Why? In part, it’s because Mandela is unique. Few Americans have ever had the opportunity, let alone the courage, to make the kind of sacrifices in the defense of their beliefs that Mandela has. As a young man he gave up a career as a lawyer to join i the fight against apartheid. He went to jail rather than renounce his conviction that blacks had a right to battle racial oppression with armed struggle. He stayed there for 27 years–enduring hard labor, separation from his family, health problems–rather than accept a deal attaching conditions to his release. Most black Americans want fervently to embrace Mandela as a moral symbol and would prefer not to wrestle with the troubling questions that some of his positions (the support for Arafat and Kaddafi, the continued refusal to renounce violence) raise.
Whether Mandela is viewed as a saint or as a sometimes fallible crusader, no African-American leader today can match his stature. The last one who did was Martin Luther King Jr., by virtue not only of the gospel of justice he preached but the principled means he used to fight for it. Since then, Jesse Jackson and other black leaders have tried to wrap themselves in King’s mantle, but their sometimes uplifting messages have all too often been tinged with grating self-promotion. Other civil-rights leaders like Georgia’s Andy Young and John Lewis have gone into local elective politics–a necessary next step in the road to black advancement, but one that inevitably requires compromises of principle and leaves them open to the same partisan sniping and innate public suspicion that greets any pol in the United States.
Yet the leadership gap shouldn’t be blamed entirely on a shortage of inspiring public figures. The problems African-Americans face today just aren’t as susceptible to dramatic acts of statesmanship as the struggle in South Africa. Some blacks have seized on Mandela’s visit to proclaim that apartheid exists in America, too. That kind of overheated rhetoric belittles all the work blacks and whites in this country have done to right the most dramatic wrongs–legal segregation and disenfranchisement–that blacks in South Africa continue to battle. Blacks at all levels in America still encounter subtle and not-so-subtle forms of discrimination and the black underclass is still mired in a tragic predicament that goes beyond racism to fundamental issues of class and values. But these are complicated and deep-seated problems that compelling leaders, even if we had them, could do only so much to address.
Acts of heroism: Other problems that have held blacks back–the decline of public education, the limits of mobility on the job–also don’t lend themselves easily to earth-shaking oratory or bold strokes of legislation. If anything, they require small and unheralded acts of heroism: the teacher who finds a way to get through to inner-city kids; the black manager or official who uses his position to help other blacks. So as Mandela ends his visit, African-Americans who care about the struggle in South Africa must make sure it doesn’t exhaust all of their moral energy. We need to save some of it to confront our failings at home–and realize that in these struggles, we can’t expect to find leaders like Nelson Mandela to show the way.
