Disclaimer: For all those ready to aim missles toward Lake Arrowhead, California (where I am right now, trying to finish the book that won’t die), I support the NAACP that was established in 1909, when it was actually about the ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED PEOPLE. Colored people–which was synonymous with actual BLACK people. I supported it, even when I found out that the very organization my father was a member of until the day he died at 86, actively practiced coloracism during the Civil Rights Movement by putting the light-skinned black women up in the front office and kept the “jigaboos” in the back. After all, dark people are scaaweeee. Despite those inequalities in an organization dedicated to equality, I have respect for what they had accomplished until around the 1990’s. I pick that year for no particular reason, except that it’s when I started to smell the rotten fish.

You damn right something is fishy! The organization has become the bastard triplet of greed, opportunism, and selective outrage. Outrage of the week: No black people on the CNN news line up. Oh…THE HORROR! My Lord. Generations of fighting to get our mugs on TEE VEE down the drain!

Pfffft!

I got an email from the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) updating me on the OUTRAGEOUS slurry of white people hiring at CNN, and, sensing an opportunity to mug for the cameras, the NAACP joined in the pile on:

It has been 17 days since I sent network news executives an open letter about the deplorable lack of diversity in their prime-time schedules. Now, I am floored that CNN missed another opportunity to fill a void created at 8 p.m. The NAACP took notice too and blasted the network for a lack of black talent on the desk after former New York governor Eliot Spitzer’s departure this week. Former CNBC anchor Erin Burnett will join the prime-time lineup.

Um…wow. What an outrage. No black people on the news. Wait. There’s LOTS of black people in the news, just on the other side of the camera. And BINGO! That’s the problem.

–The black out-of-wedlock rate has skyrocketed to an embarrassing-as-hell 73%, and I’ve seen no national campaign to address this issue, that’s been rotting away at the fiber of the black family. Where are the billboards? Where are the organized picket signs in the hood demanding black men and women actually raise their kids with purpose? Where are the email campaigns, drives to get bloggers behind this issue? I mean, if I’m missing something, let me know. I went to the official website and looked under their Advocacy and Issues page and saw nothing about the massive, deleterious effects of children being raised fatherless. This is the highest negative statistic attributed to black people, and it’s essentially ‘nignored’ on the site.

–Where are they on the issue of the constant barrage of degradation of black women in rap videos played ad nauseum on BET (uh…that’s Black Entertainment Television). Instead, they give lifetime achievement awards to Jay-Z, a former drug dealer and pimp, who shot his own brother at 12-years-old because he thought he stole something from him. By giving Mr. Z the NAACP stamp of approval, they essentially co-signed all the behaviors Jay-Z acted out upon, and little black boys all over the U.S. will strive to be drug dealers/pimps/rappers because the most preeminent organization for black people gave him their stamp of approval.

–Maybe my Google is broken, but I combed the web and saw not one, single, solitary press release condemning Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa for calling black women the ugliest of uglies, while saying black men were the hottest of hot.

Anyone seeing a common thread here? I bet you didn’t know I was an expert in reading between the lines, and the NAACP is essentially saying to black women, “Bitch, sit-cho ass down.”

I posted on my Facebook page about the NAACP’s convenient mugging for the cameras while Negro Rome burns. Here are some of the responses:

The issues you rattled off affect black women disproportionately, and as a result they are not a (borrowing a phrase from the fine quality programming at VH1) motha-effin factor. Anything REAL in our community is never addressed, in fact they spend more time enabling and jockeying for camera time and issuing statements then anything else these days. Smh..

…and another…

Because they probably want a BM up there hosting. NAACP is irrelevant when it comes to BW issues. They can all go sit on their thumbs and spin.

…and another…

It is my belief that, in addition to sexism, there is a belief that to confront the issues you raise is to “air the communities dirty laundry” and bring shame upon it. I guess if they refuse to see it the problem doesn’t exist and nobody outside the community will know about it. Reminds my of when my son was a toddler and believed if he couldn’t see you than you couldn’t see him. Question is can they be reformed?

…and another…

Gerda Lerner said it best, and this is something that the NAACP and black men don’t seem to get.
“To rid ourselves of all of those other “isms”–racism, classism, ageism, etc.–it is sexism that must first be eradicated”.

I’ve yet to see the NAACP focus exclusively on the subjugation of black women. When it comes to a group that has been subordinated, black women have suffered the most, yet have gotten the least amount of attention from the NAACP and for that matter, black men have not taken any bold steps to focus on black women issues as a collective. But they are quick to want black women to get behind causes for them, and of course by default when we support and push issues that benefit the black race, that means black women benefit too.
But in this patriarchal religious based society, women are subjugated now more than ever. There is a concentrated negative campaign going on in the media against black women with all these negative billboards and pushes to control women’s choices on her body (womb) to everything else, and not one prominent black man have steppedforward to address it. If anything they’ve all jumped on the band wagon to throw the black woman under the bus.

So, NAACP, where do you stand on the plight of BLACK WOMEN in this country? Are the only black issues worth fighting the ones with black men front and center?