The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership

by Al Sharpton

  When it comes to the nation’s struggles with gay marriage, let us take a step back and consider how this looks to outsiders, perhaps someone from one of those Muslim countries that Americans are constantly condemning because of their willingness to rule the land by the laws of their religion. We are quick to berate countries in the Middle East and Africa that are intent on imposing Sharia law, lecturing them about how undemocratic they are, about how they should consider separating church and state the way we do. We even invaded Iraq and used the spread of democracy as one of our justifications—this after the “weapons of mass destruction” argument failed to stand up to the facts. We Americans are so infatuated with our democracy that we believe we can sprinkle it across the globe like topsoil and just watch it grow, naively believing it’ll take root in countries that have been invested in other governing systems for centuries. But as we scold Pakistan and Syria for their religious fundamentalism and preach to them about the healing powers of democracy, if we turned our gaze back on ourselves, we would quickly see how hypocritical we must look to the outside world.

  When we try to deny rights to same-sex couples based on our religious principles, how are we not acting out our own form of religious fundamentalism? We look down upon these other countries for requiring women to wear veils, but I can remember when I was growing up in the Church of God in Christ, it was considered a sin for women to wear pants and lipstick. When we went to a gospel competition and I saw a first lady of one of the big churches wearing pants, I scurried over to my mother and said, “Ma, look, she’s going to hell because she has on pants!”

  But the church changed, evolved, and was overtaken by a measure of modernity. We need to keep this in mind when we get so set in our positions, so rigidly opposed to change. I’m as firmly ensconced in the principles of the black church as anyone; I started preaching when I was just four years old! If I can evolve in my own thinking on gay marriage, I am convinced that we can all do it. In fact, we must, for the sake of our children and our grandchildren. The last thing we want is for future generations to look back on our politics and shake their heads at the rampant bigotry that masqueraded as conventional wisdom—much the same way that we shake our heads now at the segregationists who ruled the South fifty years ago. What was once unthinkable is now commonplace.

  I want to know that when a child in 2063 looks back to study American society at the turn of the last century and she comes across the name Al Sharpton, she will see that I stood proudly for justice and equality—for every member of our society.

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  VALUE FAMILY, VALUE COMMUNITY, AND, MOST IMPORTANT, VALUE YOURSELF

  With the publication in 1965 of the U.S. Labor Department report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan shaped an entire generation of analysis about the plight of African-Americans. An assistant secretary of labor at the time, Moynihan, who would soon become a U.S. senator from New York, wrote a persuasive treatise that not only deeply influenced President Lyndon Johnson in his crafting of the War on Poverty but also established the direction and tenor of the national conversation about the black community for years to come.

  Moynihan’s conclusion, largely derived from statistics, was presented right at the top of his report: “At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.”

  This was the overarching thesis of his report, which presented graphs, charts, and pages of powerful testimony to prove its insight. But right from the start, I think Moynihan got it all wrong, and much of the debate about black pathology over the past nearly fifty years has suffered as a result.

  By using the white family and white society as his point of comparison, Moynihan essentially missed the fundamental truth of black American life: Black success has always derived from community, not from family.

  In Moynihan’s paper and in much of the societal discussion since then, there has been a hazy nostalgia for a return to solid nuclear families, to strong patriarchal units, to Leave It to Beaver family unity and family values. If we could only get back to that time, black pathology will disappear, the thinking goes.

  Well, my response to all of this nostalgia is, back to when?

  I’ve never known a time when we didn’t have serious issues in the black family. As Moynihan pointed out correctly, much of it emanated from our history, a history during which it was against the law for blacks even to have a family. My great-grandfather, as the New York Daily News discovered in 2007, was the property of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond’s family in Edgefield County, South Carolina. That’s just two generations ago, not centuries, not some distant figures in a history textbook. It was against the law for my great-grandfather to name his children after himself and to marry his wife legally.

  So when was this period of thriving black families?

  It certainly wasn’t during slavery, when the idea of the black family by law couldn’t even exist.

  Was it during Reconstruction, when the first generation could marry legally? I don’t think so.

  It certainly wasn’t in the early or middle twentieth century. I was born in the middle of the twentieth century, and I grew up in a Brooklyn community surrounded by kids who came from single-parent families.

  My point here is that I believe we are romanticizing something that was never there. African-Americans haven’t degenerated from some golden period of black family unity—because we never had a golden period of black families.

  But my further and more important point is this: While we have always had family breakdowns and single-parent family structures, we have always had strong family values. And those values were derived from the black community that surrounded us, not from the existence of a mother and a father in the household at the same time.

