Jesse's Tattered Message

You think that to defend Reverend Jackson of any Black man that is standing up for justice for you is to put yourself in jeopardy with white people because white people don't like that, Jesse's on a mission. He may never make it to the White House, but he will have done the job that God put on his shoulder to do like no other Black man could do.

Louis Farrakhan, radio broadcast March 11

The controversy over Jackson's remarks might have been much easier for many Blacks to accept had the messenger been white. It certainly would have been neat and easy. But it didn't happen that way. It rarely does.

Washington Post reporter Milton Coleman on his reporting that Rev. Jesse L. Jackson called Jews "Hymies," from The Boston Globe, April 15.

JESSE JACKSON'S presidential crusade marches on in tatters, slowly dying because of the hypocrisy of its leader, but continuing because minority and low-income voters see his success as being in their best interests.

Put simply, Jackson's campaign is morally bankrupt, and little he does now can redress the damage caused by his handling of the "Hymie" controversy and the racial demagoguery of campaign supporter Louis Farrakhan.

This moral failure is particularly striking because Jackson has cast his campaign largely in moral terms.

"I want to be the conscience of the Democratic Party," he often says on the stump. Jackson has fashioned himself the logical heir to generations of civil rights activists, including the venerable Martin Luther King Jr. In Harlem, Jackson told cheering crowds that his showing in the New York primary would represent the resurrection 16 years after King's crucifixion.

Jackson's appeal has always been moral--he did not present even a marginally detailed platform until January--so his abysmal record on Black-Jewish relations nullifies whatever good his candidacy has produced.

Jackson's continued ranting about Jewish influence-peddling and his recent Newsweek interview on Black-Jewish relations show that the public uproar over the "Hymie" remarks and Farrakhan's statements has done nothing to change Jackson's myopic stereotypes.

As Jackson "moves from the Harlem Globetrotters to the NBA"--his words--closer scrutiny of the candidate has confirmed the worst fears of a number of Black leaders. "It is very, very frustrating to me as a supporter of Jesse Jackson's campaign to have to read and hear of his insensitivities, ignorance or possibly worse," Newark Mayor Kenneth A. Gibson wrote in a March 8 letter to Nathan Perlmutter, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.

I appreciate your understanding that the utterances of one Black person do not reflect the thinking of all Black people. I emphatically deplore the Jesse Jackson insulting references to the Jewish people.

I'm sure you realize that Black people are able to think for themselves and the great majority of us do not subscribe to negative ethnic, racial, or religious references and speeches. Therefore, the implied threats by Muslim Minister Farrakhan do not represent the thinking of myself or other Blacks who know the differences between righteousness and rhetoric.

Jackson still must be credited with pushing issues too often left out of the political discussion--for example, problems with the primary run-off system in the South, and a greater U.S. foreign policy emphasis on parts of world other than Western Europe, the Middle East, and the USSR. But the runoff system--Jackson's major domestic issue--is far from an open and shut case. Many people argue that the total abolishment of the two-primary system in Southern states would ultimately send more Republicans to high state and national office, rather than more Black Democrats. Jackson--who has hinted that he may trade his support at the Democratic Convention for a commitment on the two-primary clause--is taking an all-or-nothing stand on a complex issue that should be divorced from such rhetoric.

Jackson was also praised for his efforts to bring new voters into the electoral process, but that praise has always been contingent on Jackson's sincerity in promising to campaign whole-heartedly for the eventual Democratic nominee. And given the almost absolute schism Jackson has created between Black and white voters in recent contests, the Democratic grip on the minority vote may be weaker than in past years.

Jackson is no longer a positive force in the nomination race. He argues that liberal whites do not support him for racial reasons, but his charges ring of hypocrisy and petty opportunism. He calls for a "Rainbow Coalition," while sharing campaign platforms with a man who threatened death to a Black "Uncle Tom" reporter.

To paraphrase an oft-used Jackson cliche, you cannot have racial demagoguery in one hand and racial unity in the other.