"We need to reframe the struggle"

Tiffany and Black Feminism.org says that while most black folk agree with Bill Cosby's most recent comments, but don't know how to address the problems he raises.

[T]he solution is not to lob classist missives at poor blacks. The solution is not to blast poor blacks for “betraying the Civil Rights Movement” — a movement that was very much rooted in, and beneficial for black bourgeois interests.

Instead, we need to actively reframe the Civil Rights struggle to include economic issues. We need to actively work with and on behalf of poor blacks to bring change.

Tiffany's argument is consistent with the entire history and philosophy of the black feminist movement, which stretches back the the mid-19th century efforts of Maria Stewart and Sojourner Truth, spawned the black women's club movement, and continues today through such organizations as the National Council of Negro Women, Alpha Kappa Alpha, and Delta Sigma Theta. There are people in these and other similar organizations who have been trying to do exactly what Tiffany is advocating over the last century and a half or more.

In the 60s and 70s, a lot of us thought that we had to build new, alternative institutions to accomplish many of these tasks, but outside of the growth in the numbers of African American elected officials and the establishment of African American studies as a discipline, most of what we tried to do either didn't last or had to be absorbed in more established institutions. In the '80s and '90s, more of us returned to our traditional organizations, or tried to use our new access to the mainstream to help lift others as we climbed, with mixed results.

Today, we have black CEOs leading Fortune 100 companies, or creating their own firms,black women who lead major philanthropic efforts such as Stephanie Bell-Rose, Esther Silver-Parker and Gabriella Morris.

I know enough about each of the people referred to in the last paragraph to know that has dedicated much of his or her life and resources to the kind of racial uplift that Tiffany is talking about. I know too, that they can't do what they do and social work tha hood at the same time. (Nor, for that matter, can they always be available to their younger sister and brethren on the corporate and academic plantations.)

I also know that they need folks to be prepared to walk through the doors they are trying to wedge open, and Cosby's valid frustration is not only that too few of us are ready -- too many of us have been so seduced by materialistic, fools-gold fantasy of American pop culture that we disregard and disrepect the people who are trying to stand in the gap. Tiffany is right -- we need to redouble our efforts to promote financial literacy and independence. But we also have to engage the some of the selfish and self-defeating attitudes that, as sociologist Julia Hare so succinctly put it on one of Tavis Smiley's summits earlier this year, leaves us with "too many black men looking for justice and too many black women looking for Jesus."