Why tavis smiley hates obama

And he reacted with mock outrage when it was suggested that he celebrate the anniversary by throwing himself a party. Tavis Smiley grew up poor, in a Pentecostal household in white rural Indiana. He was raised, alongside nine siblings and cousins, by a stern mother and a quiet but tough Air Force-officer father who was actually, he discovered when he was twelve, his stepfather.

As with many kids of his generation, his life was changed by a stack of Motown LPs, but these were recordings of great speeches by Martin Luther King, Jr. His stepfather once beat him so badly, he says, that the police intervened and placed him in foster care, where he remained for almost half a year. He filled his high-school years with debate tournaments, student-government meetings, and an internship in the office of a Kokomo city councilman.

His mother periodically forced him to prune his schedule and focus more on the church; in response, he cut himself off from her throughout much of his high-school career. By his senior year, Smiley was barely speaking to either of his parents, but he got accepted at Indiana University, in Bloomington, and an African-American administrator helped him find the right loans and jobs.

In Bloomington, he encountered a broader African-American culture. He was a director of minority affairs for the student government, and he joined a black fraternity, Kappa Alpha Psi, although he says he had to pray about the decision—King had been an Alpha Phi Alpha. King one day, when I meet him in Heaven, that I pledged Kappa? In , during his junior year, he lobbied hard for an internship with Tom Bradley, the first African-American mayor of Los Angeles.

Some students might have been disillusioned by all the meetings and committees, but Smiley loved to think that he was helping to run the city.

By , he was back in Los Angeles, where he worked as an aide to Bradley, then made an unsuccessful run for the city council. During this time, Smiley noticed that there was a whole industry of people who got paid to talk and, even better, to opine.

His focus was meat-and-potatoes black-community issues: police brutality, affirmative action, poverty. Smiley suggested that regular political commentary might get listeners motivated to register and vote, and he was hired.

He had a series of warm conversations with President Bill Clinton, who evidently saw the show as a sympathetic forum—he gave Smiley his first interview after admitting to his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. West and Smiley make an effective team: the tenured radical and the indefatigable entrepreneur, united by twin commitments to black politics and intellectual populism. Smiley likes to joke that he stalked West for a while after they first met, at the Los Angeles headquarters of the S.

Phillip Randolph. A president who wants to be remembered as a great statesmen, and not just another garden variety politician, must be willing to course correct. To be sure, the headwinds you faced were real, not imaginary. But too many times you overestimated the will of your opponents and underestimated the resolve of your supporters. I am anxious to see how you will attempt to impact the lives of those who were left behind during your two terms in the Oval Office.

Specifically, your most loyal constituency: black people. I love all of humanity, but I confess to having a particular and unapologetic love for black people. Symbolism matters, but substance matters more. In gratitude and love, thank you for having the courage to step forth, so that we might experience in our lifetimes that which many fellow citizens thought was impossible. Your election gave generations of children yet unborn, that which is in short supply these days: HOPE.

As a freelancing, itinerant, nonordained, self-anointed prophet, West has only to answer to himself. Most ministers are clerics attending to the needs of the local parish. Only a select few are cut from prophetic cloth. Yet nearly all the religious figures we recognize as prophets—Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Powell and King were pastors of local churches as well. To be sure, there are prophets who are not ministers or religious figures—especially women whose path to the ministry has been blocked by sexist theologies—but most of them have ties to organizations or institutions that hold them accountable.

West has a measure of responsibility as a professor, but he enjoys far greater freedom than most ministers or prophets. Professors have a lot of flexibility in teaching classes, advising students, writing books, and speaking their minds without worrying that a deacon board will censor them or trustees will boot them out. West gets the benefits of the association with prophecy while bearing none of its burdens.

By refusing to take up the cross he urges prophetic Christians to carry, West is preaching courage while seeking to avoid reprisal or suffering. He berates them for their appetite for access to power, their desire for insider status. In his book, The Preacher King, Duke Divinity School Professor Richard Lischer noted that in ancient Israel, the central prophet moved within the power structure, reminding the people of their covenant with God and also consulting kings on military matters and issues of national significance.

Peripheral prophets were outsiders who embraced the poor, criticized the monarchy, and opposed war. West ignores these variations, which results in an idealized, and deeply flawed, portrait of King as a peripheral prophet who was only useful when he hugged the margin.

