by Al Sharpton
I came home thinking about how easily Americans detach ourselves from the rest of the world, romanticizing our relationship with our homeland—whether African-Americans, Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, and so on—but not doing a thing actually to help the people still living in these countries. It’s a sort of mindless boasting—“I’m Irish,” “I’m Italian,” “I’m African-American”—and we pay lip service to the importance of our ancestors and our lineage. But how many of us take the next step and go back to our countries of origin to offer assistance, to make sure the citizens are thriving and able to sustain themselves? If I’m Irish, I should be concerned about the state of the economy in Ireland and the lack of jobs and opportunity. If I’m African-American, I should care that they slaughtered a million Rwandans or that there is slavery in the Sudan. How do you find pride in something but not be proud enough to preserve the integrity of that thing that brings you pride?
The painful lessons of intragroup hostilities also came up during my memorable meeting with Fidel Castro in Havana. I was in Jamaica for a gathering of Caribbean newspaper publishers in Montego Bay in 2000, and I was going to be flying over to Havana with several members of the U.S. Congress who were on the trip. But when they got called back to Washington for a surprise session of Congress, the Cuba jaunt was called off. But I still wanted to see Cuba, so I asked one of my assistants to see if he could get us there anyway. It turned out that I was allowed to go on a religious visa.
So I got onto a plane with three others from my group, and we landed in Havana, where they immediately took us to the Hotel Presidente and put us up in very nice suites. Right away, I put in a request to meet with President Fidel Castro. The officials who were minding us looked a bit skeptical, but they said they would try. We went to an international gathering of Communist leaders at the Karl Marx Auditorium. We saw Daniel Ortega, the former Nicaraguan president whom Ronald Reagan had been trying to overthrow in the Iran-contra scandal. We sat there for hours, watching the proceedings. The next day, we went back, and it was the same thing, sitting in that auditorium for hours. I was supposed to be leaving the next morning, so I figured the meeting with Castro was not going to happen. That evening, I was sitting out in the plaza of the hotel, listening to the group of musicians who walked around to entertain the tourists. A stranger came over to me and told me that I was to go to the convention center again the next morning before my three P.M. flight, but I should bring all of my luggage with me, because I was going to meet Castro on the way to the airport.
“But you cannot tell anyone traveling with you,” he cautioned me, which I thought was odd. He walked away without another word.
Next, I had a meeting with Rev. Lucius Walker, the progressive activist preacher who had started a group called Pastors for Peace, which focused on battling American imperialism abroad, fighting issues such as the trade embargo of Cuba and American policies in Latin America. Walker had been to Cuba many times to meet with Castro, so he briefed me on the protocol of such a meeting and once again warned me about telling the rest of my group about the meeting.
When we left the next morning, the guys in my group couldn’t understand why I made them bring all their luggage when we weren’t leaving until later in the day. We sat in the Karl Marx Auditorium for the third day in a row. But after about ninety minutes, a Cuban official came to get us and rushed us to a van, which drove us about a half hour to a modern building. We walked in and got into the elevator, which took us up to the second floor. When the doors opened, there was Fidel Castro, standing with his hands extended. I could hear the audible gasps of my delegation; they were stunned.
“I always wanted to meet you,” Fidel said to me.
After that, he spoke to me in Spanish through an interpreter. Over lunch, we talked about the ongoing election drama in the United States between George Bush and Al Gore. This was in November 2000, when Florida was counting ballots and the nation was fascinated by the specter of the “hanging chad.” Well, Fidel was fascinated, too. Clearly, the outcome of the election would have a significant impact on him and his nation—one can easily imagine that the last decade of Cuban life and politics would have looked much different if Gore had won. Fidel asked me who I wanted to win, Gore or Bush, although I’m sure he already knew my answer. I told him what the election tally looked like when we had left the States, but he had more up-to-date numbers from the previous hour, which he shared with me. That’s how closely he was watching the proceedings. He told me he was familiar with all my work on racial issues in America.
“We have the problem of race here in Cuba,” he stated.
“Really?” I asked, surprised that he would go there.
“I can bring you down to Santiago, where I grew up,” he said through the interpreter. “It’s mostly black people, and the people my complexion look down on them, even now under my rule. We have a problem of race all over the world.”
I was shocked to hear this from the world’s most famous Communist leader, an acknowledgment that his country was still fighting the evils of racism and colorism. But it reminded me that tribalism, classism, racism, and colorism are international problems, affecting humans in virtually every corner of the globe. In America, we need to move beyond a parochial view of African-American discrimination and start thinking about forming a global coalition. As a human rights activist, just as I am committed to fighting discrimination against gays and immigrants, I know I need to expand my perspective to fight against all discrimination, whether it’s Hutus against Tutsis, sexism and misogyny across the globe, or classism in Latin America.
