Harris campaign endorsement money is one more opportunity to move on from identity politics

I have never taken a donation or any other form of payment from President-elect Donald Trump. Aside from my salary, I have never received any payment or kickback for the work I do on the South Side of Chicago. When I heard the news that Rev. Al Sharpton was paid $500,000 by the Kamala Harris campaign, I was insulted. This is a man, a man of God to boot, who claims to care so much about Black people and yet he charged Harris a pretty penny for his time. 

Sharpton was not the only identitarian-based advocacy group to receive a paycheck. The Harris campaign paid a whopping $5.4 million to multiple Black and Latino advocacy groups. 

If you want to go further, you can add the celebrities who also advocate for Sharpton and these types of groups And consider the nearly $2.5 million Oprah’s company, Harpo Productions, received for the vice president’s town hall.

OPRAH TOWN HALL COST HARRIS CAMPAIGN FAR MORE THAN INITIALLY CLAIMED: REPORT

Sharpton and others didn’t care enough about their causes to get behind the Harris campaign. They didn’t see it as a chance to better their community. They only moved to action when handed money and a script. 

People always ask me what the Al Sharptons and Kamala Harrisses of America have done for my community and I always say the same thing: nothing! Not one positive thing. In fact, it was Harris who let in millions of people through the southern border and then asked us, myself included, to take care of these folks. I stepped up. Did she?

Real strength lies in developing our own character and seeing character in other people. That’s the truth that we need to get back to. 

The only time I ever heard Harris talk about Chicago was when she praised that fraudulent victim, Jussie Smollett, and prayed for his recovery from this "attempted modern day lynching." Has she ever said anything about the young lives that were taken far too early and that I have to eulogize too often? 

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Al Sharpton has made some efforts and I have to give him some credit. He tried to replicate Martin Luther King’s Chicago campaign by visiting my city every week but then he eventually disappeared. His lasting impact over the last ten years or so has been leading the Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and George Floyd campaigns which inflated Black Lives Matter at the expense of my community. There was money to be made there and we lost far more lives that we should have — thanks to Defund the Police.

What bothers me, especially about this $500,000 payment, is how it reveals race is only about money and power and that’s all these two people care about. How are they any different from the white segregationists who exploited Blacks for money and power? I will tell you what the difference is here and that is, they are exploiting their own color for money and power. 

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But then again, none of this should surprise us, should it? Identity politics never helped anyone in my community. If you consider affirmative action, who does it help the most? Middle to upper class Blacks, multiracials, and Africans. Not poor Blacks. And these well-to-do kids never needed racial preferences in the first place. 

We have to stop giving power to race. We have to stop believing that it means something. We simply have to. And I practice what I preach every day on the South Side. When I hear, "white man," I squash it. When I hear "the Black man can’t," I jump all over it. Identity politics has no place here. It teaches us weakness. Real strength lies in developing our own character and seeing character in other people. That’s the truth that we need to get back to. 

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Al Sharpton can keep his money. Kamala Harris can keep up her lie that she’s doing something for us Blacks. Game recognize game and we are moving on past them. 

We’re moving onto to a better America where people deeply care about their communities and one another and to a better America where we face our real problems without fear. The shame on us is that we gave so much power to the Sharptons and Harrisses of America but no more. 

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