John McWhorter: But Is Jesse Jackson *Interesting*?
[John McWhorter is a lecturer at Columbia University.]
Jesse Jackson has never interested me much. I’m a little late out of the gate in commenting about Jackson’s latest diversion, analogizing LeBron James to a runaway slave in light of Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s sputtering about James’ departure to Miami. I’ve always been a little laggard in dogpiling on Jesse. When I first started writing about race, I quickly noted a certain cognitive dissonance: everybody expected the new cranky black “conservative” to have a Jesse obsession. I never did, and don’t now....
He has star quality. But that’s really it. The black community is not checking in with the man whose most prominent statement about Barack Obama involved testicles.
And yet at least once a year we can count on Jackson getting serious press for some Thing he says somewhere. My favorite example of the media obsession with the man: one reviewer of my essay collection Authentically Black had clearly read only the handful of pages I wrote about Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and trashed the whole book as claiming that the black community’s problem was them. What the essay was actually mostly about was lesser known local black leaders and how the rock stars like Jackson are a distraction from their activities. The reviewer’s red-hot hankering for what I had to say about Jesse Jackson—he must have gone straight to the index to smoke out what I had to say about him—was highly indicative, and sadly typical.
Read entire article at The New Republic
Jesse Jackson has never interested me much. I’m a little late out of the gate in commenting about Jackson’s latest diversion, analogizing LeBron James to a runaway slave in light of Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert’s sputtering about James’ departure to Miami. I’ve always been a little laggard in dogpiling on Jesse. When I first started writing about race, I quickly noted a certain cognitive dissonance: everybody expected the new cranky black “conservative” to have a Jesse obsession. I never did, and don’t now....
He has star quality. But that’s really it. The black community is not checking in with the man whose most prominent statement about Barack Obama involved testicles.
And yet at least once a year we can count on Jackson getting serious press for some Thing he says somewhere. My favorite example of the media obsession with the man: one reviewer of my essay collection Authentically Black had clearly read only the handful of pages I wrote about Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and trashed the whole book as claiming that the black community’s problem was them. What the essay was actually mostly about was lesser known local black leaders and how the rock stars like Jackson are a distraction from their activities. The reviewer’s red-hot hankering for what I had to say about Jesse Jackson—he must have gone straight to the index to smoke out what I had to say about him—was highly indicative, and sadly typical.