For NAACP to meet the challenges facing Black America it must be "Transformed"

by Mikel Kwaku Osei Holt
The NAACP buried the "N" word Monday. But they forgot to bury the mindset and culture behind it.

Actually, the funeral services were acknowledged to be symbolic. And based on my limited survey of Black Milwaukeeans prior to and immediately after the burial, most folks didn’t receive the obituary. Among those who did, few seemed genuinely moved by the service.

Which is not to say the funeral services didn’t have appreciable value. As I was explaining to my son while en route to UW-Milwaukee Tuesday morning, most Black people who use the adjective have little if any knowledge of its history, much less a cognizant understanding of how our usage of the word fulfills a self-fulfilling prophesy of cultural denigration. Usage of the word supplements the Willie Lynch methodology, guaranteeing we will never achieve economic, political or social parity. It proves we are under the cloud of slavery, with a titanium chain around our minds.

The ceremonial burial sparked an unintended consequence for the NAACP, which is at a crucial cross roads, some say hoping to redefine itself, or at the very least clarify its mission while taking on an ambitious fundraising and membership drive.

For the record, the NAACP continues to be one America’s most viable and important civil rights organizations. It is one of the few entities we can count on to provide a voice for the voiceless, to challenge the status quo, and most importantly, to bring light to the abysmal status of Black America and the failed promise of the Constitution.

I have not always agreed with the NAACP platform, and to be honest ended my membership in the organization when the local branch aggressively sought to terminate the Milwaukee Parental School Choice program.

But I’ve since reestablished my membership, recognizing that it is one of the few vehicles around that continues to fight the vestiges of racism and bigotry, and that its leadership has raised its voice when political, religious and civic leadership have hidden their heads in the sand.

That said--and with membership card in my possession--I would suggest members of the organization attending the annual convention in Detroit this week spend two hours out of their busy convention schedule and attend a showing of the new action movie, "Transformers."

Attending the movie may plant a seed in the minds of members leading to a "transformation" of the organization with a new agenda, one that could lead to a transformation of Black America.

As I repeatedly stress, the civil rights movement has moved from battling institutional racism that denied us the opportunity to sit at the lunch counter, to being about whether we can afford the cost of the meal, and equally important, are able to read the menu.

Disparities and racism still exist. But by law, we can avail ourselves of the opportunity to attend any school, to eat at any establishment, to purchase homes where we want and to shop at any store. The new battles are being waged on a different field.

Today the focus should be on tearing down the walls of economic and educational apartheid. Just as importantly, we need to look inward, because our community is stagnant, many would suggest regressing.

Crime, single-parent households, low self-esteem and apathy besiege us. Most of us don’t vote, attend a religious institution, take advantage of educational opportunities or support each other economically.

Thus, from my perspective, the NAACP is spinning its wheels soliciting membership or support from a generation of Black Americans who can’t relate to the Civil Rights Movement, the African cultural paradigm or the campaign for Black empowerment. A civil rights movement is needed, and who better than the NAACP to spearhead it.

The NAACP needs to make itself relevant to the three young teenagers who walked through the MCJ parking lot burdened by pregnancies last Friday, their futures defined by the unborn children they bore. If the statistics hold true, all three will drop out of school, live in poverty and never marry. Their futures are dark, as are the opportunities for their children.

The NAACP should transform itself so it is relevant to the 16-year-old Black teenager who will drop out of school this fall, feeling uncomfortable and out of place in a public school system where he is lost and abandoned. He reads at a 6th grade level, can’t figure out simple math formulas and thinks Africa is located somewhere near Haiti, the Boston Tea Party was a reception for a rap group, and John F. Kennedy was the first American president.
The NAACP needs to relate to the 30-year-old who has not been able to find a job, yet walks past a Black church construction project site in his neighborhood where the construction workers are White folks from the suburbs.

Without sounding too pretentious, a much needed transformation would help move America back to the center and redirect Black people back on the freedom train (too many of us mistakenly got off the train in the late ’70s thinking it was their destination, versus a transfer depot).

A few fundamental areas of transformation within the organization come to the mind:

Integrate the national board with young, progressive and culturally attuned members. The controversy over the recent resignation of the NAACP president after only a year of leadership was rooted in a conflict between a pragmatist and a board of senior citizens stuck in the civil rights paradigm of the 1960s. It was said that the average age of a board member was 66, and its basic philosophy and agenda was as outdated as the zoot suits they wore.

The civil rights organization is desperate for an infusion of new blood, young Black professionals and grass roots poor.

Integrate a former welfare mother who can relate to the plight of the poor, along with a hip-hopper, who sees the world and Black culture through different eyes. Add a young Black professional who encounters a glass ceiling and a street flowing with blood from a drive-by.

Secondly, transform the organization from a quasi subsidiary of the Democratic Party, unions and corporate sponsors into a truly independent organization.

