Black people, when you make it to the top, do you kick
down the ladder or help other people climb up?
Are we trying to help everyone or just help
me, myself and I? Are we in service to people
or an empire that is harming Black folks,
Indigenous people and the marginalized? Are we
water carriers dousing water on a Big House
engulfed in flames? And when we witness
injustice and exploitation, how large of a bag
would it take for us to shut up and look the
other way?
These are questions we must ask these
days, with turmoil both at home and
devastation in Haiti, Sudan, Congo and Gaza.
On Founders
Day at Spelman College, honorary degree recipient and Princeton
professor Ruha
Benjamin mentioned the popular social media
slogan “trust Black women,” and urged the
students at the HBCU to be trustworthy and not
allow themselves “to be conscripted into
positions of power that maintain the
oppressive status quo.”
“Black faces in high places are not going to save us. Just
look at the Black proponents of Cop City in
Atlanta’s leadership class,” Dr. Benjamin
said. “Black faces in high places are not
going to save us. Just look at the Black
woman’s hand — ambassador at the U.N. [Linda
Thomas-Greenfield] — voting against a
ceasefire in Gaza,” she added.
Days later, Prof. Benjamin was a faculty
observer for pro-Palestine protesters at
Princeton, where students
occupied the graduate school administration
building and formed a Gaza solidarity
encampment to force the university to divest
from Israeli apartheid.
And there’s Dr.
Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, a global and international studies
professor at U.C. Irvine who was one of 50
people arrested by cops who broke up a
peaceful pro-Palestinian campus encampment.
When asked if she was concerned her actions
could threaten her job, Willoughby-Herald
replied, “What job do I have if the students
don’t have a future?”
What would you do: Stand with the students or play it safe
and not mess up that good job?
There was once a time when Black “firsts” were lionized
and worshiped in the Black community. They
still are to some extent. Think of back in the
day when Black people were so excited to see a
Black face on TV, in the Major Leagues or more
recently in the White House. But what is the
point of having Black fashion accessories to
spice up and color up white spaces, when they
do not fundamentally change systems that
oppress us, and they do not bring other Black
people up with them? All around us, we see
policies that are harming us, and there are
Black “leaders” who are advocating for these
policies.
Some of these Black faces in high places
remind me of Fela Kuti’s song “International
Thief Thief (I.T.T.),” in which the artist sings about white
multinational corporations propping up and
paying off a Black man “with low mentality”:
Them get one style wey
them dey use
Them go pick one
African man
A man with low
mentality
Them go give am million
naira breads
To become of high
position here
Him go bribe some
thousand naira bread
To become one useless
chief
With that in mind, consider that Eric
Adams — the Black mayor of New York City who
is still recovering from his appearance on “The
Breakfast Club” — used the first
Latino NYPD commissioner and sicced the
police on pro-Palestine college protesters
at Columbia University. This was done at the
behest of Columbia’s first president of Arab
descent.
Jeh
Johnson, former Homeland Security head under
Obama, sits on the board of Columbia
University and Lockheed Martin, a military
contractor and major arms supplier to
Israel.
Adams wants to use Israeli
drone technology for the NYPD and praised Israeli
police for how they “strategically and
successfully deal with a large crowd” when he
visited the country. The NYPD also has an office
in Tel Aviv and works with Israeli law
enforcement on counterterrorism. The mayor,
described by his mentor Charles
Barron as “profoundly disappointing,”
called the Columbia students fighting for
college divestment from Israel “professional
agitators.”
Kaz Daughtry, a Black NYPD deputy
commissioner, went on Newsmax to claim the
Columbia students are “terrorists” and
“outside agitators” who are being radicalized.
Daughtry even claimed the cops found a book
on terrorism — actually a history textbook from
a well-known British scholar — on campus.
Most of all, as the Washington Post
reported that a group
of billionaires — including business leaders, hedge
fund managers, financiers and real estate
developers — formed a WhatsApp chat group and
had a Zoom call with Mayor Adams to convince
him to unleash the police on the Columbia
protesters, even offering to use private
investigators to assist the police in their
efforts. And of course, they offered him
money.
Mayor Adams, who would criminalize
students for expressing themselves, faces a
federal investigation into campaign
finance corruption involving Turkey and is the subject
of a sexual
assault allegation.
Back to that Black U.N. ambassador that
Ruha Benjamin mentioned at Spelman. U.S.
Ambassador to the United Nations Linda
Thomas-Greenfield had her invitation to speak at Xavier
University and the University of Vermont
rescinded because of Biden’s support for
Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza. Black U.N.
officials such as Thomas-Greenfield seem to
raise their hands extra high in the air to
support racist and colonial policies that
serve U.S. imperialism at the expense of
darker-hued people of the Global
South.
This came only days before Biden was
scheduled to give the commencement address at
Morehouse College, the alma mater of Martin
Luther King, on May 19 — Malcolm X’s birthday,
no less. Like his U.N. ambassador and for the
same reasons, Biden faced
protests from Morehouse
students, alumni and faculty who believe he
should not receive an honorary degree.
While we know that old-thinking white
dudes from the 1950s feel a certain way about
bombing
brown women and children, what is the Black woman’s excuse? At
what point does Linda Thomas-Greenfield simply
quit her job, like other Biden
administration officials — including those of Palestinian and Jewish
descent — already have over the Gaza
genocide their government is
funding?
Does Professor Benjamin have a point?
Look at Clarence Thomas, a Supreme Court
justice who cares more about receiving
expensive gifts from wealthy donors and
protecting his insurrectionist wife than
helping his community. Meanwhile, Tim Scott,
who said America isn’t racist and dropped the
ball on police
reform legislation on purpose, is out here skinning
and grinning at white Christian nationalist
commencement ceremonies as he auditions to be
Trump’s running mate.
Perhaps we can do better. We can and should demand and
cultivate Black leadership guided by ethics,
morals and social responsibility. Those Black
faces in high places who promise to bring
change from the inside — once they get the
promotion, just not today because now is an
inconvenient time — may never deliver. So we
must take the reins, save ourselves and become
the leaders we need.
Toni
Morrison said it best: “I tell my students,
‘When you get these jobs that you have been so
brilliantly trained for, just remember that
your real job is that if you are free, you
need to free somebody else. If you have some
power, then your job is to empower somebody
else.”
This
commentary is also posted on TheGrio.com.
