( 2112 )

Ok, it sucks to have to write what I’m about to write and to be to completely honest, I suck for having decided to write it. But there are things that need to be said in no uncertain terms and things that simply cannot be societally tolerated under any circumstances and you and I are gonna have a little chat about at least a couple and maybe even as many as three of those things here today. You see for over a month Princeton Professor and noted homeless guy in a Fredrick Douglass costume impersonator Cornell West has been engaged in something, rather reprehensible, I am no longer willing to ignore.

You could probably properly date Professor West’s current run of saying stuff that’s unacceptable to an Ed Show appearance earlier this summer during which he proposed that President Obama should be more like Martin Luther King Jr. and focus more on “bringing the love” but I’m not going to.  Like a lot of the Gen X and younger left, my tolerance level for the boomer left’s compulsive need to over-reference the 60’s is substantial. It’s something they do and aren’t likely to stop doing so there’s usually no upside to hassling about it.  I’m also not going to date the point at which Professor West crossed a line (there’s a cultural obligation to smack him back from and down for) to a recent State of the Black Union, during which he proclaimed: “Obama Is NOT The Fulfillment Of Martin Luther King’s Dream!”

See, as you may have already guessed what we’re here to discuss is how Professor West has been “Tomming” and though a statement in that context could be considered “Crabbing” because of the intended audience it couldn’t be “Tomming” since that’s a whole other thing. Now for those who came in late, I should probably back up and define those terms. Crabbing references observation that crabs in a cooking pot will cling to one another rather than allow one of their number to escape. In the African American community it’s been used to describe behavior determined to constitute “keeping another brother down” … but for me, to count as crabbing, those acts have to be part of an internecine struggle and include attacks aimed at delegitimizing a target in terms of his or her blackness.  To clarify here’s a for instance … Sharpe James referring to Cory Booker as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” or Bobby Rush telling an audience of black voters that “… he isn’t one of us and we don’t have time to teach him to be one of us” while running against Barack Obama, that was them crabbing.

“Tomming” is a troubling term on a couple of levels, starting with how it’s used in two ways:

1. Uncle Tom: A black man who will do anything to stay in good standing with “the white man” including betray his own people.
2. Uncle Tom: Term used by black people to try to convince other black people that working, education, living well, and setting a good example for their children is selling out.

Because that second definition is such horseshit it’s more like unicorn shit and the circumstances necessary for an occurrence of that first one so rare, that the term is functionally off limits at any altitude above street. Basically everyone who would use it describe someone Tomming as in the first, has been called a Tom by some jackass attempting to describing them as one in the second. So let’s just leave two in the cultural trash heap where it belongs and move on to what would be necessary in terms of action and intent, to actually-accurately charge an individual with Tomming as in that first definition.

“I think one of the best things to come out of Obama’s election is the retirement of The Office of HNIC (intermittently held by Frederick Douglass, Marcus Garvey, and Booker T. Washington among others)”

Well first off, as with crabbing that individual’s acts (attacks) would need to involve an attempt to delegitimize his or her target in terms of his or her blackness. Second, unlike crabbing, that individual would need to be making the attack in question on another African American primarily for the consumption of White America and further, as a part of some effort to attain or maintain an exalted status or position of some kind in the eyes of White America (the media for example). Third, such an attack would also need to come from an African American of the left (writ large) and be aimed at an African American also on the left. Black Republicans essentially forfeit their ability to question “blackness” when they self-identify as Republicans and as “authentic blackness” is only a commodity of value to white’s on the left, launching such attacks from left to right would be as pointless as it would be ineffective (think we can agree that an attack that can do no harm, isn’t an attack).

It’s depressing to, but I already think what Professor West has been up to of late meets that standard, and can be called Tomming. So instead of spending the rest of today’s word count expressing my regret, disgust and anger over having come to that conclusion; I’m gonna try and recount-contextualize West’s acts and actions then just ask what you think.

Now strange as it may sound, the first item on that recount-contextualize list is not something that Professor West said or wrote himself.  It’s an unnerved attitude that started to bubble up on the Professional Left that was maybe best personified by Joan Walsh, who over a series columns, expressed first her resentment of lefty persons of color who wrote in droves to correct her whenever she claimed to represent President Obama’s “base” and then her dismay that Obama was not the sort of “black leader” liberals of her sort, extraction and generation had come to expect. But that kind of stuff wasn’t just coming from Walsh, there was a notable amount of white privilege loss angst seeping out of the Professional Liberal-Left. And it was pissing people off. More importantly, by that I don’t mean that it was pissing “Jesse Jackson” off, I mean that it was pissing “people” off and could not therefore be fixed (read: swept under the nearest whatever) by doing a joint interview with a “designated black spokesperson” and being declared not a racist.  And both the expressed angst and the less than happy reactions to it were expressions of how the racial politics by proxy arrangement-system on the left has been steadily disintegrating over the last few years.  Well technically, it was steadily disintegrating then Barack Obama’s election went and blew large parts of what remained of it up. White liberal politicians (like Alex Sink) are no longer able to court black voters exclusively by proxy and still bank on getting their vote.

