The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership (20 page)

In November 2012, we got clear and irrefutable evidence that Obama understood the community more than his critics did. Despite the attacks and the predicted fall-off in his black support, he got a huge turnout of black voters—in many states, more than in ’08. Not only did blacks come out to vote, but they stood in line for five or six hours to do it in some places. So at the end of the day, whom were the critics speaking for? What happened to all their threats? In the end, it appears that perhaps he understood more than they understood.

There’s no constituency group I’m aware of that doesn’t think the president could do more for them. Latinos ask why
they didn’t get the DREAM Act passed. The gay community asks why it took so long for him to support same-sex marriage, which he was not in favor of at the beginning of his administration. Everybody wants more. That’s the burden of the world’s biggest job.

As we look upon Obama’s second term, the black, Latino, union, gay, and progressive white communities need to understand that we are under siege. Even as the election showed that the country is changing and that we have more electoral power than ever before, that’s not reflected in the country’s policy-making right now. At last count, twenty-four states were considering right-to-work laws that could push unions into extinction. The Voting Rights Act was gutted by the Supreme Court when they removed Section 4 and it became a rallying cry for our 50th Anniversary National Action to Realize the Dream March on Washington. Several so-called swing states are considering changing their electoral college process from winner-take-all to proportional representation based on congressional districts—meaning a Republican presidential candidate could overwhelmingly lose the state’s popular vote but walk away with a majority of the electoral votes.
Roe v. Wade
is one case away from being squashed by the Supreme Court.

If the progressive community does not use the next four years under Obama to legislatively, and with executive action if necessary, cement what we have achieved, we will find ourselves in a very bad state. We must push Obama to help us salvage what we have already achieved in the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, and the gay rights movement.
Otherwise, the next president will be looking at a landscape that resembles 1950s America. We must activate every resource we have—from mass marches to boycotts to petition drives—to come together. We must use technology, too, as in recent movements around the world. The president can be a major ally as we undertake this—but only if we don’t waste a lot of time indulging our egos and making him the enemy. If we get caught up in the pettiness, I fear we will look back in twenty years and wonder why we didn’t take advantage of so many opportunities to get more done when he was in office. And while we look back with regret, our grandchildren by law will not even have the rights and legal protections we have. What a sad day that would be.

As for me, I’m not going to be bogged down in the mire of people condemning me for having access to the White House. After all, as I said before, other black leaders before me didn’t let such critiques keep them from pushing forward, so I must do the same. There’s never been a day in our history when every black leader agreed on everything—proving total unanimity isn’t necessary to get things done. Complete unity and harmony would be wonderful, but it wouldn’t be wise for me to waste time and energy yearning for something that we’ve never had before.

And none of us should forget the importance of asking for what we want, whether from the president of the United States or from a spouse sitting across the table. Not the president, not our boss, not even our loved ones can read our minds.

I
t wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I connected my obesity to the traumas I experienced when I was a child. Before that moment of introspection, I had a list of rationalizations that I would wield like a nimble flyswatter, batting away any questions or ridicule connected to my weight.

Oh, they just don’t understand black church culture . . .

Black preachers are supposed to be overweight—it makes the congregation more comfortable . . .

What, am I going to be rude and turn down all the meals I get offered as a leader of the black church?

In other words, I didn’t see my weight as a problem. It was just a part of me, one of the essential elements of Al Sharpton, minister and civil rights leader.

Anyone who is familiar with the black church knows that the church world is based first on a solid bedrock of God. And
not far behind is food. Eating soul food, eating all the wrong foods in terms of a healthy diet, was the norm. I’m talking about fried chicken three times a day—in the morning with grits and eggs for breakfast, a fried chicken sandwich for lunch in the afternoon, and half a chicken at night for dinner.

When I started getting heavy as a youngster, I didn’t have to worry about standing out. As I said, in the world of the black church, being heavy was not uncommon; in fact, it was almost expected, particularly among ministers. Most of the ministers I saw were large, to the point where if they weren’t, people would think they were unhealthy. The pride of many church folk was to have the minister come eat at their house, where they would keep heaping food on his plate. As I moved through my teens and became more well known, preaching at churches all over the Northeast, I started getting those dinner invitations. People were constantly feeding me, and it certainly was not proper to turn the invitations down. And when you sat down at their table, you couldn’t tell them to stop piling on the food—not as if I would have wanted them to stop, anyway. In my spare time, I began hanging out with other preachers, men who had no discipline at all about eating.

It only got worse—much worse—when I went out on the road with James Brown when I was eighteen. For those of you who have never done any extensive traveling with a musician, let me draw a picture of life on the road with the Godfather of Soul. You’re literally going from plane to hotel to venue to hotel to plane, and then you do the same thing over again the next day. When you come back to the hotel at about midnight
after the performance, you order room service—probably something fried, with lots of starches—and then you go to bed on a full stomach. Remember, this was in the early ’70s. Hotels didn’t even have fitness centers yet, if you were inclined to try to get in a workout. But doing a workout never crossed my mind, anyway.

One day I woke up, and I was 300 pounds.

Well, that’s what I’m guessing I weighed—I didn’t take any kind of self-inventory that would involve getting on a scale. In fact, nearly two decades would pass before I actually got on a scale. When I got stabbed in Bensonhurst in 1991, they weighed me in the hospital, and I was more than 300 pounds.

Starting in my teen years, I was in the bubble of the church world and the entertainment world, spending all my time with friends or church folk, so even the women I was going to date or eventually marry came out of a small circle that was preordained. There was nothing to make me look at myself critically or even to think about the big belly I was carrying around.

