Word: jacksonism
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...looking to get Jesse Jackson for February," she said. That month, the club will program events around the debate over civil liberties...
...Does Jackson enjoy legitimacy as the pre-eminent black American leader? Why? Says who? The white American media - somewhat lazily, I would say - seem to accept him as such...
...whites do not appoint black leaders. If they did, Colin Powell or some other outstanding African American would have the title. Jesse Jackson - a shameless hypemeister, a genius of self-promotion with a talent for survival and a gift for grifting silly old whitey - stays in business because of a complex racial physics dictating that his viability as a black spokesman/agitator stands in direct proportion to the extent he succeeds in infuriating white folks and, from time to time, shaking them down. He infuriates. He reconciles. The check comes forward in its smiling envelope...
...that more blacks than whites regard Jackson as a threadbare old charlatan. (One may remember that Martin Luther King Jr. at the time of his death had come to be regarded somewhat dismissively in the black community; they called him, satirically, "De Lawd...
...Jackson stays relevant on both sides of the racial divide by means of showmanship and what might be called amphibious opportunism. He intrudes himself into every crisis and photo op with the aggressive agility of a pro football lineman; he mediates, he bloviates, he aggrandizes himself, and occasionally, I suppose, he performs a useful function. That is the legitimacy of his hustle...