Joe, We Hardly Knew Ye

And an even better story might have explained just what happened to all the passion and conviction for issues of race, class and poverty Hicks allegedly brought to community organizations where he did time, like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the Multi-cultural Collaborative. Maybe Hicks is right that approaches to those issues weren’t working at these places, but the Center for the Study of Popular Culture is hardly picking up where the SCLC left off -- it‘s in the business of refuting social problems, not solving them. Yet this appears to bother Hicks not at all. No, the move out of the hood was not merely ideological, as the Weekly story maintains, but racial -- Hicks didn’t run to Horowitz so much as retreat from the black monde.

That‘s a much touchier and more insider take on conversion, which is always ignored in profiles of blacks gone conservative because it simply doesn’t play well in Peoria; it disturbs the master narrative on the subject that‘s been running in a loop for the last 20 years. For ultimately this is a story not about a courageous new-age political conversion, but about an age-old search for identity. It’s the search black people have been on for eons, wandering the American desert of place that has always paralleled the universe of American plenty. Joe Hicks has tried out several places and wants out of that desert for good, and in some ways I don‘t blame him. But if leaving the desert means leaving everybody in it, I’ll stay put and take my chances on a change of scenery in the near, or even the distant, future. Identity is a word that seems to get thoroughly under Hicks‘ skin -- identity politics to be exact, a phrase he often uses interchangeably with race-based politics. The inference is that only black people have identity, and to invoke it is always to abuse it for political gain. This is not only untrue, it’s unfair -- what would you call Latinos who battled Prop. 187? Jews who fight anti-Semitism? The Joe Hicks story dismisses Maulana Karenga and his pan-African organization as practitioners of the reviled race-based identity politics. Whatever one thinks of Karenga or his tactics, it‘s patently wrong to dismiss him, or anyone, solely on the grounds that he supports other black people. It never ceases to amaze me how blacks are held to the highest standards of fairness and objectivity in matters of race, as if we created racism ourselves. We are viewed as nationalists, nomads until proven otherwise. Joe Hicks was once a nationalist and has given ample proof he is no longer, though I truly wonder what nation he’s living in now. As I sometimes wonder exactly who, and what, I‘m writing for now.