Crown Heights tells us everything one needs to know about Sharpton. A 7-year-old black child was accidentally struck and killed by a car driven by a Hasidic Jew in that section of Brooklyn, N.Y. It sparked three days of riots, resulting in a hundred people injured and the stabbing death of a young Jewish scholar, who was surrounded by a mob chanting, "Kill the Jew." Sharpton fanned the flames, leading some 400 protesters through a Jewish section of Crown Heights. He said: "The world will tell us that (the child) was killed by accident. ... What type of city do we have that would allow politics to rise above the blood of innocent babies? ... Talk about how Oppenheimer in South Africa sends diamonds straight to Tel Aviv and deals with the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights. ... All we want to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to pay for it. No compromise. Pay for your deeds." Later he said, "If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house."
Want a different perspective on the reverend? A November 2004 Village Voice article led with this title: "On a New High, Sharpton Hits a New Low: TV's Democratic Minister of 'Moral Values' Takes a Hypocritical Plunge."
Newsweek: "He has lived an upper-middle-class, although hardly opulent, life." The Village Voice: Sharpton and family lived in "their enormous Brooklyn mansion."
Newsweek: "(Sharpton) is one preacher who has managed to negotiate the temptations of fame untouched by sexual scandal." The Village Voice, on Sharpton's apparent extramarital relationship with a married employee: "The ... saga is not just a question of sex; it's a window into the dysfunction of Sharpton's universe."
So what, indeed, does Sharpton's "longevity say about race in America"? It says that Newsweek and others who should know better apply a different and lower standard of acceptability for a black race-hustler like Sharpton than for a white race-hustler like David Duke. And, assuming Sharpton ever mattered, does he now?
Blacks and whites were asked by Gallup in 2003 to name "the most important national leader in the black community today." Four percent of blacks and 2 percent of whites named Sharpton.
On some things, it appears, whites and blacks are not so far apart. Perhaps the Rev. Al achieved some racial unity after all.