Problems facing the black community in America are primarily due to the breakdown of the nuclear family, the Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson told a half-filled MacMillan 117 Tuesday. His speech was followed by a heated question-and-answer session.
Though he cited personal experiences with segregation during his childhood, Peterson said the major perpetrators of racism in America today are organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and black leaders like the Revs. Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
Peterson said such leaders proclaim racism where it does not exist in order to promote themselves - and in the process, he said, they anger black Americans and contradict the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of a society in which individuals would be judged "not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
"Once (King) was assassinated, Jackson and others took his dream and perverted it - they took good and turned it into evil," Peterson said. "The battle we are fighting has nothing to do with color and everything to do with character."
Peterson - a conservative, nondenominational minister - was born and raised on what he described as a plantation in Alabama. He is the founder of the Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny - a group dedicated to, its motto proclaims, "rebuilding the family by rebuilding the man" - and author of "Scam: How the Black Leadership Exploits Black America."
"We're trying to wake black folks up so they can overcome their anger and move forward," Peterson said of BOND, a nonprofit he said receives no government funding. Peterson was sharply critical of the federal government, which he called "godless" and pointed out that "prior to the civil rights movement, families were together" and helped one another without depending on the government.
Peterson, who advocates a boycott of the NAACP and hosts an annual National Day of Repudiation of Jesse Jackson in Los Angeles, attributed the rise in single motherhood, incarceration and educational discrepancy among blacks to the absence of stable, two-parent households and the tendency to blame white people for problems.
"That state of anger is destroying the black family, the black community itself," Peterson said. In an infrequent invocation of religion in his speech, Peterson said "there's so much anger between the black man and the black woman that I think it's going to take Jesus Christ to come and restore" peace in relationships.
Peterson went on to criticize the use of the term "African American," which he called "ridiculous in itself - because if you're born in America, you're an American."
Peterson also spoke of the presence of "white fear" in American society - white people, he said, have become intimidated by the notion of being labeled racist or threatened with lawsuits for speaking out about issues related to black America.
"White Americans have allowed themselves to be intimidated" into not speaking their minds about race, Peterson said. "White folks who are living today are not responsible for the past. ... They need to get rid of the false guilt that they have," he added.
The theme of dwelling on the past became a major issue in the heated question-and-answer session that followed Peterson's lecture. In response to a question about his tendency to speak about black America in the third person, Peterson said, "I don't identify as a black man. I identify as an American, a Christian, a conservative and a Republican. My color doesn't matter to me - it gets me nowhere. It's my character that counts."
"What good is it doing you to identify with your color?" he added, followed by several seconds of silence from the crowd.
A question responding to Peterson's criticism of black welfare families noted the Wagner Act, past policies of the Federal Housing Authority and other forms of government handouts that the questioner said favor white Americans.
"Intelligence is overrated," Peterson responded. "What we need more of is wisdom, because if you were a wise man, you would let the past be gone and live today."
When the same student noted that accumulated privilege would still be inherited by future white generations, Peterson dismissed the student, saying, "I've already wasted too much time on you."
The lecture was organized by the College Republicans and co-sponsored by the Young America Foundation and the Department of Africana Studies.
