Stanley Crouch's
Firing: Any Epiphanies, Stanley?

For the last few years, Stanley Crouch has had a penchant for saying what whites want to hear about Black people, from Black people; he has been paid handsomely for it. Consequently, he has aligned himself with the camp of Black Conservatives who have financially enlarged themselves as a result of harsh rhetoric proffered against Black people. Indeed, as Ishmael eed has stated, there is money to be made in Black bashing, and Crouch has made money that way.

A week or so ago Crouch was fired as a columnist at a white owned Jazz magazine. His firing was because he wrote an article saying, some white Jazz musicians cannot really play the music, but since they are white they are being promoted as innovative and good, when all they are doing is deviating from the principles of Jazz without meaning, to paraphrase his words on the Tavis Smiley Show.

That critique was courageous for Stanley Crouch to write about anyone white; he has become wealthy catering to white tastes and philosophical propensities, especially concerning Black people and things negro, a term he seems to favor. It is difficult to feel Crouch's pain in this matter because it is hard to imagine him jeopardizing a lucrative job by offending whites with the truth.

What happened to Crouch? Was he so mistaken about his place in the elite circles he supposedly has access to that he thought things were really colorblind? Has he not seen that the conservative right, to whom he has catered in his written comments, will not tolerate negroes on their payrolls criticizing them or speaking truths that are not flattering? The Black Conservative industry is a cottage industry; it has not grown to the level of allowing Blacks to write or speak the truth and still be paid, when those truths offend or demean whites--J.C. Watts is at home, not still in Congress!

One wonders whether Crouch's firing as a result of his unflattering article about whites has caused any epiphanies in this negro brother. Could this incident be a form of lightning striking? And is it possible that this or some other form of lightning will strike other Black Conservatives who have cashed in on the Blacks bashing Blacks craze?

Maybe some of the Black Republican Conservatives will realize they are on the payrolls of Republican Conservatives as race-talkers and only as long as they write or speak harsh words about Blacks, not whites. []
Frank A. Jones