The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership by Al Sharpton Page B

arthritic knees to scrub floors for me? I think not. I know more about family values than he does, any day of the week.
    No one has fought harder than I have in my lifetime against inequality and unfairness. But I’ve never taught anyone that the inequality and unfairness they might face is an excuse or a justification not to do everything in their power to overcome. Yet somehow, that’s the message that has seeped through to the generations that came after mine. We allowed a spirit of dysfunction and surrender to supplant our spirit of determination. While women like my mother made sure that my generation was challenged by what we didn’t have, now it seems to define us. Limit us. Break us.
    When I give speeches, I sometimes use a helpful analogy:If I step off the stage and knock you off your seat, that’s on me. I’ve abused you, knocked you to the ground for no reason. But if I come back a week later, and you’re still lying on the ground, that’s on you. If you’re not responsible for being down, you are responsible for getting up. But that’s not what’s happening in our communities and families today. We’re not getting back up. We must figure out a way to reenergize and reignite the spirit of get-up in our communities. I am sad and burdened, almost to the point of heartbreak, that we let our young people lose it. We allowed it to slip away in a generation, disappear into a fog of disconnection and self-centered entitlement. When I meet with young people, I see it in their eyes, in their faces, in their demeanors, in their voices. They’re telling me, I ain’t gonna be nothing nohow, so why bother? I’ll just join a gang, take me out in my twenties. I don’t care.
    When things were much worse off, we didn’t surrender. We can’t accept it now. That is not the legacy of our ancestors. It is not us.
    I started to notice the change in the mid-1990s, seeing young people who didn’t seem to hear what I was saying to them, who didn’t think all the talk about uplift and self-improvement applied to them. Whereas my generation grew up with songs such as “Say It Loud” by James Brown, “What’s Going On” by Marvin Gaye, “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy, all records exhorting us to action, by the ’90s, that message had started to give way to more self-focused tributes, to weed and sex. It started to become acceptable, even in vogue,to live a thug life. In one of the most damning developments, to young African-Americans, it seemed that blackness became synonymous with thuggery, hood life. It was the definition of what it meant to be black.
    I remember how hurt I was when my daughters told me this way of thinking had so permeated young black minds that it was even present on their college campuses. Even in college, if you were well-spoken, well-read, eloquent, you were acting white, they told me. So the converse was that to act black, you were supposed to act like a thug, a street urchin? That’s a crippling and racist self-image. But it’s been sold, reinforced, and glorified by the last fifteen years of black culture. The music, the movies, and the literature all became a celebration of the thug. So if that’s blackness, what does that do to W. E. B. DuBois and James Baldwin and Leontyne Price? They’re not black? Or Dr. King—he’s not black? What are you talking about? Blackness was never about how low we were; blackness was about no matter how far down they brought us, we found a way to get back up. That’s the black legacy—not just to our children but to all of America.
    Using the previous analogy, about me stepping off the stage and knocking you off your chair, what we are doing now is getting knocked off the chair, and not only are we not getting back up, but we are lying on the ground and rapping about it.
    I’m down . . . bump bump bump . . . I’m down . . . I ain’t shit.
    It may be entertaining, or even