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Friday, Jan 9, 2009
Al Sharpton's race-card politics have produced nothing but divisive melodrama for New Yorkers. Now he wants to run for president.
Feb 27, 2002 | Editor Tina Brown wanted very badly to confirm that in 1964 Al Sharpton's father had impregnated his stepdaughter, who thereby presented 10-year-old Al with a brother and a nephew in one birth. Sharpton had confided this to me in November 1992, as we stood outside his imposing, 10-room former home in the leafy Hollis area of Queens, where the tragedy had unfolded, prompting his father's departure and the family's plunge into poverty.
Wanting his secret revealed not by a newspaper headline but in a long New Yorker profile, Sharpton told me how his brother/nephew, then 28 and living in Alabama, was "in and out of jail, and I identify with him, because he went through some of the same trials I did." Thereby hangs a tale, about Sharpton and his primal unease, but also about how he deploys it and how New York's high-end media present it. Now Sharpton is running for president, his career of race-baiting having yielded nothing but drama and disappointment for black New Yorkers, while his nemesis Rudy Giuliani revived the city and its spirits, before and after Sept. 11, and did more to improve the lives of blacks than any New York mayor in history. It seems time to set that record straight for the rest of the country, if not for New Yorkers.
The New Yorker wouldn't publish what Sharpton told me unless we got confirmation from his father, who wouldn't return our calls. Public records I'd found were ambiguous. Sharpton promised us proof, either by coaxing his dad or by producing other records, and I spent the better part of a December afternoon awaiting his promised arrival at the magazine's offices to satisfy the fact-checkers and lawyers. Editorial director Hendrik Hertzberg, preternaturally wise and kind, with a trace of 1960s countercultural impishness beneath his vaguely mittel-European reserve, darted almost giddily in and out of people's offices, relishing the prospect of the Irreverend Al's disrupting the waiting-room-like tension in that aerie of eager, white writers sweating to be cool.
But Sharpton never showed up, and he ducked me for weeks, even though we'd known each other for years and I'd just spent several months with him almost full-time. Over my objections the profile ran (on Feb. 23, 1993) with a first-paragraph account of the aftermath of Sharpton's stabbing by a white man during a demonstration in 1991, which had prompted one of his many supposedly transforming epiphanies about leadership and his role in the world.
I kept his early family story to myself. It was Sharpton who revealed it three years later, in his autobiography, "Go and Tell Pharoah."
"I had to watch my mother, whom I loved more than anyone, live with the fact that her daughter had stolen her husband, and that the two of them had given life of a child, out of wedlock," he wrote -- disorienting those of us he'd told that it was Alfred Sr. who had stolen his wife's daughter. "To this day," Sharpton added in the book, "I don't know how [my mother] lived with the humiliation." But wasn't he compounding the humiliation by telling the world, with his quiet, faithful mom still very much alive?
Surely he compounded it yet again when he justified his impresario's role in the Tawana Brawley abduction/rape hoax, writing that at some point Brawley's case "stopped being Tawana, and started being me defending my mother and all the black women no one would fight for. I was not going to run away from her like my father had run away from my mother."
Forgive the intrusion, but it's hard for me to see how he helped his mother or any black women in America by slandering an assistant district attorney named Stephen Pagones (whom Brawley, Sharpton and others accused of raping her), by abusing the criminal justice system and obliterating the possibility of honest racial dialogue. Certainly the psychological resonances between Sharpton's story and Brawley's are deep: Like Sharpton's father, Tawana's father left her family when she was young, and the girl had reason to fear her stepfather, Ralph King, who had murdered his first wife while awaiting trial for stabbing her 14 times. He was out of prison and very much a presence in Tawana's home when she staged her hoax. The stepfather is not mentioned in Sharpton's book, but a boyfriend of Tawana's told Newsday that she'd admitted concocting her tale to keep the man from beating her for her four-day disappearance. She threw herself upon the public seeking rescue, as Sharpton the boy preacher had done, but she lacked his finesse and bravado.
You would have to be a stone not to know why Sharpton found Brawley's story compelling and rushed to her aid, but you'd have to be a fool to trust him as a public tribune for letting his passions drive his judgment. No one can build a movement for justice on lies, grandiose distortions, vilification of innocent parties, intimidation of those who may have legitimate differences of opinion, and dehumanization of your political adversaries. (Sharpton was found guilty of defamation and was ordered to pay Pagones $65,000, which he never has.) To blame his own and Tawana's family dramas so directly on racism, to demand special black exemptions from truth-telling, was to condemn blacks to deepening isolation and impotence, here and around the world.
That is the problem with Sharpton's putative leadership. He is all about public psychodrama, a politics of racial paroxysm that traffics in archetypes of rape by white slave masters, taps vast reservoirs of white guilt and black rage and stages catharses that are neurotically inapt, a civic equivalent of the dry heaves. Nothing gets accomplished. The variety and complexity of black life, the joy and resilience, get lost in the cloud of melodrama Sharpton draws around himself, with the news media's shameful indulgence. Other blacks appear only as fellow-victims, followers and voters, no matter how much doctoring of the truth that requires. If Al Sharpton didn't exist, the right would have had to invent him, so ably does he subvert any possibility of cross-racial coalition. If you liked what Ralph Nader did to the Democrats and the left, you'll love Sharpton -- though it's possible he'll run as a Democrat, not an independent, pretending to reform but instead subverting the party and its chances of unseating President Bush.
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