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Jewish World Review July 23, 1999 /10 Av, 5759

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Econophone

Problem profiteers

http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
ONE OF THE OUTCOMES of last week's NAACP 90th Annual Meeting was a call to mau-mau network executives for not having enough blacks in leading roles in next fall's television shows. Another was Kweisi Mfume's call to sue gun manufacturers.

The NAACP director said, "The time has come for us to look at the proliferation of handguns." Mfume, like the mayors of Philadelphia, New Orleans and Chicago, sees gun manufacturers as responsible for the murder and mayhem in black neighborhoods.

At the turn of the century, Booker T. Washington warned against the agenda of "problem profiteers," proclaiming: "There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs and the hardships of the Negro race before the public.

Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs -- partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs." Booker T. Washington'sS warnings apply aptly to people like Jesse Jackson and Mfume.

Robert Woodson, director of the Washington-based National Center for Neighborhood Enterprises, points to the increasing gap between the concerns of the civil-rights establishment and those of ordinary black citizens for whom they purport to speak in his recent book, "The Triumphs of Joseph." In one survey, 83 percent of blacks said they were in favor of school choice. Yet in a floor vote at the 1993 NAACP convention, delegates passed a resolution opposing school choice. In a Washington Post survey, pollsters asked whether minorities should receive preferential treatment to make up for past discrimination -- 77 percent of black leaders said yes, while 77 percent of the black public said no. Black leaders support forced school busing, while a majority of blacks disapprove. Only 8 percent of blacks see racial integration as an issue of importance. Yet the civil-rights establishment continues to pursue their '60s agenda of mandated integration and recompense for past discrimination.

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Jackson and Mfume's push to have more blacks in starring roles on television shows is exactly what Bill Raspberry, Washington Post columnist, meant when he wrote, "The inner-city poor furnish the statistical base for the proposals, but the benefits go primarily to the already well-off." More blacks on television doesn't do a thing for the major problems of the inner-city blacks, such as poor education, crime and female- headed households.

Invoking the names of poor blacks in order to benefit well-off blacks isn't new. In 1990, Jackson and other civil-rights leaders accused Nike Corporation of exploiting inner-city black youngsters. Among their demands were: more blacks in top management positions, more Nike advertising in black-owned media outlets and more blacks on Nike's board of trustees. This tactic of using poor blacks to provide benefits for their better-off brethren is known in retailing as "bait and switch."

Since private and Catholic schools do a far better job of educating blacks, the NAACP could have called for school choice, but that would have offended their members who are public school teachers. They could have called on the Clinton administration to speak out against slavery in Ghana -- as featured in a Feb. 7, 1997, New York Times story -- and slavery in the Sudan and Mauritania, where an estimated 30,000 blacks are held in bondage, but that might offend Jackson's Muslim backers.

If there's a bright side to the NAACP, it's that ordinary blacks don't give the organization much attention and financial support. Most of the organization's financing comes from white liberals, mau-maued corporations and foundations.


Up

07/16/99:The vanishing poor
07/09/99: State sovereignty
07/02/99: America's theater of the absurd
06/25/99: Corruption of language
06/18/99: Asian excellence, American mediocrity
06/11/99: Reining in the EPA
06/07/99: Minimum wage, maximum folly
05/27/99: An armed citizenry and liberty
05/19/99: Blaming the past
05/14/99: General principles
05/06/99: Confronting unpleasantries
04/29/99: Permissiveness costs
04/23/99: South Africa: after apartheid
04/19/99: A time for truth
04/12/99: Population and poverty
03/31/99: Moral hazards
03/24/99: Right to be left alone?
03/17/99: Why Congress can't be trusted
03/10/99: Racial profiling
03/03/99: Equality before the law
02/24/99: Population control nonsense
02/17/99: Congressional contempt
02/11/99:Blooming fur tyrants
02/05/99:More money, better education?
01/27/99:Absurdity, brazenness and hypocrisy reigns
01/20/99:Economics 101
01/13/99:A wrongful celebration
01/06/99: Economics of predation
12/30/98: Things I wonder about
12/23/98: Unseen crime costs
12/21/98: How to become rich
12/09/98: Advancing national decadence
12/02/98: The Civil War wasn't about slavery
11/24/98:What's happened to us?
11/20/98:Tragedy in black neighborhoods
11/11/98:Family debasement
I11/04/98: Is it them or us?
10/28/98: Where are the poor?
10/21/98: The budget surplus hoax
10/15/98: Where union power lies
10/08/98: Race and sex in the military
9/29/98: Can Clinton run the economy?
9/25/98: Liberals and the constitution
9/17/98: Clinton and future presidents
9/11/98: Donate or sell organs
9/03/98: Common Sense vs. Experts
8/26/98: Mother Nature's unfairness
8/24/98: The pretense of superiority
8/13/98: Yours or mine?
8/05/98: I do my job well, so that means I can....
7/29/98: Education production


©1999, Creators Syndicate