Well, I dont have it in front of me, but I'm pretty sure that criticizing an entire group of people based on the actions of a few people in that group IS the textbook definition of bigotry.
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A New Mission for the NAACP
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Jealous was among those students who occupied university property in 1992 in opposition to a proposal to turn the Audubon Ballroom (where Malcolm X was assassinated) into a biomedical facility. After being kicked out, Jealous worked in Mississippi as a community organizer for the NAACP, fighting a state plan to close two historically black colleges. He also worked as a journalist, investigating corruption at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman for the black-owned Jackson Advocate.
He forgot about becoming a lawyer—litigating cases took a lot of time, sometimes decades. But, says Jealous, "in a two-year period of being a journalist in Mississippi, I saved an inmate's life, got a black farmer exonerated and had a couple of other smaller successes … That was a pace I could work with."
He returned to Columbia with focus and a renewed sense of mission; he also won a Rhodes scholarship ("one of the few achievements you could have as a young black man that would force the most privileged white man to second-guess himself"). After graduating from Columbia and earning his master's degree at Oxford, Jealous worked for the National Newspaper Publishers Association and Amnesty International before being named president of the California-based Rosenberg Foundation, which focuses largely on civil-rights work. That's where he was when the NAACP came calling.
He hopes to make the association matter in a way that it has not for a long time: as an irresistible voice for progressive change. "Our first victory in this country was ending lynch-mob justice," he points out. "We never succeeded in passing the [anti-lynching] law; we simply shamed the country into consensus." He hopes the NAACP can be successful in building a new national consensus on issues ranging from racial profiling to education reform to reversing "the mass incarceration of black people in this country." His more visible, more aggressive NAACP will spawn a new mass movement, mobilizing support for wider health-care access and quality jobs. The new NAACP also will monitor the president and "hold him accountable to … his own ambitions." Those are big dreams for an organization that many have long thought of as irrelevant. But then, as President Obama himself has shown, audacity—coupled with focus and passion—can lead to interesting things.
© 2009
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