Beyond blaming whitey

Tavis Smiley's "The Covenant With Black America" has become a No. 1 bestseller because it offers black people a tough and inspiring vision.

By Debra Dickerson

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April 28, 2006 | If it's Thursday, there must be a new book out promising black folks 10 Easy Steps to Ending Racism and Perfecting Your Collard Greens. Step No. 1: Buy this book. Step No. 2: Pay me a huge speaker's fee to come talk about this book. Step No. 3: Contract to sell a minimum of 100 copies of my book at said event. How else will we let "The Man" know we're serious? And, oh yeah, help a brother out: Tell Channel 6 that you'll accuse them of racism if they don't cover my talk. And make sure they know that the left is my good side.

You can understand why our eyes might get to rolling whenever somebody draped in kente cloth pops his trunk to reveal Charmin boxes full of his self-published, typo-ridden musings on white folks. (Remember the nonsense-spouting, self-"educated" inmate played by Damon Wayans on "In Living Color"? Imagine he wrote a book.) That the offering, as with Tavis Smiley's surprise blockbuster "The Covenant With Black America," is professionally published and attached to well-known black names does little to assuage skeptical minds: Nobody knows better than blacks how much money is to be made and how much power to be gained by claiming to speak for us, by claiming to channel our demands and to express our pain. The healthy livings that untalented and/or unscrupulous black carpetbaggers make (instead of the hardscrabble lives of the grass-roots activists who actually do the community's heavy lifting) are too often the "protection" money America pays to keep the racial peace.

In this context, as word of "The Covenant" has percolated through the community, I imagined the worst. Even my own saintly mother rolled her eyes when I told her about the book, and passed on reading it -- though she never says no to a book. Too bad, because, surprise, surprise, "The Covenant" is news black people can use.

Just because we get squinty-eyed when presented with the latest "how to fix black America" book doesn't mean we don't realize we have devastating problems. It's just that we get so easily sidetracked by racist provocation from our "leaders." What's different about "The Covenant," then, is not its insight or its fresh approach, but the discipline and organizational synergy it offers and the distracting "hate whitey" whining that it doesn't. Referencing neither whites, Republicans nor Democrats, "The Covenant" is a blessed model of focus and restraint for a people fed far too often on the thin gruel of mere grievance.

"The Covenant" begins where most intracommunal discussion of our problems ends: Until the rapture comes and racism vanishes, what can we do to keep Raheem in school and Jaquita out of the maternity ward? How can we fight the guardians of the status quo and win, however much they might continue to hate us? The Covenants, organized as annotated essays written by experts in each field, run the usual gamut -- from affordable housing to community policing to quality education. But there's a difference between "Covenant" and even editor Tavis Smiley's own forgettable previous anthology, "How to Make Black America Better" -- and that's this book's attitude and approach. After defining the problems (with varying degrees of readability and specificity), the book offers practical (if oversimplified) methods of attack. For instance, David M. Satcher, the interim president of the Morehouse School of Medicine, former surgeon general of the United States and assistant secretary for health, tackles the troubled state of black health. Along with identifying how racism and classism create the conditions for our worsened health, he focuses relentlessly, if unemotionally, on blacks' complicity in their own stratospheric blood pressures and super-size rumps. He writes, "While access to and quality of healthcare are paramount to eliminating health disparities, their roles are not as significant as environment and lifestyle. According to a major study, the environment accounts for 20-30 percent of morbidity and mortality; genetics for 15-20 percent, and lifestyle for 40-50 percent. Lifestyle is a major consideration in the elimination of disparities in health."

"Take responsibility to improve your diet; eat at least one additional fruit or vegetable daily. Walk one mile every day," he prescribes. I blinked my eyeballs dry, shocked to hear blacks taken so casually to the woodshed. Thank God somebody blacks can't dismiss is making us face the fact that it isn't David Duke frying all those pork chops. Clearly, with the clamor for "The Covenant" on black Main Street, we can no longer decry medical racism without simultaneously facing up to the intracommunal crime that prevents us from enjoying our green spaces, and forces us to tether our children to the TV for their own safety. We don't need the end of racism to make it safe for mothers to sun their children.

Similarly, James Bell, executive director of the W. Haywood Burns Institute and a founder of the National Conference of Black Lawyers, in analyzing what he memorably calls the CPS, or "cradle-to-prison" superhighway, connects overhauling that system with requiring our children to behave, do well in school and be respectful with police so as not to escalate a tense situation (something young blacks will not have learned from Rep. Cynthia McKinney). The point is not whether "The Covenant's" advice can be directly implemented; in most cases it can't, just as a sewing pattern must be tailored to fit the proper size among the several provided. The point is to give communities a basic blueprint they can adapt to their particular circumstances and organize around. Equally important, it provides a way for communities to plug into the black American body politic at large and leverage the entire community's resources -- mostly via the Internet.

Indeed, "The Covenant" has caught fire among blacks because it treats us like warriors, like activists, like folks with a plan and all the fire in the belly we could ever need and not like downtrodden victims with nothing for fuel but gospel songs and bitterness. It's about us, not about the evil of whites and the rich. It speaks to a maturation of blacks' political imagination and to their understanding of themselves, at long last, as valuable citizens whose talents are going to waste, and not just "the people who are oppressed by white people." Could it be that black America is finally all grown up?

Next page: "We haven't been on Oprah!" says Smiley. "Black people did this"