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 Askia At-Large
Askia Muhammad
Columnist Page
Friday, January 14, 2005; Page 16
Armstrong Williams Falls from Grace
I was riding my bicycle toward the U.S. Capitol one day last summer and a voice from the back seat of a Black limousine called my name. Ordinarily I just wave when folks call me while I’m on my bike—something about safety on the road takes precedence over glad-handing with friends most of the time. But I had to stop, turn around and go back to see who it is who knows me personally and gets chauffeured around town. It was Armstrong Williams. We visited and went our separate ways.
That’s the kind of person Armstrong is. He’s a regular guy, living the life of a pompous patrician.
Armstrong, an ultra-conservative Black Republican, got a wake-up call last week. Someone “dropped a dime” on him by alerting USA Today that he has been the recipient of a questionable financial deal with the Secretary of Education. It seems that the Department paid my friend a hefty $240,000 to “regularly comment on No Child Left Behind during the course of his broadcasts,” and to interview Education Secretary Rod Paige for TV and radio spots that aired during his syndicated radio and television shows last year, according to a front page article last week.
The incident has brought the mighty patrician back down to earth with the rest of us pedestrians. Tribune Media Services has cancelled the syndication of his newspaper column. TV One has suspended his TV show “On Point,” and “America’s Black Forum” syndicated TV show has also complained about his cutting a side deal with an advertiser they’d like to have pay them a quarter of a million dollars.
What’s really sad about this tawdry business, as far as I’m concerned, is that this exposes how thin the African American “bench” is in the Republican Party. With the departure of Secretary of State Colin Powell, who at least spoke up in favor of affirmative action, there is not one single prominent Black person remaining in the Republican ranks who can be trusted by the rest of us Black folks.
In the old days, Black Republicans—like the late Berkeley Burrell, President of the National Business League and others—at least saw themselves as part of the Black community, who were simply working “the other side of the street,” but were still looking out for the best interests of their people. The new crew of Right-wing Black ideologues—like Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell and President Bush’s new Black domestic policy adviser, Claude Allen —have no loyalty whatsoever to Black folks, in my opinion. They are in their positions, to simply mouth neo-conservative rhetoric in the Black community.
I took an informal survey and found that none of the people I think should know believe that there are any trustworthy Blacks to be found in the GOP leadership. I asked outgoing Congressional Black Caucus Chairman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), and Drs. Ronald Walters, University of Maryland political scientist, and David Bositis, Senior Research Associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
“There must be some,” Rep. Cummings told me, “I just don’t know enough Republicans to know who they are.” Of the 2,500-some-odd partisan Black elected officials nationally, Dr. Bositis reported last year, only 50 of them are Republicans.
The rigid, racist, anti-Black Republican ideology is just not compatible with the psyche of most Blacks, even Blacks who are old fashioned and conservative about most social issues.
In his state, Mr. Blackwell is the leader of the far-right wing faction of the party, and there are at least two White Republicans who are more popular with Blacks than Mr. Blackwell. For his part, Mr. Allen earned the suspicion of Blacks in his home state of Virginia, when he tried to broker former Gov. James Gilmore’s Confederate Heritage Month. Although he pushed for an investigation into the burning of Black churches in Virginia, at a meeting about the controversial Confederate celebration, Mr. Allen gave an NAACP official a painting of Robert E. Lee.
Now, with Armstrong, a nice guy with objectionable, conservative views reeling in disgrace and fighting to restore his reputation which now correctly depicts him as a cheap propagandist for the Bush White House, the GOP should do some serious soul searching, because there is something wrong with a picture where Black folks just can’t “hang”.
The final lesson Armstrong should realize was articulated by Bryan Monroe, Vice President for Print of the National Association of Black Journalists, who says that Black journalists (or commentators or “pundits” or whatever he wants to call himself) must realize that we are here to be “watchdogs, not lapdogs.” |
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