Judy Bachrach: O Contraire

What exactly, we all have a right to ask, is the NAACP fighting for? The organization was founded in 1909 after a race riot in Springfield, Illinois. By 1954, its special counsel, the young and skillful Thurgood Marshall, had won the country’s most impressive legal victory with Brown v. Board of Education: a Supreme Court decision that gave African-American children the right to enter segregated schools of the lighter-skinned and more privileged.

Now, more than half a century later, it has a lot less to show both its members and the nation it long ago helped reform and improve.  Obviously there was a time when the organization had its uses. But we now live in a country led by the once unimaginable: an African-American president. There are currently 42 African-Americans in Congress. As the New York Times recently reported, there are at least 32 African-Americans running for Congress as Republicans — the largest number since Reconstruction.

And what is the NAACP doing these days? Well, among its ranks (among its speakers, in fact) is one Shirley Sherrod — yes, the very Department of Agriculture official the organization’s president, Ben Jealous, promptly threw to the wolves the moment some amoral blogger edited Sherrod’s words out of context so as to make her appear racist. Where had Sherrod delivered her speech? That is correct: before guests at an NAACP banquet. When had she spoken? Just four months ago.

How hard do you think it would have been for anyone at the NAACP to do due diligence and actually review a tape of Sherrod’s speech before releasing the statement in which Jealous declared, “According to her remarks, she mistreated a white farmer in need of assistance because of his race. … Her actions were shameful.”  How much digging do you think anyone at the organization had to do before announcing: “We concur with US Agriculture Secretary Vilsack in accepting the resignation of Shirley Sherrod”?

And how smart was it of Jealous, once he actually bothered to view the tape of her speech, to declare himself “snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Beitbart”? Or to suggest that thanks to his dumb remarks, “activists and journalists” were experiencing “a teachable moment.” Activist leaders are supposed to deliver teachable moments, not absorb them in prime time, or, as embarrassing, blame them on journalists. Getting snookered is for schlubs who respond to e-mails promising millions in return for sums mailed to a post office box in Lagos. It’s for the doddering, delusional, and demented. An organization that promotes the rights of minorities cannot — should not — pronounce itself mentally challenged and, of all things, out-Foxed.

So all in all maybe it’s time for the NAACP to disband. There are 38 million African-Americans in the United States, and fewer than 300,000 are NAACP members: clearly demonstrating a growing distance between leaders and possible constituents. I’m not suggesting every last minority issue has dissolved. Far from it. The median income of African-American citizens is still the lowest of all in this country — 40 percent less than that of the general population — and that disparity needs to be redressed.

But is the NAACP the right organization to do the redressing? It fought some old battles, and fought them well. Now that it declares itself too feeble-minded to fight the ditzy drinkers at the Tea Party, it may be time to switch warriors and pick its battles. Different battles for different times.