An unknown to white and many black Americans, Jack and Jill has provided a safe meeting place for black upper class kids since the 1950s.
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If you’re going to invest time and energy in a quest for Black Identity, why not define Black Identity in a positive, constructive fashion? My prayer is that all black leaders strive to be truthful in their words. Somewhere in America tonight, there is a black law professor. He is popular with his students. Only when he receives his college alumni bulletin in the mail does he think back to what might have been. To return to the right side of history, African-American law professors might go back to black tradition, to the wisdom of our founding father, Dean John Mercer Langston. If conservatives had supported civil rights in the 1960s, African-Americans would be a conservative people today. Imagine how you must feel if you are (a) not of the south, (b) married to a white spouse, and (c) a passionate intellectual and you are hired by the faculty to bring in a "black voice." Talk about an identity crisis! As I started watching Black Entertainment Television, I began to see the truth; that keeping it real meant sex, violence, and profanity, that dealing drugs had become the American Dream, and that the sound of a shotgun being cocked had become music on the street. According to the critical race theorists, "True blacks" do not oppose affirmative action or vote Republican. They blame the man. Before John Hope Franklin and W.E.B. DuBois, there was George Washington Henderson at the University of Vermont. Years of turning inward guaranteed that Black America would be more taciturn than forthright, more reticent than revealing. If Black Americans appreciated the show put on by Critical Race Theorists, there would be boycotts at black colleges and editorials in Black Enterprise magazine. Rather than focus on being the good black, blacks should focus on finding the right white. Radical thinkers focus on Black identity because they wish to exert power over the contour of acceptable blackness. If you can establish a monopoly on what it means to be black, then you can lock in generations of blame the Man sheep. When strangers meet at the Black Table, there is always a tentative sizing up of the other person for their loyalty to the race. The clearest insights into the black condition might be found in the lost art of “table talk.” I've always believed that African-American lawyers have an obligation to help others deciding whether to enter the profession. How many black historians, writers, and philosophers have we lost to the legal grind? On December 12, 1870, Joseph Hayne Rainey took an oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. When black law professors shy away from the hard, traditional work of scholarship, they are not seen as serious contenders in the academy. Racism exists, but relationships matter even more. If African-Americans can support Samuel Alito, that unexpected relationship may reap unimaginable dividends over the years. |
 
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