When playing for Barry Switzer’s Oklahoma Sooners, J.C. Watts was considered one of the best option quarterbacks in the game, insofar as he had the smarts to know exactly when to hold it, fold it, toss it away or run with the ball. Those same smarts translated to votes when Watts ran for Congress in a predominantly White district in 1994, therefore the Republican Party’s hierarchy was shocked when their only Black face in a high place suddenly dropped the ball and announced he would no longer play on an uneven political playing field.

Within minutes after Watts, the House’s fourth-ranking GOP leader and the only Black Republican in Congress announced that he wouldn’t seek re-election, shockwaves rippled throughout the Grand Old Party. “It’s going to be a big loss for the party,” said GOP pollster Linda DiVall. Meanwhile, American’s Democrat Party addicted Black leadership, as well as the GOP’s angry White males are scratching their collective heads wondering why a nice guy like J.C. Watts no longer wants his handsome Black face in a political high place.

Perhaps, 44-year-old Watts’ move surprised many made in America Africans who truly believed he was living the American Dream. On the other hand, 48-year-old Cornell West, an Ivy League professor, who warned America of a “quiet riot” while speaking at Rice University on Feb. 7, 1997, certainly wasn’t surprised.

Nor was African-American News&Issues. We have published several articles revealing that our young people (raised with Christian values) are beginning to wake up to the reality that the America Dream only exist in Black America intelligentsia’s slumbering consciousness. West, perhaps America’s foremost authority on educated, young Black Americans’ mindsets, validated our suspicions on Tavis Smiley’s talk show.

He recently stepped down from his prestigious position as professor of Afro-American studies at Harvard University, and warned at the time “racial tensions in the United States will not ease unless they are understood in terms of human evil.” After years of speaking candidly about racism in America from an academia’s perspective, he shocked Harvard’s hierarchy almost as much as Watts impacted the GOP. He is now teaching at Princeton, after publicly expressing his disaffection for Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard’s new president.

On a much smaller scale, Watts and West represent what is happening all over America. Quietly, but consistently, African-American’s best and brightest, who once truly embraced the American Dream, seem to have become disenchanted with the nation’s leadership. They seem to be pondering if the worm causes the apple’s core to rot or does the rot create the worm.
For sure, they have learned the hard truth that changing a system from within, is as much a myth as Blacks ever being ceded first class citizenship, or receiving the same respect as White Americans. Although we’re not a monolithic people, that old cliché (it makes no different how rich, smart or saintly Black people are, in essence, they still are just another Black boy or gal), still rings true in 2002 America.

Nevertheless, it is not glass ceilings, institutionalized racism, less pay for more work, or even personal dignity that is causing Black America’s best and brightest to walk away from prestigious jobs in corporate America and lofty positions in government or public service. Truth is, the haves are beginning to realize why their brothers and sisters have not.
History records that Black youths at the forefront of the civil rights movements in the late 50s and 60s, responded to America’s unyielding inequality and oppressive injustice. They lost faith in the system.

And for the same reason today’s Black achievers have lost faith in the American Dream. For sure, young civil rights militants like Angela Davis, H. Rap Brown, Kwame Ture (nee Stokely Carmichael), Elridge Cleaver, or even Jesse Jackson were bright young people who could have easily conformed and performed to fare very well in mainstream America.
Conversely, they were young idealist, who suddenly realized that they were actually tokens helping an oppressive nation, oppress their people. It was a matter of conscience. Or dare we suggest African roots?

For sure, affirmative action had created a generation of privilege Blacks, who were able to educate their kids in prestigious schools, the same as mainstream America. It was easy for successful Blacks to have second thoughts about the American Dream. Surely, Watts wasn’t politicking, but speaking from his heart when he goaded Black Democrats and civil rights leaders as being “race hustlers” and “poverty pimps.”

J.C. made it abundantly clear in his keynote address at the 1996 Republican Convention, how he felt. He preached family values and self-help, as opposed to welfare and public housing. He felt the American Dream, indeed, was within reach of every citizen who lives in the land of the free. He thought the same as the great broadcast journalism Ed Shannon who says, “America is a cornucopia of opportunity. All we have to do is reach in and grab some.”
That philosophy is easy to sell when all is well on Wall Street. Nonetheless, hard times, i.e., recessions, 9/11 and exposing the corruption in corporate America has changed many right-thinking Blacks’ perspective. Denial aside, young Blacks have become more conscious of the salient fact that when a nation is controlled by evil in high places, it ultimately has an evil agenda.

An evil agenda that many young brothers and sisters simply don’t want to be part of. Young Blacks are actually quitting good paying jobs that require them to contribute to their own people’s nightmare, so that greedy, inhumane people can enjoy the great American Dream. No longer willing to sell their souls to the devil, many of those bright young minds have blended into the Hip Hop culture.

It’s no secret that several of the more successful Hip Hop moguls have Ivy League degrees. Meanwhile, it is entirely possible that Watts got his first insight into what “dirty tricks” politics was really all about when the Republicans made the fatal mistake of exposing Clinton’s tryst with Monica. Ergo, they violated the “partying politicians”’ agreement that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones.

Honor among thieves aside, it got even worse when a desperate GOP actually stole the election. It is highly possible that the Florida fiasco became a defining moment for Watts, no doubt raised to be a Christian, who decided, “Blesseth is the man that walketh not in the counsel for the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful.”