The late civil rights activist Jesse Jackson exits the public stage at a time of slightly increased racial tensions.
I say slightly—at the risk of being falsely accused of dismissing the whole issue of ethnic relations—because there’s a world of difference between the state-mandated, Klan-enforced, sometimes violent, explicit racial separatism that characterized parts of the U.S. when Jackson’s career began in the 1960s and today’s subtle disputes (however noisy they may seem by the standards of the placid 1990s in between) over things like whether programs aimed at hiring even more non-whites at colleges should be tempered by slightly renaming the programs, whether Somali immigrants receiving huge daycare subsidies are filling out the proper forms, and whether white left-wing activists can reasonably expect to be shot if they interfere with police activities.
Jackson had critics for decades, though you can’t deny activists from his day had clearer grounds for complaint than do people engaged in the often academic, campus-based, theoretical race disputes of the current day. In fact, hard as it may be to believe amidst the conflict-maximizing media (and social media) environment of the 2020s, just a few decades ago even conservatives were often willing to let the misdeeds of men like Jackson slide, given the enormity of the racial crimes he was ostensibly trying to rectify.
He famously wore a bloodied turtleneck a day after Martin Luther King was killed, thereby perhaps succeeding in the conscious goal of making himself the literally-anointed successor to King as leader of the anti-racist movement. Witnesses disagreed about whether Jackson was actually close enough to the killing to have gotten bloodied—and regardless it’s hard to believe he couldn’t have changed out of that shirt by the next day if he so chose—but few were inclined to give him a hard time about it because, well: the Klan, slavery, Jim Crow, etc. It would take a lot of missteps by pro-black activists to outweigh all those historic evils. Some leeway on symbolism was the least society owed them.
The symbolism was rapidly getting more complicated by the end of the 20th century, though, for the simple reason that ethnic relations were improving so rapidly, contrary to the carefully cultivated negative impression young people today would get from listening to a college lecture or watching almost any movie about “history” or time travel. If Jackson were to launch his Rainbow Coalition organization today, he’d likely have to take pains to explain that the purpose of the group was to bring together people with many different skin colors rather than just to celebrate gay or trans people.
Today, the Rainbow Coalition probably also gets confused in some people’s minds with the latter-day hippies of the forest-gathering Rainbow Family like a lovely young musician I spoke to recently, having until that conversation forgotten for years that either group existed.
All was not sweetness and light and consciousness-raising in Jackson’s world, though. It has plausibly been argued that Jackson’s protests-plus-non-profit-status combo made for an effective shakedown operation (that argument has been made in a book called Shakedown, in fact). Donate or expect noisy, embarrassing crowds, in short. Al Sharpton arguably encouraged similar tactics, inspiring the occasional riot or arson along the way. Despite all this, Jackson mostly managed to sustain an air of moral superiority, even with his occasional slip-ups like calling New York City by the anti-Jewish slur “Hymietown.”
Speaking of dueling faiths, Jackson’s ambiguous combo of moralizing and fundraising may have taken as its inspiration not just centuries of racial conflict but centuries of fervent-yet-opportunistic Christian evangelizing. Like Sharpton, he was a preacher, after all. Some extremely-online youth today might be surprised to learn that “grifting”—blending intense political harangues and heavy hints that you should donate to the cause if you believe—long preceded the existence of the digital donation button.
And just as the spittle-flecked podcasters of our own day probably believe most of what they say, partly because it’s in their interest as performers to do so, so too did Jackson likely believe on some level that God wanted him to pursue his crusade of purging America’s racial evils.
I once defended atheism (for lack of a more nuanced label, though I also answer to “agnostic” because who knows) in a public debate against a professional Christian apologist who says he may have been the spur back in 2001 that led to Jackson officially confessing that he had had an affair (resulting in a daughter) with one of his staff members. Jackson had passed by and heard my future debate foe doing a bit of manic street-preaching about the need to confess one’s sins, which Jackson did the next day. Cause and effect? Who can really know?
It’s also difficult to know the precise weight of good and harm Jesse Jackson did in this world, but if, like his blood-soaked mentor, he nudged the world closer to judging the world as individuals rather than as homogeneous tribes, I of course regard that as a good thing.
Similarly, rather than addressing the ethnic conflicts of our own day in sweeping, moronic generalizations, such as condemning all Somalis over the acts of a few con artists, we should strive to see the participants as individuals.
There might be much to learn, for instance, from the specific tensions in the mind of Deko Nor, one of the two Somali moms who froze up onstage recently, shutting down in mid-sentence while trying to address the issues of Minnesota daycare scams and recent I.C.E. raids. Both women seemed stunned into temporary silence, Nor fleeing the stage, when they reached the point in their likely carefully-planned speeches containing perfunctory condemnation of fraud, perhaps only then realizing they’d said too much about the kind of operations with which they were associating themselves.
In short, that was an individual conscience at work, however haltingly, and no sane detective would react by saying he need know nothing more about Nor specifically—or the workings of a given daycare center to which she was alluding—than the skin color of the people involved. The most basic function of justice is differentiating between innocent individuals and guilty individuals, and if you get too lazy to do that, wanting instead to condemn vast swathes of humanity with the same brush, admit that justice isn’t really what motivates you.
If you think, say, that Somalia’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Abdisalam Ali, owning a short-lived Ohio healthcare company just before Somalia takes control of the U.N. Security Council, hints at a vast web of international graft, by all means tell us more. Don’t just stop at the vague assertion that you can’t trust those Africans. Show us individual crimes, with actual victims, and recommend appropriate compensatory measures or punishments. That, not a world of sweeping ethno-nationalist resentments and collectivist reprisals that reward the guilty by lumping them in with the innocent, is what King and Jackson, at their best, were fighting for.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey