Fifty years after Brown
vs. Board of Education made the courts a battleground of the
civil-rights movement, Rosa Parks is suing Andre 3000 and Big Boi
over Outkast's use of her name as the title of a song released six
years before Hey Ya. Never mind that the duo spoke her name
to millions of young people who probably don't know Montgomery,
Ala., from a hole in the ground.
Two years ago, civil-rights leaders threatened demonstrations,
not because of voting problems in Florida but because Cedric the
Entertainer's character in the movie Barbershop -- written
and directed by African Americans -- took liberties with some myths
of the movement, including pointing out that Parks worked for the
NAACP.
The incidents paint a picture of a civil-rights establishment out
of touch. Old schoolers smell a lack of respect. Younger blacks say
that the respect is there, but communication is lacking. The truth
is even worse.
''The civil-rights movement is over,'' Boston minister/activist
and Harvard Divinity School fellow Eugene Rivers told me recently.
``Its language, rhetoric and icons are irrelevant to a generation of
young black people who were born after Martin Luther King and reared
after the election of Ronald Reagan.''
The generation gap is particularly pressing in an election year,
amid complaints that there aren't enough ''brothers'' in
presidential candidate John Kerry's ''band of brothers'' and with
black leaders facing their lowest level of political influence in
decades.
If you asked most blacks under 35 to name America's most
influential black leaders, how many of us would name Jesse Jackson,
Al Sharpton or a Congressional Black Caucus member? Their stars have
fallen: Jackson had baby-mama drama, Sharpton was rebuked by black
Democratic presidential primary voters, and the caucus watched
helplessly while the Bush administration opened up a can of
insta-coup in Haiti.
More would probably name one of the blacks in President Bush's
cabinet, though they're less than iconic. (In a skit on last
season's Chappelle's Show, the races hold a ''draft,'' and
blacks trade Colin Powell to the white team on the condition that
they take Condoleezza Rice, too. And Rice, who has taken to
comparing Iraq to the civil-rights struggle, is a frequent target of
black Generation Next's official satirist, Boondocks
cartoonist Aaron McGruder, who once derided her in his comic strip
as ``Bush's most embarrassing black person.'')
Politics aside, interaction between the generations has
definitely hit low tide, with the venerables doing more to pander
than to lead. Media mogul Bob Johnson serves up NBB (nothing but
booty) on BET, Soul Train gives the Quincy Jones award to R. Kelly
and the Aretha Franklin trophy to warbly singer Ashanti, and the
NAACP hands out statues to McGruder and Rice on the same night.
Even the black church, which gets used by Democrats as cover and
by Bush to bypass traditional civil-rights leaders, has less
influence than ever, having mostly left its activist past behind.
Today's black church is rarely heard on issues that matter, such as
the education gap and high rates of incarceration and poverty that
linger among the urban poor 50 years after middle-class blacks
''overcame.'' They're AWOL on the Iraq war, though minorities swell
the military ranks.
The one issue on which the black church has been vocal is gay
marriage, which black clergy denounced as an abomination on the day
that the Massachusetts Supreme Court's Big Change took effect. For
the record, most blacks oppose both gay marriage and the attempts by
some groups to equate it to slavery, rape, lynching and Jim Crow.
But the church has been all but silent on the scourge of AIDS that's
cutting a deadly swath through the black community. Meanwhile, a
record number of black women are contracting HIV from closeted black
men.
Is it hopeless? I was ready to say Yes.
''There has got to be a new intellectual conversation among young
black people and the old intelligentsia,'' Rivers said -- and he
didn't just fault the older folk. ``A lot of young folks think Def
Poetry Jam is black politics. What we need are new conceptual
paradigms to move black people forward. That's the challenge for
your generation.''
Joy-Ann Reid is an online editor and a freelance writer.