As the most powerful nation in the world, America needs to set an example, to be a beacon for all on how to fight against these -isms that plague the globe, rather than reinforcing their inevitability.
In 2001, I traveled to southern Sudan—which is now a separate nation—to witness with my own eyes something that radio host Joe Madison had told me about: Sudanese people being sold into slavery. We flew into Nairobi, Kenya, where we were met by a group of guys who flew us in a propeller plane into southern Sudan. We had to go up and down four times to refuel and stay as surreptitious as possible, because we weren’t supposed to be there. We went out into the bush, where we stayed in a tent for two nights and witnessed the slave trading. I interviewed people on video with a translator, and they told me they were forced to work for nothing and that if they didn’t pray the way they were ordered to pray, they would be raped or have a finger cut off. This was black against black, African against African. So unless we have a global standard against tribalism, racism, and classism, our work as human rights activists is not done. Given the technology of today, it’s possible to have a global movement. I’ve spent many hours talking about this with Martin Luther King III, about how the ethic of love and equal justice must be fought for around the world. So on one level, we must work to cement the civil and human rights gains we’ve made in the past, but on another level, we must move outside the United States to join with these freedom campaigns across the world that we’ve seen in recent years. Nobody planned the Arab Spring; people demanded it.
Traveling outside of the United States can be an important agent in broadening our perspective about American problems. When Castro confessed that Cuba was struggling with colorism, it made me realize the issue isn’t unique to African-Americans, so perhaps we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves. But at the same time, we need to expand the conversation about how to solve these issues by including people of color around the world, in the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. And while we’re at it, we might include white people in the conversation, too, because ultimately, every person on the planet is affected when any of us is kept from reaching his or her potential, regardless of the reason.
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BEWARE OF THE DANGER OF EXTREMES
The need to establish relationships outside the borders of the United States and to fight extremism around the world was brought home to every American with undeni
able force on September 11, 2001, when my city was devastated by terrorists. I knew people who died in the World Trade Center. As a matter of fact, a young man who went to church with my kids lived with us after he lost his mother in the attack. I watched him every day slowly having to come to terms with the reality that his mother was not coming back. In the first few days, he jumped every time the phone rang, thinking it was his mother or the authorities telling him she had been found in the rubble and she was all right. After about three weeks, he finally started to accept the brutal fact that she was gone. It was heartbreaking. His mother had nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy. She didn’t make any decisions about what was going on in Iraq or Afghanistan. But everybody died in those towers—black, white, Latino, Asian, Jew, Arab. If you were in there, you were gone. It was an equal-opportunity devastation. I felt that we needed to make a statement against this recklessness, where people felt they could take the lives of others based on their own extreme beliefs.
When people are faced with instability, whether through economic crashes, military takeovers, or citizen uprisings such as the Arab Spring, they tend to run to extremes. They want to hold on to something that will make them feel empowered, will carry them through the storm, such as military might or religious fundamentalism. I believe that’s why we’ve seen this explosion in fundamentalist escapism in recent years; people want some help in standing on their own two feet. The leaders of these movements play on people’s fears and anxieties, rather than teaching them to be fearless and to grow with the changing times. What I’ve learned in traveling across the United States and the world and meeting with people during their times of trouble is that if you can find a way to endure the storm, it is always going to get better. There’s a bright sun on the other side. Don’t succumb to hate and militarism as a way to ease the pain. If you give in to the extremes, you won’t even know the sun has come out, because you will be too blinded to see it.
After the events of September 11, 2001, I called Mort Zuckerman, the owner and publisher of U.S. News and World Report and the New York Daily News, who at the time was chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. I told him I wanted to go to Israel. Because I had been a controversial figure in some Jewish circles, I thought it would be a powerful message if I went there to make a statement about how the world must stand together against terrorism, extremism, and the shedding of innocent blood. Zuckerman thought it was a great idea, and he arranged a formal invitation to me from the government of Israel. I would be hosted by Shimon Peres, the minister of foreign affairs at the time who became president of Israel in 2007. On the ten-hour flight to Israel, I saw that I was sitting in first class with Ehud Barak, who had just stepped down from his post as prime minister after losing to Ariel Sharon. I went over to speak with him.
Barak said to me with a laugh, “You know, I was thinking with me and you on the same flight, if the terrorists knew we were up here together—boom!”
The whole rest of the flight, I would jump every time the plane hit a bump, thinking to myself, Why did he have to joke like that?
