radical Black spokespeople around? Just wanted to add another ?uestion...
Good questions. Malcolm got mainstream media to pay attention to him and there is a big difference between that and waiting with baited breath to get mainstream media to broadcast a radical message that deals with issues head on in terms of blacks in this country. And how did he do it? The same way we have talked about the Democratic Party’s only hope to any long-standing political success: Energizing a base. When Malcolm joined the Nation it was a very small operation (less than 1,000 members). It was him speaking directly to disenfranchised black people without regard for, and even more because of, their distance from the political center that garnered him a following and brought the TV cameras that began to educate a broader America about the fact that there were articulate, organized and angry black folks in this country.
As far as there being any true radical Black spokespeople around…I am not going to be ignorant (like a lady I just saw at the Pan African Film Fest trying to blame the black community’s woes on Ludicrous) and say, No. If these thoughts are flying in my mind they must be in the minds of others. Simple but what I think to be good logic. Now, this is a different political climate than years past and these radical leaders are not going to enjoy a national spotlight. So, we have to look locally. What radical personalities are addressing issues for blacks in LA? That is a question we can share answers to on this blogspot.
To add another comment regarding the initial article… The tone with which Minister Scott dismisses black intelligentsia is short sided. Because though in truth, as a group, they have turned their back on broader black America there is a history of profoundly great thinkers and artists coming out of these “Pale” universities. (Paul Robeson at Rutgers, Charles Dutton at Yale, Nina Simone and Miles Davis at Julliard, just off the top of my head.) And currently, there are many scholars doing yeomen’s work re-educating a lot of educated black people on the subject of radicalism. Not everyone is as weak and wack as Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates. An example of this would be Robin Kelly at none other than G’brey’s Columbia University. I would recommend his book “Freedom Dreams”. In it, he draws a lot of connections between cultural expression and freedom movements as well as speaking on the tangible relationship between the black power movement and Red China. As well, there is a tradition of “non college-educated” intellectual heavyweights like James Baldwin and Tupac. The point is, we can’t start bickering and dividing ourselves among class lines, that’s some pure brown-paper-bag ignorant mess. The dividing line should be politics, period.
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