Beginning already in the Eisenhower administration and increasing steadily throughout the turbulent Kennedy years, he had been regularly consulted on matters of interest to the Negro in America.

No black leader had ever enjoyed comparable access to the Oval Office and the power it represented. King moved from central to peripheral prophet in his last few years with an emphasis on economic justice and antiwar activism—views he grew into as he wrestled with his conscience, his staff, and the folk to whom he was accountable.

King was arguably more beneficial to the folk he loved when he swayed power with his influence and vision. When West begrudges Sharpton his closeness to Obama, he ignores the fact that King had similar access. Sharpton and Jackson moved in the opposite prophetic direction of King. While King kissed the periphery with courageous vigor after enjoying his role as a central prophet, Jackson, and especially Sharpton, started on the periphery before coming into their own on the inside.

West remains an elite academic and can hardly be said to have ever been a true outsider, given his position in the academic elite and the upper reaches of the economy, but he hungers to be seen as rebellious.

In truth, West is a scold, a curmudgeonly and bitter critic who has grown long in the tooth but sharp in the tongue when lashing one-time colleagues and allies. West may draw on prophetic insight; he may look up to prophets on the front lines; and he may even employ prophetic vocabularies of social dissent. But none of that makes him a prophet. They might be explained with a bit of the moral psychology West likes to apply to the president. What kind of shit is this? The irony is that, as highly charged as his criticism has become, West is, in some ways, not that different from Obama.

The president has long wished to be the grand architect of bipartisanship, the conciliator of left and right, the bridge between conservatives and liberals. West used to fancy himself a similar figure; at least he did when he was riding high on best-seller lists as a progressive icon. West sought to account for the suffering of black America by steering between the arguments of conservative behaviorists and liberal structuralists.

He thought it was important to acknowledge self-inflicted injuries as well as dehumanizing forces. For West, the cure is a politics of conversion fueled by a strong love ethic.

The odd thing is that Obama talks right—chiding personal irresponsibility in a way that presumes the pathology of many black families and neighborhoods—but veers left in his public policy. West, on the other hand, talks left but thinks right in his notion of nihilism and the factors that might reduce its peril. He gave the notion ideological cover because it got a sexy upgrade from a prominent leftist.

In the article, Harris-Perry also jabbed at West for levying the same criticism at Obama for skipping the event in If West is no prophet but instead a dynamic and once-indispensable social critic, neither is his nastiness the echo of divine disfavor from on high.

His prophetic forebears, as it were, taught him how to get mad, what themes to press, and what language to use. In his callous disregard for plural visions of truth, West, like the prophet Elijah, retreats into a deluded and self-important belief in his singular and exclusive rightness. But God reminded Elijah that his prophetic exclamations were wrong.

West and I participated in several State of the Black Union meetings, as well as a roundtable in Chicago to address the black agenda. But more often than not, the two black intellectuals who stand to grasp the most limelight for taking spiteful jabs at President Obama are Cornel West and Tavis Smiley.

An author, media personality and one of the self-proclaimed leading voices in the black community, Tavis Smiley has a national audience and influence. However, when taking time out time to recently describe the president's remarks about race as "weak as pre-sweetened Kool-Aid," you can only begin to question the motives behind such a very immature and unintelligent insult.

Smiley's good friend and radio show co-host of Smiley and West , the accomplished scholar Cornel West only added more fuel to the fire. Earlier this week, West went to the extreme by calling Obama a "global George Zimmerman" and further added that those who would want to be critical of the president, notably Rev.

Al Sharpton, "can't because he's still on the Obama plantation. I am used to celebrities with a half-thorough knowledge of politics to make foolish pseudo-intellectual remarks to spark controversy.

But never would I have imagined that two grown, educated and successful black men would fall for the cheap thrill of being media trolls. In many ways, this situation says a lot about the age-old stigmas in the black community that comes from success. For one, there is nothing wrong with being critical of our president. Poverty, drug laws, and gun crime are some of the major issues that have yet to be tackled effectively.

I have had my fair share of discussing possible outcomes and solutions along with noting the current failure to do so by our Congress. However, turning those critiques into rhetorical personal attacks only hurts one's credibility.