Given the NAACP's Recent History, Bush's Snub Was Justified

John H. McWhorter, in the Los Angeles Times (July 15 2004)

Last week, for the fourth year in a row, President Bush declined the NAACP's invitation to speak at its annual convention. Predictably, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume railed that the Bush administration failed to recognize the nation's oldest and largest civil rights group as being significant or important in any way.

The sad thing is, the Bush administration's attitude toward the group is justified.

The NAACP is stuck in a mind-set that worked 30 years ago but makes little sense today. Mfume and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond boast that the organization is committed to"speaking truth to power," continuing the whistle-blowing tradition that the organization was founded upon in 1909. This was urgent in an America where lynching was commonplace and segregation was legal.

But almost a century later, black America's main problem is neither overt racism nor more subtle"societal" racism. Lifting blacks up is no longer a matter of getting whites off our necks. We are faced, rather, with the mundane tasks of teaching those"left behind" after the civil rights victory how to succeed in a complex society — one in which there will never be a second civil rights revolution.

To be sure, racism still exists and must be stamped out. But it has been clearly and distinctly marginalized. And it is simply a fallacy to say that the only way people can achieve is when there is absolutely no bias whatsoever against them. The burgeoning of the black middle class has made it clear that societal racism doesn't condemn African Americans to failure.

Yet Mfume and the NAACP's anger-based politics imply that black success can only be accidental unless the playing field is completely level. Instead of insisting on that, they should be working on specific cures to specific ills: creating a culture of achievement among black students, addressing the AIDS crisis in black communities and fostering constructive relationships between police forces and residents of minority neighborhoods.

These real problems are being addressed, but not by the NAACP....