  My mother, Ada Sharpton, raised me on strong family values with no father in the home; most of my friends in Brooklyn had strong family values and came out of so-called broken homes. I think what Moynihan and a generation of scholars and pundits missed is that we may have come out of broken homes, but we didn’t have broken families. We didn’t have fathers, we didn’t have any means of an adequate existence, we didn’t have any kind of comfort level, but we had standards.

  My mother raised me so that I was expected to be something, expected to take the strands of opportunity that were presented to me over time and stitch them together into a successful life. So even though my home was broken, I was never broken. I was challenged to live up to my mother’s expectations. I say often in speeches that I never knew I was underprivileged until I attended Brooklyn College, because I was never raised to focus on what I wasn’t, what I didn’t have. I thought I could be great. I thought I could be a minister. I thought I could achieve. I thought I was as good as any of my classmates, because my mother, my pastor, my teachers, the circle that compensated for me coming from a broken home, taught me about great possibilities.

  All of that is what has been lost in this generation. We have been sunk by low expectations. We have come to define ourselves, and let others define us, by what we don’t have.

  When I was growing up, we were intent on challenging the barriers we confronted, not submitting to them. And let me say this again: It had nothing to do with our family structure, whether we had a father in the house, not even with the amount of money our mothers brought home. We would never let somebody get away with telling us we weren’t going to make it because we were fatherless. That would have been like spitting in our eyes.

  My mother went from owning a new Cadillac every year and living in a private home to becoming a domestic worker after my father left. She would walk to the subway every morning at five or five thirty to go down to Greenwich Village to scrub floors for people, trying to take care of my sister and me and supplement the meager welfare check she would get. Sometimes I would make that walk with her to the subway
to make sure she didn’t get her pocketbook snatched, and she would talk to me, feeding words into my head that had powerful messages behind them. “You’re gonna be somebody,” she would tell me. That’s family values. This was a woman whose life crumbled, who decided to live for her children and never give up, committing herself to them and their well-being. That’s more family values than some rich woman who has a nanny raise her children. So put me up next to a guy who had a daddy and a mommy and a trust fund to take care of all his needs, and he’s going to teach me about family values? Did his parents teach him more about family values than my single mother on welfare, getting down on her arthritic knees to scrub floors for me? I think not. I know more about family values than he does, any day of the week.

  No one has fought harder than I have in my lifetime against inequality and unfairness. But I’ve never taught anyone that the inequality and unfairness they might face is an excuse or a justification not to do everything in their power to overcome. Yet somehow, that’s the message that has seeped through to the generations that came after mine. We allowed a spirit of dysfunction and surrender to supplant our spirit of determination. While women like my mother made sure that my generation was challenged by what we didn’t have, now it seems to define us. Limit us. Break us.

  When I give speeches, I sometimes use a helpful analogy: If I step off the stage and knock you off your seat, that’s on me. I’ve abused you, knocked you to the ground for no reason. But if I come back a week later, and you’re still lying on the ground, that’s on you. If you’re not responsible for being down, you are responsible for getting up. But that’s not what’s happening in our communities and families today. We’re not getting back up. We must figure out a way to reenergize and reignite the spirit of get-up in our communities. I am sad and burdened, almost to the point of heartbreak, that we let our young people lose it. We allowed it to slip away in a generation, disappear into a fog of disconnection and self-centered entitlement. When I meet with young people, I see it in their eyes, in their faces, in their demeanors, in their voices. They’re telling me, I ain’t gonna be nothing nohow, so why bother? I’ll just join a gang, take me out in my twenties. I don’t care.

  When things were much worse off, we didn’t surrender. We can’t accept it now. That is not the legacy of our ancestors. It is not us.

  I started to notice the change in the mid-1990s, seeing young people who didn’t seem to hear what I was saying to them, who didn’t think all the talk about uplift and self-improvement applied to them. Whereas my generation grew up with songs such as “Say It Loud” by James Brown, “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye, “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy, all records exhorting us to action, by the ’90s, that message had started to give way to more self-focused tributes, to weed and sex. It started to become acceptable, even in vogue, to live a thug life. In one of the most damning developments, to young African-Americans, it seemed that blackness became synonymous with thuggery, hood life. It was the definition of what it meant to be black.

