A few weeks ago I wrote an opinion piece in which I listed CNN correspondent Roland S. Martin, among others, as a pseudo intellectual. I still stand by those remarks and this week Martin supported my hypothesis even more.
Yesterday, Shirley Sherrod, a loyal and dedicated public servant of the USDA, was asked to tender her resignation, via text message on the side of a Georgia highway, for allegedly making statements that revealed racist views.
Without due diligence, substantiation or proof, the NAACP and its headless horseman of a leader, Benjamin Jealous, and the self-made pundit Roland Martin, vilified Shirley Sherrod and called for her to be removed from office.
The impetus for their reaction was based on information obtained from a conservative Web site of an event that the NAACP conducted and had stored in their archives.
Martin rushed to condemn Sherrod before he had all the facts like a kid running to get the first seat in the back of the bus. Likewise the NAACP, in using its “I can do anything better than you” modus operandi, tried to refute the Tea Party’s recent allegation that it, too, is racist.
The intellectual deficiencies of both the NAACP leadership and Martin are examples of what is wrong with the black community. First, to pretend that they are the most wise and sagacious among us and should speak on behalf of the masses is feculent, given that they respond to emotion more so than reason. Scholars, scientists, and intellectuals do not make decisions as a function of emotion.
As a scientist, I do not make statements or judgments from one survey or one clinical trial, but rather hundreds and even thousands. I will not publish a scientific paper based on one article but many.
This is not an issue about Fox News or Andrew Breitbart as the aforementioned would claim, but more about how inept and incredible the positions evinced by so-called journalists like Martin and leaders like Jealous really are. The truth is neither is the intellectual equal of a James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. Du Bois or Ida B. Wells.
They are Stepin Fetchit Negroes that respond to any bait that Master places in front of them. They are pawns who present ignorance under the guise of intellect and are of no value to today’s African American community.
They should be the ones we ask to resign, for as Plato stated, “Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something.”
–torrance stephens, ph.d.
