Editor's note: This column is an excerpt from Crystal Wright's new book, "Con Job: How Democrats Gave Us Crime, Sanctuary Cities, Abortion Profiteering, and Racial Division."
When was the last time anyone heard the “Reverend” Al Sharpton give a sermon? I mean a real one, not a rant that incites racial unrest. Ever since Sharpton came to the defense of Tawana Brawley in 1987, knowing she HAD lied in accusing white men of raping her, he’s been a professional race profiteer. Not only did Tawana lie, she lied big time: spreading dog feces on herself then hiding in a trash can to stage her rape. After Al “marched” in defense of Brawley, a grand jury concluded Brawley had concocted a “hoax” and the lawyers who represented her were disbarred. Steven Pagones, a Dutchess County assistant district attorney, was one of the men Brawley, Sharpton, and her advisors Alton H. Maddox Jr. and C. Vernon Mason accused of raping her. In 1998 Pagones won a defamation lawsuit against the three race-baiting stooges, who were ordered to pay Pagones $345,000 in damages. Brawley was also sued by Pagones and ordered to pay over $400,000 in damages, which she only began paying in 2013.27 In 1988 People magazine referred to Sharpton, pictured with Brawley on the cover its magazine, as “a belligerent black activist” whose actions were a “disgrace.” Today, a thinner, tailored-suit-wearing Sharpton works as a well-paid TV host of MSNBC’s PoliticsNation.
The “Reverend” Al has also been quite successful in not paying over $4 million owed in federal and New York state taxes. Obama’s IRS was masterful at targeting conservative groups from 2010 through 2012 to silence their influence in elections by delaying or not approving their applications for tax-exempt nonprofit status. But you mean to tell me the IRS can’t make Al Sharpton pay the $3 million in back taxes he owes the federal government? In spite of his lawlessness, Sharpton has visited the Obama White House about eighty times. Apparently our Democrat president buys into Al’s hustle. Or, like the Democrat Party in general, he finds it useful for winning elections. The first black president’s embrace of Sharpton—enabling him to pose as a spokesman for us all—should show black Democrats how little Obama thinks of black people. Sharpton calls the president, governors, and congressmen his friends, just like Jesse Jackson, who pops up like a jack-in-the-box at every racial riot or protest alongside him.
But Al and Jesse aren’t alone in belonging to the “black spokesperson” club. When “an unarmed black teen” is killed under America’s first black president, the media also call upon Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West to be the mouthpieces for black America.
As the Class of 1943 University Professor at Princeton University, West is best known for his book Race Matters. If he were intellectually honest, West would say race matters for keeping him employed, just like so many other black professors working in “Black Studies Departments” at colleges across the country. Dyson is another black professor, an “ordained Baptist minister” turned spokesperson for the black race. Like West, Dyson’s only qualification for the job of speaking for an entire race seems to be his skin color.
As a professor of theology, English, and African American studies at Georgetown University, in 2011 Dyson taught a three-credit course on the black rap/hip-hop star Jay Z: “Sociology of Hip-Hop: Urban Theodicy of Jay-Z.” “His body of work has proved to be powerful, effective and influential. And it’s time to wrestle with it,” Dyson recalled in an interview, as if he were analyzing the work of a great writer like William Shakespeare or James Baldwin. Hip-hop lyrics, including Jay Z’s, are notorious for glorifying gangsta behavior: crime, killing, and treating women like “bitches and hoes.” Yet Dyson found Jay Z’s song-writing talents were critical to the education of Georgetown students, who paid $40,000 in tuition that year.
These are the credentials—race hustler, black preacher, or black studies professor—that catch the eye of liberal news organizations. Democrat-allied journalists further insult blacks when they class Sharpton in the company of true civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Rosa Parks. The news media and Democrat politicians know all too well that Sharpton and the rest of the black leaders are nothing more than liberal con artists. That’s why they promote them, because they know blacks keep following the voice of these black Pied Pipers right to the Democrat ballot box without questioning their motives. The day blacks decide to question why black leaders are getting richer every election cycle while the black race wades deeper into an economic wasteland will be the day blacks own political power. “Still today, the best way to make a black leader mad is to say to him that black Americans are capable of being fully responsible for their own advancement,” wrote Shelby Steele. This is quite a revealing point that black Americans should spend some time thinking about. The livelihood of black leaders like Sharpton and others is based upon the Democrat precept that blacks are irresponsible degenerates, buried under a mountain of ignorance—and forever needing to be rescued by the Democrat Party.