I have basically gone point by point to deconstruct the gentleman’s argument, as it has been the lone argument in support of Tavis Smiley’s behavior that I have seen. In addition, my site was initially referred to by comments of his article in some fashion at theRoot.com.

I tried to contact McAllister via twitter to get a better idea of his thoughts… anyway

(I saw the article “http://www.theroot.com/views/tavis-smiley-was-right/” in my server logs).

In his rush to criticize where the president should assist black people, Lenny McAllister either blatantly ignores the faulty premise of Tavis Smiley’s statements this week or completely misunderstood the problems with Tavis Smiley’s strawman position.  Regardless of the reason behind Mr. McAllister’s support of Tavis Smiley, the end result is a position that doesn’t seem conservative at all — support of Tavis Smiley’s unclarified race-based “Black Agenda.”

Further McAllister’s critiques of what the Obama administration are misguided. While I believe PBO needs to be critiqued from all corners, from all ideologies and all people,  the critiques should be focused on well-thought out specific policies issues, or executive-level execution rather than idle wishes.  Among these idle wishes, policies need to be detailed that will help segments of African Americans as opposed to an undefined race-based “black agenda.” So, without further ado, I’ll examine McAllister’s piece at theRoot.com.

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Actual commentary on air by Al Sharpton and Tavis Smiley is here:

Summary of Parts 1,2,3 Tavis Smiley’s Intitial, Al Sharptons Response and Smiley v. Sharpton.

Some other opinions I think are interesting to reference:
Dr. Boyce Watkins http://www.thegrio.com/opinion/sharpton-smiley-reveals-rift-in-black-leadership-split-over-obama.php
Roland Martin http://www.rolandsmartin.com/blog/index.php/2010/02/24/audio-roland-s-martin-tom-joyner-morning-show-commentary-02-24-10/

Point I: No monolithic black agenda.
Implicit in most of these pieces is the idea that African Americans have some pre-ordained unified agenda on the basis of shared created ethnicity.  Roland Martin actually does a good job of beginning to separate out different policies that could actually be implemented.
(Created ethnicity is a concept I’ve had since undergrad regarding Africans in America as descendants of slaves. As a result of shared experience, descendants of African slaves have essentially become a quasi ethnic group. Barack Obama importantly, by virtue of his absent father , became a member of this ethnic group.)

However, I have yet to see Tavis Smiley clearly explain what is included in his idea of a “black agenda.”  Since African Americans represent roughly 12% of the United States population, some 30 million plus people, any discussion of a unified agenda is a bit far-fetched.

What is more important perhaps, is dealing with discrete issues that affect different segments of black populations when separated by different demographic features.
Some groups might be the following:
African American males age 12-25
African American single parents 14-35
etc…

The lack of detail to the “black agenda” makes the whole idea difficult to take seriously.

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