But one day, when my daughter Ashley was about five, she looked up at me with the innocent, curious eyes of a child and asked, “Daddy, why are you so fat?”

Suddenly, faced with a simple enough question from my child, all those black-church rationalizations sounded silly. In that moment, I began my long journey to become a living embodiment of the things I preached: the need for personal discipline and to hold human life in high regard, which, for me, started with prioritizing my personal health.

When I became a mainstream figure in New York in the 1980s, my weight was one of the first things that people would use to parody me. I was quite the compelling target, with the sweat suits and medallions and long, flowing, pressed hair. But despite the cartoonish depictions that would appear in tabloids such as the
New York Post
—even a memorable frontpage picture in the
Post
showing me in the chair at the beauty salon with rollers in my hair—I still wasn’t bothered by the mocking. I was still a product of that black-church bubble, still spent most of my time with church folk and religious leaders, so it was easy to dismiss it all. Even when a lot of my friends started becoming health-conscious, I would just tell myself that was part of their idiosyncrasies. Some people smoked; they ate healthy food.

But then came those fateful words from my daughter, asking me why I was so fat. And I started looking inward, asking myself some tough questions. What answer could I give a five-year-old that would make sense? I couldn’t tell her she just didn’t understand church culture, or, even worse, would I be inadvertently resigning her to an obese future, since church culture was her culture, too? How could I tell her that? At that moment, I began to wonder,
Wait a minute, what am I projecting to my kids?
I spent much of my life looking for a father figure. Now I was the father figure for my girls—what image was I giving them?

Those questions stunned me. I had never stopped to think about these things before, had never considered the entirety of the image I was projecting to the world.
Am I that reckless, both
in terms of language and appearance?
I started to reevaluate what I wanted to look like, what I wanted to project and say to the world. So I went back to the books.

Dr. King and Nelson Mandela were devoted to discipline. They saw leadership not as something that was segmented, compartmentalized in a specific slot of their lives—which is what I had been doing, in a sense—but as something that needed to run through every aspect of their lives. Mandela was a boxer, an athlete who maintained his health so well during his twenty-seven years in prison that he was able to walk out of there erect and in great shape, and he remained vibrant well into his nineties. Dr. King wrestled with his weight—no doubt from being ensconced in the church world—but he would never let himself get out of control with it.

And just as important, both of them thought a lot about the temperament of leadership, controlling your mind and your mouth, in addition to your body. I had put in many sacrifices, had my life endangered by being stabbed, had been getting attacked for many years, but I still hadn’t given enough attention to the temperament of leadership, the rhetorical discipline. It dawned on me, reading about these great men, that if I wanted to go to the next level, I needed to take control of my mouth—both what I put into it and what I allowed to come out of it. What I ate and what I said. And I could only do that by controlling my mind, controlling my appetites. To me, that became the path to greatness; it was the only way I could go from being a famous leader to being a great leader.

While I thought compartmentalizing was working for me,
this time of study and introspection revealed to me that it wasn’t working. We’re all one person. We may have many facets to our personalities, but I saw that they are all connected. The image you project publicly and the way you treat yourself—it’s all tied together.

This message started to find its way into my sermons and the words I was delivering to the black community. I began to preach about the need to be consistent and disciplined in all aspects of our lives. You can’t preach about the abundant life and then tell people to go downstairs into the church cafeteria and kill themselves. In effect, to dig their graves with their teeth. This transformation made me think more deeply about the way food dominated the black church community and even to think more analytically about the food itself. For example, what we call soul food came out of a slave culture. We had to eat heavy meals because we worked in the fields all day and night. So when you’re working in the fields from sunup to can’t-see, doing grueling manual labor, you not only need to eat certain foods to give you strength, but you will sweat away thousands of calories every day. Now most of us spend our days behind a laptop in an office. Clearly, that can’t be compared to working in the cotton fields in Alabama. So the diet our great-grandmothers and great-grandfathers needed to survive in the fields, probably burning upward of 3,000 to 4,000 calories a day, is totally inappropriate today, completely antithetical to our dietary needs when we work behind a desk, burning next to nothing.

We’re no longer slaves. I preach a sermon based on
Galatians 4, where Paul is trying to advise the Galatians to stop acting as if they are still in slavery. Black people are corporate CEOs now, governors, even president of the United States—so why do you still have a slave diet? African-Americans would be quick to attack someone who spoke to us as slaves—but then, when it’s time to eat, please hand me the slave lunch menu. Either we are the twenty-first-century children of those who rose to the unbelievable levels we have achieved, with everything from the menus to the habits and social life that goes with our status, or we are not. You can’t go backward and forward at the same time. These are the thoughts I had to come to terms with as I did an inventory on my life, my thinking, and my diet.

This is one of the great challenges for the black community and the black church—and also for the Latino community and poor Southern whites, too—if we are going to rise up and fight against people looking at us as if we are nothing and treating us as if our lives are without worth. If we are going to battle to insist that our lives have merit, have value, then how are we going to proceed to kill ourselves with our own diet?

The basic fact underlying all my work is that every human life has value. But how can I preach the value of human life and at the same time preach that it doesn’t matter what you do to your human life with your diet? I knew I couldn’t have it both ways. You can’t say it’s all right to kill yourself with diabetes and hypertension and high blood pressure and obesity but still parade around telling everyone to value all human life. If you value life, you have to value it in all ways. At least, that’s what
I came to believe about my own life. So that made me act to take control of my diet.