That arrangement’s also breaking down in the media (though not as quickly). The days when ABC News could invite someone like Tavis Smiley on during its election night coverage explicitly to provide only “black folk” color commentary are mostly over and the days when say Maureen Dowd could type out a racial slip up and move on by trotting out hiding behind  her “black friends” have mostly come to an end. Which might sound airy, but on a practical level the development’s put a lot of people who were in the business of being “designated black spokespersons” out of work, drained power from those in the racial proxy political racket and has threatened the job security (influence) of the white professional left.  So the angst makes sense, there are after all only so many elected-appointed or pundit slots to go around. What I’m pointing out here is that we’d reached a point where the people from both sides of that old order transaction (from the aforementioned professional lefties, political candidates and designated black men to the congressional black caucus) were getting increasingly and vocally antsy about the evolving new order of things. I suppose it was only a matter of time before one of them crossed the line in an attempt to defend their once secure position in the order of things. And that, well, brings us back to Cornell West.

“President Obama has a “fear of free black men,” says the celebrity professor from Princeton by way of Harvard, explaining why the president feels “at home” among people who are not black. This remark made me wonder: Which of these men do you think, is actually free, and which afraid of who he truly is?”

You’re reading this, so you already know that back in April Professor West showed up on an ill-conceived MSNBC documentary (The Black Agenda hosted by Ed Shultz) and promptly referred President Obama as a “Black Mascot” of Wall Street oligarchs and The Reverend Al Sharpton as a “mascot” of the Obama administration.  He followed that up by giving an interview to Death of the Liberal class author Chris Hedges during which he described President Obama as having “a certain fear of free black men.… It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening” referred to Obama as having “a certain rootlessness, a deracination” and being “most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want” … neither of which you’d have to go out on a limb to describe as attacks aimed at delegitimizing his target’s blackness. West was in no uncertain terms asserting a “self-anointed power to confirm or withdraw Obama’s standing as an authentic black man.”

But, why? What was Professor West up to? And why am I just now asking you to ask yourself whether or not whatever it counted as Tomming? Well, initial “assessments” portrayed West as having been engaged in a petulant personal pissing match with President Obama over some half imagined slights.  Others threw rocks at his academic intellectual credentials. Hedges of course rose to the defense of “my friend Cornel West” even going so far as to call him “a prophet” and all those criticizing West “liberal sell-outs.”

Which was all fairly funny (though infuriating) until West didn’t stop. He headed back to TV at every opportunity to launch his attack again and again. And his audience no longer seemed to be the State of the Black Union crowd but rather bookers at CNN, MSNBC, ABC News and even Democracy Now. You couldn’t help but think on how he kept putting himself forward as the authentic black voice Obama wasn’t—in his telling (as he had from the beginning by informing Hedges that “Tavis [Smiley] and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested…”) Now Professor West and Smiley (Sancho Panza) have embarked on a “Poverty Tour” and it’s all kicking back up.

The Tour’s stop in Detroit (where Louis Farrakhan was their opening act) was met with protests and wildly panned by radio host Steve Harvey, who referred to West and Smiley as “Toms” … a charge that prompted Adam Serwer to write “Yo, whether you agree with West and Smiley or not, Tomming is most definitely NOT what they’re doing” and then “Being black and critical of Obama doesn’t make you a Tom, anymore than supporting Obama makes you a sellout” which is how you wound up here. Because even though I disagreed with Harvey (thinking he was using Tom in that second way) I simply couldn’t think of a better way to describe what Brother West has been on about than Tomming as in the first.

“God help us if Cornel West and Tavis Smiley getting arrested is our last chance at a democratic awakening.”

So now I’m going to ask you. Does my definition of Tomming seem fair? Do the addendums to it I laid out? If your answer’s “no” to either question … leave me an angry comment and cop a walk. If your answer’s “yes” on the other hand, here are a few additional questions: Did West make a conscious attempt to racially delegitimize President Obama and even his black supporters? Is he a person of the left making said charges against others on the left? Has the intended audience of West’s rhetorical broadsides been a) White America or b) Black America? And finally did the attack constitute a betrayal of other African Americans?  Yes, I know that last one’s a doozy because “betrayal” is such huge thing to tag someone with.  But that’s why the racial politics by proxy stuff is up above. Because that last answer, that doesn’t just hinge on West’s motive. If you think he engaged in all of the above but can say the only one hurt by it was President Obama as an individual, you’d have to conclude that West wasn’t Tomming. On the other hand, if you agree that West has been acting out some script posing him as the kind of “black leader” liberals of Walsh and Hedges’ sort, extraction and generation had come to expect, and further that in doing so was engaged in a conscious attempt to restore the “designated black man” status he enjoyed while African American politics was stuck in a patronage based by proxy state, then he’s been Tomming.

It’s that simple and yet not simple at all. Even if it is accurate here, it is an ugly label to hurl at a guy. But if you honestly think the cap fits, you just have to make sure he wears it. Because in the long run, the only thing worse than calling Professor West one, is him being one.

Tags: adam serwer, Al Sharpton, Chris Hedges, Cornell West, Crabbing, Ed Shultz, President Obama, Professional Liberal, tavis smiley, Tomming