Living in the Past

America’s oldest civil rights organization, the NAACP, has passed a resolution condemning what it sees as racism in the Tea Party movement.

The group’s president, Ben Jealous, said in a statement, “We take issue with the Tea Party’s continued tolerance for bigotry and bigoted statements. The time has come for them to accept the responsibility that comes with influence and make clear there is no space for racism and anti-Semitism and other forms of bigotry in their movement.”

This is very good news.  I will explain in a moment.

And just the other day, after the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers wrote a dumb, angry rant expressing unhappiness because his star player, LeBron James, left the team for Miami, Jesse Jackson said the Cavs boss sees James as nothing more than a “runaway slave.”

This is more good news.

I mean, If the nation’s most prestigious civil rights organization and the nation’s best-known civil rights advocate have time for such silly crap, things must be just swell in black America.

In the old days, civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King were busy with stuff like voting rights and integrating America’s schools and securing the rights of black Americans to eat at lunch counters and stay at decent hotels, just like white folks.  You know, important sutff! Now they’re busy comparing a guy who makes hundreds of millions of dollars a “slave” and smearing a movement because of a few bigots in the crowd.

By that standard, the NAACP should condemn itself.  During the presidential campaign of 2000, the civil rights organization ran a vile TV ad that linked George W. Bush to a vicious modern day lynching.  The ad was about a black man, James Byrd, who was dragged to his death from the back of a pick up truck by three white racists.

In the ad, over black and white footage of a pickup truck dragging a chain, the daughter of the murdered man says, “So when Gov. George W. Bush refused to sign hate crimes legislation, it was like my father was killed all over again.”

Here’s an idea:  any organization that runs such filth to make cheap political points has no business lecturing anybody about anything.

The problem is that the NAACP and Jesse Jackson are stuck in the past.  Their glory days were the 1960s when they accomplished so much.  Instead of worrying about trivial stuff, they should spend every waking minute trying to deal with much more important things, like a black illegitimacy birth rate of 70 percent.  If the NAACP and Jesse Jackson could fix that, they’d fix much of what ails black America.  But since they don’t have a clue as to how to deal with a real problem of that magnitude, they spend their time on nonsense.   And in reality, this is not good news at all.