Let's start with the good news first, National Board Chairman, Julian Bond has endorsed the upcoming National Equality March scheduled to take place on October 11th in Washington. Bond has been a friend of the LGBT community for a while now. However his stance is contrary to that of the NAACP's president Ben Jealous, who has refused to take a stand on equal treatment for all.
The very popular Jack and Jill Blog has called them on it, actually doing a post entitled “The NAACP hates black people.” You can read about the controversy here.
As I've said repeatedly in my own posting, that Black civil rights organizations are ineffective and out of touch with today's struggles. They seem stuck in the 1950's and 1960's, choosing to ignore the problems which are killing our community today.
What hurts us today is a lack of education, black on black violence, the refusal to recognize the Black LGBT community, HIV/AIDS infecting straight Black women, the government marginalizing of the Black community in favor of the Hispanic community.
Minority communities in this country should be about presenting a united front, because the institutionalized racism in this country affects all of us equally.
Yet, the National NAACP refuses to take any stances on anything in recent memory and especially since Ben Jealous took over as president.
The Cincinnati Chapter has been hijacked by the likes of Christopher Smitherman and his young band of less reknown, and has become a tool of a local white and right wing organization called COAST. COAST stands for Citizens Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes. It has long been the most conservative anti everything in Cincinnati.
COAST has been "helping" the NAACP in its shortsighted fight against the much needed streetcar and light rail system proposed by Mayor Mark Mallory.
A gay man who happens to work for both COAST and the NAACP since the election of Smitherman, is routinely shown off by Smitherman as his token gay, in an attempt to demonstrate his “enlightenment” on the subject.
This same gay man is the one who actually wrote the abominable anti gay ordinance that was repealed a few years ago. He wasn't in the NAACP at the time.
Until the NAACP, both locally and nationally, begins to address the problems of today's community, it will continue its slide into irrelevance and certain oblivion, making it the perfect fool and front for bigger, more insidious organizations with agendas designed to hurt minority communities.
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