O-Dub Says Barbershop Gospel

Oliver Willis writes on Barbershop, Jesse and Al in the American Times:

They were once noble-minded foot soldiers in Martin Luther King’s struggle for civil rights. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, both sharp-tongued orators who rally the black community against the forces of injustice. But once the fight for civil rights had reached its goal, Sharpton and Jackson refused to change their tactics.

Instead of realizing that many of the problems facing black America are internal (rather than external) they have consistently toed the party line even when the logic was shaky. Jackson’s hypocrisy with his extramarital affair and Sharpton’s calculated misdeeds in the Tawana Brawley case (in which he pushed for the prosecution of six police officers – knowing the young woman involved was lying about her rape and abduction) began to expose them as more modern-era hucksters than civil rights activists….

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