House Slaves
and Sacred Cows

By Harry Amana
SeeingBlack.com Media Critic

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Here we go again with the black community's sacred cows.

Entertainer-activist-humanitarian Harry Belafonte's recent remarks comparing Secretary of State Colin Powell to a plantation slave have ignited a firestorm of national criticism directed at the famed singer. And his more recent follow-up remarks to the national press last week that added Bush adviser Condoleezza Rice to the plantation residency haven't helped. Everyone, it seems has come down hard on the brother. Even the more liberal and radical spokespersons seem reluctant to support him.

Early this week, for example, the sometimes-controversial University of Maryland political scientist Ron Walters, while not blasting Belafonte, seemed to disapprove of his remarks. "The question is, should he have said it and should he have said it in the way he did?" The Associate Press quotes Walters.

And Jesse Jackson, who has experienced his own share of harsh criticism for untoward racial remarks he made in the '80s about the Jewish community, did a little spin doctoring on the issue. "Harry was not attacking a person. He was attacking the side of history that person is on," Jackson is quoted as saying earlier this week. "[Bush] would not permit Powell to go to the UN conference on racism in South Africa; he has sought to stock the courts with anti-civil rights judges; he is anti-affirmative action; he has taken us from budget surplus to budget deficit. We are simply on different teams."

For those who still don't know what this is all about (who must have pulled a communication Rip Van Winkle for the past two weeks) here's the skinny: Speaking Oct. 8 in the 12th minute of an 18-minute interview with talk-radio host Ted Leitner in San Diego, Belafonte was asked what he thought about Bush's foreign policy and specifically about Powell's performance with the Bush administration. He responded, in part, by drawing an 84-word analogy to slavery and the plantation. During slavery, Belafonte said, "You got the privilege of living in the house if you served the master… Colin Powell's committed to come into the house of the master. When Colin Powell dares to suggest something other than what the master wants to hear, he will be turned back out to pasture." [You can hear the full interview on the Internet at: http://www.760kfmb.com]

Here we go again, I say, because we've been here before. Our society is extremely sensitive about the "s" word. When it's uttered or alluded to, we react with myriad emotions that might include guilt, anger, vengeance, pain, outrage, or any combination thereof. The late sports commentator Jimmy the Greek lost his job on network television years ago, you may remember, when he commented on the athletic prowess of black athletes, attributing their success to a slavery legacy that helped them develop superior musculature in plantation fields.

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, the ultimate house slave, was even able to use it effectively to get senators to back off him when he accused the nomination hearings of being a "high-tech lynching."

Years later, when (Uncle) Thomas was depicted on the cover of black-oriented Emerge magazine with a bandana on his head (like a field slave) editor George Curry was criticized by many blacks, not because they necessarily disagreed with his caricature of the judge, but because he had criticized a black sacred cow, publicly.

Curry acknowledged as much last week on the Tavis Smiley show on National Public Radio. But, "listen," he concluded, "it's good—look, if African-Americans don't critique African-American leaders, who should?"

Curry also expressed a lot of what I feel about all of this when he said that he applauded Belafonte's right (courage, I would say) to express himself, but that he would be more apt to agree with the slave characterization if it were said about Condoleezza Rice. Or Clarence Thomas.

But there's this unwritten law that says black people take so much criticism from white society that we shouldn't speak negatively of each other in public, especially when we are the first to hold some special position. Which is how we ended up with Thomas, the stoic hand-puppet of Justice Antonin Scalia.

But Belafonte, whose remarks have heightened the public debate over Bush's Middle-East policy, was wrong when he told a reporter that Rice and Powell should "show some moral backbone, show some courage, show some commitment to principles that are far higher than those being espoused by their boss." Powell is the consummate team player. (You don't get to be a general if you're not.) And Rice is the wunderkind who seems to have come from the womb believing in the right of nationalistic power and imperialistic might. There is little hope for him and none for her at all. They will sink or swim with Bush.

What was the remark that Malcolm X attributed to the house slave when he heard the plantation master sneeze? "We got a cold, don't we, massa'?" Powell and Rice got a real bad cold.

This column was originally published by the Chapel Hill News.

-- November 16, 2002

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