Al Sharpton and I got to know each other after 1990, when he sought me out during one of his biennial efforts to exchange his race-theater impresario's cape for the mantle of a Christian civic statesman. "I've been thinking a lot about what you wrote about me," he told me over brunch at a Brooklyn deli one Sunday. "I'm looking for new directions."

I was flattered, as many white journalists who want to "get right" with the black inner city are whenever Sharpton steps forward with their names on his lips and makes a joshing remark about their last story. He's one of the most charming, even lovable, con men on earth, the more so because, not unlike President Clinton, he sincerely does want to "connect" and to transcend himself.

Try though I and others have done to help him, he never succeeds. Eight years ago, his apparent contrition over the Tawana Brawley hoax loosed a flurry of profiles of "the new Al Sharpton," only to give way to his rank demagoguery during a black "boycott" of Korean stores and riots against Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn. Later, after he was stabbed during a demonstration in Brooklyn, he claimed to have rethought his politics, and he campaigned well in New York's 1992 Democratic primary campaign for U.S. Senate. I was among those who profiled him gently (for the New Yorker; the story was titled "A Man of Too Many Parts.")

Next came his histrionic shilling for Louis Farrakhan, whose Nation of Islam endorsed and assisted his 1994 Senate primary campaign against Daniel Patrick Moynihan. I had it out with him about Farrakhan on the Charlie Rose show and, in time, he drew closer to Jesse Jackson, who made him chairman of the Rainbow Coalition's ministers' division. But then he whipped up fury against the white owner of a Harlem store that was soon gutted by a gunman-arsonist from the periphery of Sharpton's followers. Eight people died, including the perpetrator.

Given this depressing record, why do so many of us keep trying to forgive and rehabilitate Al Sharpton? Are we more Christian than he? Or is it simply that he's good copy -- colorful, quotable, even insightful? Sure, but something worse is in play -- a liberal-media racism that prefers his street theater to serious politics and mistakes his 120,000-odd protest voters for New York's entire 2 million-strong black community. Of course, many blacks do like his defiant posture and feel drawn to his stagy reenactments of ancient hurts. But most are of two minds about him, and, I suspect, with wiser, stronger black leadership, he'd be gone.

Too many white liberals ignore such leadership. It is as if we prefer to indulge a Sharpton (there are more than a few around the country) because he offers us racial redemption on the cheap: Ritually, he presses our "racist" guilt buttons, then guides us deftly through simulacra of contrition and redemption, as when he upbraids a white reporter with a hint of real affection. For the guilt-ridden, such little psychodramas become ends in themselves. We'd rather ease our own racial fears than protest that crying wolf about racism leaves blacks more marginal than before.

Now, though, Sharpton has a real opportunity to redeem himself. He and two associates are being sued for defamation by Stephen Pagones, the white man he charged had raped Tawana Brawley. Unfortunately, his refusal to recant the charges that tore New York apart -- and that a grand jury found bogus -- confirms again his inability, or unwillingness, to nourish real reconciliation and progress. He can't lead his followers anywhere but down. He's condemning them to become an exotic appendage to the polity, playing by racially separate rules.

Here is the sort of racial separation he reinforces: In 1989, during the trial of young black and Hispanic men accused of bludgeoning and raping a white woman jogger in Central Park, a Puerto Rican juror slammed his hand on the table during arduous deliberations, glared at some black jurors, and said, "OK, I'll vote to convict Ramon Santana" -- the Puerto Rican defendant -- "if you'll vote to convict Kharey Wise" -- the accused black.

That sounded pretty "un-American" to me, even though, as Sharpton always reminds us, racialized jury deliberations had been only too "American" for much of our history. But that was why we had a civil rights movement, whose successes have distinguished what is "American" from what is so sadly routine in countries that are balkanized on racial and ethnic lines. Shouldn't liberals who claim the civil-rights mantle condemn such thinking? Shouldn't they produce school curricula and movies that highlight Americans of all colors who've persuaded fellow jurors not to sacrifice justice for a diminished sense of themselves as mere racial delegates in a courtroom?

How did Al Sharpton handle this challenge in the jogger case? He took Tawana Brawley to the jogger trial, not to show solidarity with the victim, a woman truly violated as Brawley claimed to have been, but to shake hands with defendants Santana, Wise and others who would soon be convicted of assault and rape. Sharpton likened them to the Scottsboro Boys, black youths falsely accused of raping two white women in 1932 and whose case became an international cause célèbre. He said that he and Brawley had come "to see how the criminal justice system responds differently for a white victim than it does for a black victim."

In fact, New York state had just spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to find the perpetrators of Brawley's mythical ordeal, just as it was doing for the white jogger. And there was Sharpton, like the Puerto Rican juror, trying to color-code justice at the victim's expense, much as he had done by accusing Pagones of raping Brawley.

Enough, Al! This time, even credulous liberals might not let you slip away. It's the New Year, and the millennium draws nigh. Apologize. Renounce the un-American, unchristian politics you've been plying. End the dissimulation, the false makeovers, the deceptive charm and stagy racial reckonings that retard trans-racial justice.

Sharpton won't stop the charades, of course. He can't. But, this time, even the wishful among us may stop indulging him.
SALON | Jan. 5, 1998

Jim Sleeper is the author of "Liberal Racism."

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ILLUSTRATION BY ERIC WHITE