COMMENTARY: Time for post-Sharpton agenda for Black community

The pushback has begun from Black Americans against Al Sharpton and other self-appointed liberal “community leaders.” The National Black Church Initiative, a coalition representing 27.7 million people and 150,000 Black churches across the country, recently announced that the payment from the Kamala Harris campaign to Sharpton “puts a moral stain on the integrity of the Black Church.”

The group, which said it is “very concerned” by the “growing scandal,” urged MSNBC to “launch an investigation” and expressed support for the “Rev. Sharpton’s suspension until the investigation is complete.” This is a good first step, as we are long overdue for new leaders with fresh ideas that might actually help the Black community.

Of course, the ethically questionable collaboration between Sharpton and the failed Harris campaign is but one example of the lucrative race hustle game he and others have played for years. Rich white liberals, seeking absolution for their perceived “white privilege,” provide the cash — and plenty of it — but they also provide the bad ideas that for 60 years have damaged the communities they were supposed to help.

The list of harmful measures is long — defunding the police, open borders, eliminating school choice, climate change regulations that boost energy bills and destroy high-wage manufacturing jobs, welfare policies that discourage home ownership and wealth creation and, worst of all, diversity, equity and inclusion programs that impose racism in the name of fighting it.

Sadly, well-compensated, liberal Black mouthpieces have always been easy to find, and the media give them more of a platform than they deserve.

The race hustle game re-emerges every election year. The same old big government “solutions” coupled with the usual scare tactics over racism and white supremacy would manage to keep Black voters in line. However, the problem is that it always came at the expense of economic progress. In fact, one could argue that the agenda of the race hustle game is to keep Black people poor so the elites can capitalize off their grievances along with the nongovernmental organizations that profit from their misfortune. Why else would they continue pushing ideas that have a decades-long track record of failure?

Now, the results of the last election show that a growing number of Black voters are realizing that the old agenda does not work and are ready for real change.

In the new Trump era, Black Americans need to move past the politics of victimization and toward the politics of economic opportunity, upward mobility and self-sufficiency. We need to stop listening to the nonsense those rich white liberals want to force on the Black community and look at what they actually do in their lives. They send their kids to the school of their choice; we should get the chance to do the same. They spend extra to live in safe neighborhoods or even gated communities, and we should have the same level of safety. They buy homes and accumulate generational wealth and so should we. And they benefit from a true meritocracy, and so can we.

Likewise, race hustlers, such as Al Sharpton, tell us to fear white people all while working side by side with white affluent liberals, living in all-white neighborhoods, while sending his kids to private schools.

His influence is over because we will no longer listen to “do what I say and not as I do.”

Donna Jackson is the membership director for Project 21 Black Leadership Network. She wrote this for InsideSources.com.