The Black Rejectionists

By Charles Krauthammer

As if black America hasn't suffered enough, it now faces a new calamity: the rise of an alternative political leadership, racist and nihilist, leading it angrily down a path to nowhere. The group -- a motley crew of scoundrels, losers and liars -- had its national premiere at the circus surrounding the perjury and cocaine-possession trial of Washington Mayor Marion Barry. It was a scary show.

Its luminaries are what Washington Post columnist Judy Mann calls the "fringe ministers." First there is Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. He held massive rallies in Washington, the minor theme of which was the crucifixion of Barry by white racist America; the major theme was the crucifixion of black America by same. His message, the purest of race hatred, was attended by Barry (and wife and young son) and met with wild enthusiasm by a crowd of 15,000.

On stage with Farrakhan was the other fringe minister, George Stallings Jr., excommunicated Roman Catholic priest, accused pederast, founder of his own ersatz Catholic Church called the Imani Temple. Stallings marked his entry into the political arena with the declaration that Barry, "the greatest mayor this city has ever had," was brought low by a racist government because he is "too intelligent and too black."

! On the same stage, as if for journalistic convenience, were the other fringe players in this netherworld of black rage. Helping open Farrakhan's rally was Congressman Gus Savage, lately reproved by a House committee for the sexual harassment of a Peace Corps officer, which trouble, among others, he blames variously on the racist media and Jews. To complete this chilling tableau, also on stage was Tawana Brawley. Two years ago, she turned New York upside down by charging she'd been raped for four days by six white men. The story turned out to be a fabrication. But she carries on regardless, as does her spiritual adviser through that episode, the Rev. Al Sharpton, who has now started picketing the Barry trial.

The gang is assembled, holding hands, linking fates. It is more than just a bad dream. It portends a new development in black leadership. Since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., his successors have struggled over personality and program rather than principle. The mainstream contenders, Jesse Jackson et al., accepted King's vision, one that endorses American values, embraces the American Dream and demands only that black America not be denied its share of the dream.

However, there have always been voices, like Malcolm X's, that reject this vision. For them mainstream American values are inherently oppressive and racist, to be rejected at root. That leadership has tended to be fringe. It is fringe no longer. Farrakhan's audience and appeal are growing. This year he will for the first time run candidates for Congress. And his alliance with Barry, Stallings and others with Establishment credentials is steadily gaining him space at the political center of the black community.

The new alternative leadership Farrakhan symbolizes is not so much radical (radicalism implies a program) as nihilist. It stands above all for rejection. Farrakhan's rejection of things American is too long to list, but it includes racial integration and religious tolerance. Stallings rejects a Catholic Church that has, particularly in the inner cities, nurtured and educated generations of blacks. Savage rejects civility and racial respect as forms of Uncle Tomism.

Brawley stands for rejection of the entire notion of American justice. So long as her assailants were not brought to justice, she declared, the American legal system stood indicted as racist -- but, of course, her assailants could not be brought to justice because they did not exist. Very convenient. Indeed, her rejection extends to truth itself. Her lie, never retracted, proudly maintained, is a statement that for black Americans truth itself does not matter. What matters is victimization.

What links Farrakhan and Savage, Stallings and Barry, Brawley and Sharpton is the notion that the institutions and values that America reveres, and that King himself respected and wanted only to reform (church, government, law, truth), are mere racist instruments designed for the oppression of blacks.

Why is this new leadership emerging now? A principal reason is that the traditional black leadership is out of ideas, marooned in an old agenda. Its response to the progressive disintegration of the inner cities is more of the same: more federal money, more racial preferences. Twenty years' experience has made it clear that neither will make a difference to those that need help the most. The Civil Rights Act of 1990, for example, will give a few middle- class blacks an extra step. It says nothing to the pathologies of the underclass. Jesse Jackson's newest crusade is statehood for the District of Columbia, "the most important civil rights and social justice issue in America today," if you can believe that. "It is," he says, "a matter of death, dignity and democracy."

Death? Where did that come in? This kind of lurid rhetoric comes in when traditional black leaders, with their bankrupt agenda, hear the footsteps of the rejectionist leadership. To keep up with the demagogues, they resort to the most pathetic attempts at imitative incitement. N.A.A.C.P. leader Benjamin Hooks, for example, denounces the "incessant harassment of black elected officials," and about Barry he asks, "If millions are using ((drugs)), what makes you go after one man to the exclusion of everybody else?"

Because he's the mayor. That's why. But Hooks' question was not meant to elicit an answer. It was meant for effect. It will have none. Hooks cannot compete. Farrakhan plays this game -- victimization and racial blaming -- so much better.

As the traditional black leadership descended from King declines into irrelevance, its place will be taken by the alternative black leadership antithetical to King's vision. This is a tragedy for all America but especially for black America. The rejectionists have nothing to offer the black community beyond the momentary satisfactions of articulated rage. To the whites they shake a fist at, they are a mere nuisance. But for blacks to whom they promise the world but offer nothing, they are a cruel deception.