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Agent of moral courage: Jesse Jackson Jr.

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Jul 13, 2008

When your name’s “junior,” the pressure’s on to respect your daddy. All the more so when your daddy’s a national figure in the fight for social justice.

But when your father betrays his stated values, what are you supposed to do? If you have moral courage, you buck the blood ties and call papa on his hypocrisy.

That’s exactly what Jesse Jackson Jr. did after the elder Jackson got busted sneering on Fox News that he’d like to “cut [the] nuts off” of Senator Barack Obama.

Immediately after the news broke, Jesse Jr. spoke out against his father’s crude, lewd remarks:

“I’m deeply outraged and disappointed in Reverend Jackson’s reckless statements about Senator Barack Obama. His divisive and demeaning comments about the presumptive Democratic nominee — and I believe the next president of the United States — contradict his inspiring and courageous career.

Instead of tearing others down, Barack Obama wants to build the country up and bring people together so that we can move forward, together, as one nation. The remarks like those uttered on Fox by Reverend Jackson do not advance the campaign’s cause of building a more perfect Union.

Reverend Jackson is my dad and I’ll always love him. He should know how hard I’ve worked for the last year and a half as a national co-chair of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. So, I thoroughly reject and repudiate his ugly rhetoric. He should keep hope alive and any personal attacks and insults to himself.”

Jesse Jr. missed only one beat: to remind his father that the castration of African-American men has a sordid history alongside lynching. Other than that, way to go, kid.

“But wait!” you might be tempted to blurt. “Jesse Jr. is co-chair of Obama’s presidential campaign. Of course he’s going to condemn any attack on his candidate. That takes no moral courage whatsoever.”

Not so fast. Jesse Jr. stood up to more than family fealty. He also confronted the groupthink fostered by identity politics. Here’s what I mean, courtesy of The Huffington Post’s comments section:

“As an A.A. [African-American], you should be more loyal to those who have paved the way for you. Jesse Jackson, with all his faults, is one of those people. He has been a voice for people of color and women and unions as well as an instrument of peace in the world. You don’t really know what kind of America you would live in without Jesse Jackson because he’s always been there.

You need to stop dissing your people because they make mistakes or show themselves to be imperfect. Jesse Jackson had a role in the black community and in the world, but his role has changed and I think that is what he is having difficulty with. You can certainly understand that.”

Welcome to the laziness of identity politics. It’s the kind of tribalism that lets boneheaded thoughts go unchallenged if they come from “your people.” So much for Martin Luther King’s dream of judging each other by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin.

Jesse Jackson Jr. defies such laziness. As a son of privilege, he doesn’t have to. He chooses to. Raising a man like that is one of the things his daddy did right.