After I landed and we were on our way to the King David Hotel, a car blew up about half a mile in front of us. That was normal life for them; it didn’t even seem to be that big a deal, which really exemplified for me the purpose of my visit. I saw all the important sites while I was there—the Holy Land, Calvary where Jesus was crucified, the Wailing Wall, the Holocaust Museum. I met with some of the Ethiopian Jews living there. I also met with many families who had lost family members to terrorism. But while I toured the country, I kept hearing the same message from various Israeli leaders: I needed to go over to the Palestinian side and also talk to them about fighting terrorism. But I was nervous about that, given the sensitivity of the American Jewish community and the knee-jerk tendency of the American media to stir up controversy. I remembered all the trouble Jesse Jackson got in back in ’79 when he hugged Yasser Arafat. In the middle of our meeting with Shimon Peres—I was traveling with a mixed delegation of blacks and Jews—Peres also implored me to meet with the Palestinians.
“You should denounce bin Laden and terrorism from the Arab side. You should go to Palestine,” he said.
“The right wing in America would distort it if I went over there,” I said. “They would say I’m united with the Palestinians.”
But Peres dismissed my concerns. “We will tell them we invited you.” I still wasn’t sure, but then he said, “It’s all arranged. You’re meeting at one o’clock with Yasser Arafat.”
“Huh? How am I doing that?”
“We’ve arranged it,” he repeated. “We’ve already informed your State Department and Secretary Colin Powell.”
I was taken aback quite a bit, but I knew it was best just to go along. Next thing I knew, my delegation was whisked in two vans to the Gaza border. We got out and waited in an office. About twenty-five minutes later, three fancy Mercedes-Benzes sent by Arafat pulled up. As we were getting into the cars, I teased the Israelis: “Arafat has better rides than y’all!”
Right away, we rode through some of the worst squalor I’ve ever seen, like something out of Dickens. But after about a half hour of driving, we came upon a neighborhood of fabulous beach homes, like spreads you’d see in Beverly Hills or Brentwood, California. We pulled up to a complex of buildings, and I saw about 100 cameramen and reporters thronging outside, waiting for me. I was stunned, wondering how you got together such a mammoth press delegation in the middle of the desert. I waded through the phalanx of journalists up to the second floor, where I saw two wing chairs sitting next to each other, with a couch on the side of each one. They gestured for me to sit in one of the chairs, and my delegation sat on the couch to my right. The Palestinian leaders sat on the other couch, leaving the other wing chair open.
After about ten minutes, French doors swung open, and Yasser Arafat walked into the room, dressed in full regalia. For a moment, I froze, unsure of my next move. If I got up to embrace him, I didn’t know if there were cameras in the room that would take the image and blow this whole meeting up. But at the same time, how do you not get up to greet him properly, the head of state in Palestine? Arafat stood there without saying anything, without looking at me, just a statue in the middle of the room. Finally, he sat down in the other wing chair, but he still didn’t do anything, and he still hadn’t looked at me. Now I was thoroughly confused. What am I supposed to be doing? After about a minute—which felt like ten—the French doors swung back open, and suddenly, all the photographers and cameramen appeared. When they were all in position for the shot, Arafat finally reached out his hand toward me. I was stumped again. Either I shake his hand and the pictures will follow me for a couple of years, or I don’t shake it and I’ve insulted a head of state in his own country—and I don’t know that we’ll get out of here! So I reached over and shook his hand. Did you really doubt that I would? Sure enough, the next day’s front page of the New York Post featured a picture of the two of us embracing. It didn’t matter that the Israelis set it up—the Post just wanted the salacious story, regardless of the facts.
Once Arafat dismissed the media, we quickly dived into an intense discussion about terrorism. He was vehemently opposed to the actions of Osama bin Laden.
“I denounced what happened in the World Trade Center,” he said. “You should tell people I donated blood to the victims. I consider it one of the most horrific acts in the history of mankind. I have rejected bin Laden misusing the Palestinian cause. What he did has nothing to do with Palestine. It had nothing to do with Islam.”
I was stunned by how against bin Laden he was. After about fifteen minutes of discussion, Arafat said, “Let’s have some lunch,” and the French doors swung open again. There was a huge table, where we all sat and dined on an eight-to-twelve-course meal—lentil soup, rice, lamb, chicken, lots of other delicious morsels. I sat facing Arafat; right next to him sat a member of my delegation, Sanford Rubenstein, the prominent Jewish la
wyer who had represented, among others, Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant who had been brutally abused by police in 1997 and who had just won an $8.75-million lawsuit against the city in July. Rubenstein kept asking Arafat about different food items.
Arafat pointed to a garlic dish. “This helps with potency. How old are you?” he asked Sanford.
When Rubenstein told him, Arafat said the dish would help with his virility. I’ll never forget that moment—the head of the PLO and this Jewish guy from Brooklyn, talking about how to stay virile. I said to myself, I guess there really is just one world.
