This week President Bush finally spoke at the NAACP convention and received, according to reports, a polite reception. The delegates especially liked it when he announced his support for extension of the Federal Voting Rights Act.
Did the president go out of politeness or out of political calculation? According to Harry Jackson there is an emerging split in black America, one that puts African Americans in play politically for the first time in forty years.
The split was made public on June 27 before the national media. As a result, writes Jackson, the pastor of New Hope Christian Church in Lanham, Maryland, the occasion
marked a watershed moment for the black religious community in America. The Revs. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Joseph Lowery and about 100 others decided to attack the motives and moral integrity of the nation's most successful black mega-churches.
They made the usual criticism from the left that the mega-churches have abandoned “Jesus' emphasis on social justice to preach a gospel of wealth and self-help.”
No doubt “poverty reduction, education reform, improved health care, judicial fairness and prison after care” are important, Harry Jackson says, but there are plenty of blacks who are also concerned about “black genocide” in abortion and “family disintegration.” And they need a voice for their concerns.
Harry Jackson is concerned about black unity, but he is backing the wrong horse. It is not disastrous but good that blacks are splitting and beginning to emerge from the safety of racial unity.
It’s happened before in America, and it will happen again. When an immigrant group starts to get its feet on the ground it moves away from ethnic solidarity towards the great American way of purpose and self-help. And the great vehicle of this social transformation has been, for two hundred years, the enthusiastic Christian church.
People cannot live on bread alone. As Harry Jackson quoted Senator Barack Obama: People “want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives.”
Welcome to America.
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