Let’s be honest. The NAACP has been singing a tune scripted by the Democratic Party, and never seems to find fault with the unions even when their policies are contrary to efforts to empower the downtrodden. When groups like People for the (un) American Way provide the NAACP with bullet points, it speaks volumes about who is pulling whose stings.

And that’s not to say the Democratic Party isn’t more in tune with the Black community than the Republicans. That’s obvious. But it’s not the point.

As Minister Louis Farrakhan said during his keynote address at the Million Man March, Black organizations can’t truly advance a Black agenda as long as they are reading from someone else’s script. That explains why the NAACP was silent when President Clinton and the Democratic Party touted the death penalty, spearheaded so-called welfare reform, took the teeth out of affirmative action (making it race neutral), and instituted one of the most biased and conservative criminal justice codes in U.S. history.

Black America needs a voice that can take both political parties and all special interest to task for policies that adversely impact our community.

Next, transform the organizational agenda from one that focuses on external injustice, to internal cultural corrosion.

The funeral services for the "N" word could serve as a springboard for a campaign to address a subculture that is undermining progress.

The NAACP, in consultation with other groups, should establish a cultural paradigm and fight tooth and nail to implement it. Focus on true remedies to the dysfunctional public school paradigm, starting with the premise that a 50% Black drop out rate isn’t solely attributable to the monopolistic structure.

It is also rooted in a culture of poverty that does not value education, poverty that can be traced to out of wedlock births, the disappearing Black nuclear family, and the abandonment of the moral and cultural foundation that allowed our nation within a nation to survive a system of apartheid that mirrored South Africa’s.

It is important to bring light to the disparities in the criminal justice system, but we also need to address the epidemic of criminality that holds our community hostage. Drugs run rampant in our community.

Black-on-Black violence has reached epidemic levels. Businesses are leaving our community on a daily basis, malls are closing down, and grocery store merchants operate behind bulletproof glass. All because of a culture of violence and criminality that is seemingly beyond control.

Who other than the nation’s oldest civil rights organization is better positioned to focus its brain trust and resources on a national education campaign to restore the Black nuclear family, to put value behind education and to clean up our streets.

Who better than the nation’s premiere civil rights organization is more suited to help restore a cultural paradigm that reflects the vision of our civil rights pioneers.

If not the NAACP--whose shoulders are broad enough to pick our challenged brothers and sisters from off their knees, to place a vision in the eyes of our youth, to create a platform from which our elderly can retire in pride and comfort, ridding our community of the cancer of violence, disrespect, and self-hatred that is manifest in the actions of terrorists and uncivilized thugs--than who?

A full-scale war is needed that focuses not on the use of the word nigger, but on the mindset behind it. The NAACP can’t bury an attitude, a warped value system, and a self-destructive culture.

But it can undertake a campaign to exorcise crime from our community, to restore a system of decorum and mutual respect and to market the importance of supporting Black businesses.

The NAACP could spearhead a campaign that boldly declares that sexual promiscuity, and the resulting epidemic of teen pregnancy, out of wedlock births, single-parent households are not part of God’s design.

The organization needs to undertake a bold initiative that takes no prisoners in its quest to halt the deterioration of our sociocultural foundation. It is crumbling as our leaders stand upon it articulating the plight of the poor.

Finally, I hope members of the organization leave the movietheater with the thought of "transforming" the NAACP from an interracial body to one that focuses on the educational, political and economic empowerment of Black people, exclusively. A cornerstone of that "evolution" would be the recognition that the strategies and agenda of the 1960s ill serve the needs of Black Americans in this new millennium.

I have great love and respect for former local NAACP President Felmers Chaney, but his philosophy of integration as the cornerstone of the social revolution has run its course.

As I illuminated in my book, "Not Yet Free at Last," Chaney once said in response to a question about school choice that he, and the NAACP opposed because it exclusively benefited Black children (which was a totally erroneous assumption).

Asked to explain the organization’s opposition, he said the program was created for Black children who would in turn attend Black private schools and "anything all Black is all bad."

Despite my respect for the Black pioneer, I had to ask if that meant the NAACP was opposed to "the Black-owned bank, Black colleges or Black businesses in general."

He didn’t respond.

I’m not opposed to integration, although I understand the difference between that concept and "desegregation," which is the legal remedy for segregation.

I don’t believe a Black child must sit next to a White child to learn, nor do I believe you can legislate attitudes.

More significantly, I believe Black America would be best served in today’s society through a heavy dose of Black Nationalism; that we should focus our time, energies and resources on supporting Black institutions, solidifying an African-centric cultural paradigm and cementing a communal system that prioritizes Black interests in political, civic and entrepreneurial endeavors.

Some say that’s racist. I call it the cornerstone of Black empowerment. In fact, at this point, it’s about survival.

Obviously, the NAACP will not endorse that concept. But imagine what would happen if it did. And as a member who has a vested interest in the organization’s survival, and more important in the future of our Black community, I will continue to press for a new agenda for both. Then we won’t have to talk about burying a word, but instead will be birthing a new mindset.

Hotep.