  I remember how hurt I was when my daughters told me this way of thinking had so permeated young black minds that it was even present on their college campuses. Even in college, if you were well-spoken, well-read, eloquent, you were acting white, they told me. So the converse was that to act black, you were supposed to act like a thug, a street urchin? That’s a crippling and racist self-image. But it’s been sold, reinforced, and glorified by the last fifteen years of black culture. The music, the movies, and the literature all became a celebration of the thug. So if that’s blackness, what does that do to W. E. B. DuBois and James Baldwin and Leontyne Price? They’re not black? Or Dr. King—he’s not black? What are you talking about? Blackness was never about how low we were; blackness was about no matter how far down they brought us, we found a way to get back up. That’s the black legacy—not just to our children but to all of America.

  Using the previous analogy, about me stepping off the stage and knocking you off your chair, what we are doing now is getting knocked off the chair, and not only are we not getting back up, but we are lying on the ground and rapping about it.

  I’m down . . . bump bump bump . . . I’m down . . . I ain’t shit.

  It may be entertaining, or even funny, but what kind of damage is it doing to the psyche? What you should be rapping about is, You knocked me down, but I’m just gonna get right back up. Or, Hey, you shouldn’t have knocked me down in the first place! But instead, we’re making it fashionable to be down there on the floor, embracing it, making it cool and black to be doing jail time, to have eight kids from eight different baby mamas. I think that’s sick.

  Please understand, I will always preach that black men must take responsibility for their children. That’s something I believe wholeheartedly, especially since I saw in my own life, with my own father, that too many men refuse to take proper responsibility for the care and upkeep of their children. But I have to take exception to this idea that the reason black kids aren’t excelling in school is that they aren’t reared in a traditional family. I feel as if I would be doing violence to the years of hard work put in by Ada Sharpton to accede to that. This message is especially bothersome at a time when we see the very idea of what is a traditional family transforming before our eyes. It’s clear that America needs to update its image of what a family looks like. How do we get sociologists and social commentators trying to instruct America to enlarge the view of a positive family environment, while telling African-Americans that the black community’s problem is the lack of traditional families? You can’t have it both ways. We have states such as Maryland and Washington deciding that same-sex marriage is legal, and we have gays adopting kids in big numbers—but blacks have to have a mother and a father in the home together in order to thrive? Is that what we’re saying here? Because it seems to me that if the contemporary societal message is that the traditional family is not traditional anymore, then please don’t use that archetype of the traditional family to beat down African-Americans, particularly black single mothers.

  What the black community needs in the current environment is a redefinition of community. We need to reinstitute a place where the teachers are committed to lifting children up and not teaching down to them, where institutions such as the church are dedicated to uplifting kids, where everyone in the community works together to implant in every young person the idea that the community expects success from them. But to count heads on who has a daddy at home at a time when the daddy might actually be another mommy is unfair and counterproductive. If I’m free enough to say people have the right to marry someone of the same sex, then don’t come to me wielding that traditional model. American society is feeding blacks a nineteenth-century family photo while giving whites a twenty-first-century liberated view of family. That’s not fair, and it’s not right.

  This doesn’t mean we are removing responsibility from the fathers. No, what we are saying is that if you have a child, you are responsible for that child, regardless of your sexual orientation or family type. And to extend it further, if you live in a community with children, you are responsible to help all those children, even if they don’t share your DNA. If you’re an accountant or a hairdresser, or whatever profession you happen to be in, commit some of your life to teaching, molding, mentoring young people in your community. Your lifestyle choices are your own, but your obligation is to the community and to the children. That means all of us putting aside our ridiculous, self-centered preoccupations and taking care of our children, making sure we create an intellectual climate in which they thrive, which pushes them to reject mediocrity and excuses.

  Right now, what is happening in America is exactly the opposite. We are cultivating a climate that celebrates mediocrity, even idiocy. Just fifteen minutes of reality television illustrates everything that’s wrong with the American climate—five minutes with Snooki on Jersey Shore, five minutes with the ladies of the Real Housewives f
ranchise in any of its many cities, and five minutes with Honey Boo Boo and her blissfully ignorant family. These shows and dozens of others provide a virtual dissertation on the modern failings of American culture. The dumber, more ignorant, and more anti-intellectual you are, the quicker your path to stardom. And that’s not even including the endless drumbeat of “niggas,” “bitches,” and “hos” on the radio airwaves.

  This enthusiastic American celebration of decadence, debauchery, and ignorance transcends race—we’re all there now; no community is immune. In a classic illustration of American inclusiveness, we’ve even given a vehicle to the Arab community to parade its own unique brand of brainlessness on a reality show called Shahs of Sunset. Ah, the beauty of America. Let’s show our young people—hell, show the world—how low, irresponsible, undisciplined, and uneducated you can be in this great nation and still get paid.