Over at Cobb, I've gotten into a thread about when whitefolks should or should not shutup when it comes to blackfolks politics.
I think one thing that distinguishes black politics from white is that with black politics there is always some extra-governmental organization involved with oversight and brainstorming. Thus the people are generally more concerned with the practical aspects of where the benefits hit the street.
So there's always going to be a demand for your physical presence when it comes to credibility in black politics. It is always assumed that if you are not doing the grass roots thing, showing up in person, then you're not serious about uplift. Just having an opinion, whether it's correct or not, is not sufficient because the assumption is that if the System worked then there would be no need for black politics at all.
'White' people are assumed to be part of the System. They are not on the ground where the [black] people's needs are met. So people who present ideas in the abstract and then defer to systems of oversight which are not physically present in the 'hood, lose all their credibility. Whitefolks and other outsiders default to the powers that be. When dealing with this attitude of black politics, the last thing people want to hear is that there is some bureacracy somewhere whose job it is to take care of the matters up for discussion. Again, the presumption is that blackfolks' political aspirations are not represented in that bureacracy, because if it were the System would work. But the System is, for all intents and purposes, evil and the representation of institutional racism.
I think it's interesting that these assumptions of black politics put blacks who climb the ladder in government in the peculiar position of having two masters. Somehow, they are expected to report their activities back to the Struggle. If they don't, they become agents of the System, never to be trusted.
This is the same issue that Cosby has, which he may or may not have overcome. The test remains the same. Where physically are you, and if the answer is not in the bottom three tiers of my five-way African American demographic (hill, 'burb, 'hood, ghetto, projects), then you don't have credibility in black politics today.
This is not a good thing, but I don't think that it's necessarily bad. Rather, I am trying to see it as a structural distinction in democratic political organization born of the unique circumstances of African Americans.