FLAKKING THE MAU-MAUERS:

NAACP Hasn't Advanced Anything in a Long Time: Why should Bush speak to a hostile group that has outlived its usefulness? (John H. McWhorter, July 15, 2004, LA Times)

Last week, for the fourth year in a row, President Bush declined the NAACP's invitation to speak at its annual convention. Predictably, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume railed that the Bush administration failed to recognize the nation's oldest and largest civil rights group as being significant or important in any way.

The sad thing is, the Bush administration's attitude toward the group is justified.

The NAACP is stuck in a mind-set that worked 30 years ago but makes little sense today. Mfume and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond boast that the organization is committed to "speaking truth to power," continuing the whistle-blowing tradition that the organization was founded upon in 1909. This was urgent in an America where lynching was commonplace and segregation was legal.

But almost a century later, black America's main problem is neither overt racism nor more subtle "societal" racism. Lifting blacks up is no longer a matter of getting whites off our necks. We are faced, rather, with the mundane tasks of teaching those "left behind" after the civil rights victory how to succeed in a complex society — one in which there will never be a second civil rights revolution.

The problem would still seem to be racism, but it's the racism of black leadership that asks nothing of and promises everything to blacks.

Posted by Orrin Judd at July 16, 2004 7:44 AM