Why Are Democrats Defending Al Sharpton?
They’ve handed Trump an easy win and yoked themselves to
a genuine bigot.
By Glenn C. Loury
Mr. Loury is a professor of economics at
Brown University.
·
July 31, 2019
·
When I first heard that President Trump
had gone after the Rev. Al Sharpton — and that Mr. Sharpton had responded in
kind — I must admit that I laughed. Are there two New York City hustlers who
deserve one another more?
But 48 hours later, I feel differently.
That’s thanks to the leading Democratic candidates for president, who have
rushed to Mr. Sharpton’s defense, extolling his supposed virtues as a
civil-rights paragon while denouncing Mr. Trump’s attack as racist. In doing
so, they have, yet again, taken Mr. Trump’s bait, handing him another easy
victory while yoking themselves to a genuine bigot.
To read their tweets, you would think
Mr. Sharpton was Gandhi-esque. “@TheRevAl has dedicated his life to the fight
for justice for all. No amount of racist tweets from the man in the White House
will erase that — and we must not let them divide us. I stand with my friend Al
Sharpton in calling out these ongoing attacks on people of color,” wrote Elizabeth Warren. Kamala Harris praisedSharpton as a
man who has “spent his life fighting for what’s right.” Joe Biden agreed, lauding the reverend as “a champion in the fight
for civil rights.”
The
problem for Democrats is that Al Sharpton actually is, as Mr. Trump put it on
Twitter, “a con man.” And not just a con man: Mr. Sharpton is an ambulance-chasing,
anti-Semitic, anti-white race hustler. His history of offensive statements is
longer than the current American president’s. And Mr. Sharpton’s worst sin —
his blatant incitement to violence during the Crown Heights riots of 1991 —
leaves no doubt that he is not a leader, as New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio
described him, who has spent his years “pushing for justice in the teachings of
Dr. King.”
Consider this very partial list of his
offenses:
Mr. Sharpton came onto the national
scene in 1987, during what is now known as the Tawana Brawley affair. On Nov. 28 of that year, a
15-year-old black girl was found lying in a garbage bag, smeared with feces,
with various racial slurs and epithets written in charcoal on her body. She
said that she’d been raped by six white men and that two were law-enforcement
officials. Mr. Sharpton relentlessly championed her cause. And yet, after seven
months of examining police and medical records, a grand jury found
“overwhelming evidence” that Ms. Brawley had fabricated her entire story.
Yet Mr. Sharpton proceeded to accuse
the prosecutor, Steven Pagones, of being one of the perpetrators of the alleged
abduction and rape. Mr. Sharpton was successfully sued (along with Ms.
Brawley’s lawyers, Anthony H. Maddox Jr. and C. Vernon Mason Sr.) for defamation. The jury in this
civil action found Mr. Sharpton liable for making seven defamatory statements
about Mr. Pagones, whose life fell apart as a result of the entire
episode. Mr. Sharpton refused to pay his share of damages, which was later paid by a number of his supporters, and he
has refused to apologize.
In August 1991, after an automobile
accident involving the motorcade of a Hasidic rabbi accidentally killed a black
child, riots broke out in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn. Much of
the press portrayed it as a kind of cultural clash between the black and Jewish
communities, but it was described accurately by the Times columnist, A.M.
Rosenthal, as a “pogrom.”
Following the death of the boy, Gavin
Cato, hundreds of black men took to the streets. Within hours of the accident,
20 young black men surrounded Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year-old Australian
yeshiva student visiting the United States to conduct research for his
doctorate. They stabbed him several times in the back and beat him. He
subsequently died of his injuries. The rioting continued for three days,
leaving 152 police officers and
38 civilians injured. At least 122 blacks and seven whites were arrested.
Amid
this unrest, Mr. Sharpton led hundreds of protesters on a march in front of the
headquarters of the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic movement. During his remarks at
Gavin Cato’s funeral, at which there was a banner declaring,
“Hitler did not do the job,” Mr. Sharpton let loose with a eulogy blaming
“the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights,” and insisted that “the
issue is not anti-Semitism; the issue is apartheid.” He continued: “All we want
to say is what Jesus said: If you offend one of these little ones, you got to
pay for it. No compromise, no meetings, no kaffeeklatsch, no skinnin’ and
grinnin’. Pay for your deeds.”
Four years later, Mr. Sharpton incited
violence again. In 1995, Fred Harari, a Jewish tenant of a retail property on
125th Street who operated Freddy’s Fashion Mart, sought to evict his longtime
subtenant, a black-owned record store called the Record Shack. Beginning that
August, Mr. Sharpton led a series of marches against the planned eviction.
Protesters led by Mr. Sharpton’s National Action Network picketed outside the
store day after day, referring to Jews as “bloodsuckers” and threatening,
“We’re going to burn and loot the Jews.” At one point Mr. Sharpton told
protesters, “We will not stand by and allow them to move this brother so that
some white interloper can expand his business.” Never mind that the building
was actually owned by a black Pentecostal church.
Then, on Dec. 8, 1995, a protester
named Roland J. Smith Jr. entered Mr. Harari’s store, told all the black
customers to leave, shot several remaining customers and set the store on fire.
The gunman fatally shot himself, and seven store employees died of smoke
inhalation.
Why is a person with such a sordid
history — one for which he has offered nothing more than weak apologies for
wishing he’d “done more to heal rather than harm” — enjoying the support of
such a determinedly antiracist political party? For a few reasons that I can
see.
The first is President Barack Obama.
Before 2008, Mr. Sharpton had largely remained at the fringe of the Democratic
Party. That changed because of Mr. Obama’s candidacy. Mr. Obama was
catching flak from his left among African-Americans unhappy about his relative
moderation on race-related policies, including his disavowal of his former
pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The candidate needed a black “leader” to
defend him and deflect criticism. One was found in Mr. Sharpton,
who was cultivated by
Mr. Obama’s closest aide, Valerie Jarrett.
In short order, Mr. Sharpton became a
political kingmaker. In 2011, he got his own show on MSNBC. Between 2009 and
2014 he’d visited the White House 61 times. All
of this has left the Democrats joined at the hip with an exemplar of failed
black leadership.
The second reason Democrats have rushed
to Mr. Sharpton’s defense is South Carolina. Given the critical importance of
that state’s early primary election, and the crucial role the black vote is
sure to play in that contest, Democrats running for president have had to kiss
Mr. Sharpton’s ring — and cover his derrière.
The
third, and most powerful, reason is that Mr. Sharpton now has the right enemy:
Donald Trump. Democrats seem unable to do two things at once: condemn Mr. Trump
and refuse to defend ideas and people that are not worthy of being defended.
Instead, anything he criticizes, however plausible that criticism, becomes
something they feel compelled to rally behind.
This is a losing strategy. Progressives
have been bluffing on the race issue for years now: downplaying black-on-black
urban violence, ignoring the polarizing effects of racial identity politics,
maintaining a code of silence on the collapse of the black family and more. Mr.
Trump knows it.
If Democrats cannot distinguish between
Mr. Sharpton’s hucksterism and genuine moral leadership on race and justice in
America, I assure you that many moderate voters in battleground states will
have no trouble doing so. Shouting “racist” at Mr. Trump, even if there is
truth to the accusation, will gain Democrats nothing. The president cannot be
further damaged by that epithet. Meantime, he wins votes every time a prominent
Democratic politician overreacts to his provocations by defending the
indefensible.