l Sharpton deserved the moment, and it made me sick. He was so key in getting Al Gore and Bill Bradley to commit to Monday's debate in Harlem at the Apollo Theater that he got to ask the first question, with credits from moderator Bernard Shaw. Shaw said Sharpton ''has played an instrumental role in bringing about this dialogue in Harlem.''
So there was Sharpton, the leadoff batter for black people. He stood in a pinstriped suit with a hip collar so high up on his neck that you know it was one of those garments that pro athletes grab off the rack for one usage and then give to Goodwill. His James Brown process was nicely draped back with a brunette shine that could have come only with the help of Du Pont. You could not miss his perfectly quadruple-folded white pocket hankerchief.
Sharpton asked the right question. He asked Gore and Bradley what they would do about police brutality and racial profiling. It was the right question, but was he the right questioner?
Later in the debate, Gore showed he had studied for Black History Month by citing several civil rights anniversaries.
Gore said that, and then I thought of Sharpton in his pinstripes. Did black people fight so hard and die so many deaths for equality so that we could produce our own Pat Buchanans, Richard Nixons, and George W. Bushes?
Sharpton is the black folks' Nixon for stoking the 1988 lie that Tawana Brawley was kidnapped and raped by white men. He is the black folks' Buchanan for his isolationist views, complaining far more about the black boy killed by a Jewish driver in 1991 than the Jewish man who was killed soon after by a black man in apparent street mob retaliation.
In the mid-1990s, he used his radio show to call a Harlem storeowner a ''white interloper.'' One guest on his show said, ''We are going to see that this cracker suffers. Reverend Sharpton is on it.'' The protests against the store ended in an armed, arson attack that killed eight people.
But like Buchanan, who has maintained some political clout, or Nixon, who had his reputation as a liar repaired in time for his funeral, and even like George W. Bush and John McCain, who may reach the White House despite pandering to white racist elements in South Carolina, Sharpton has avoided a permanent oblivion. He now has credibility.
Despite his poor people skills with white America, Sharpton has a timing and a feel for injustice against black people as impeccable as his hair and hanky. During an economic boom in which the gulf grew between the haves and have-nots, and in a city whose police still assault black people in grotesque ways, Sharpton found it easy to mobilize the anger of the have-nots.
When both political parties ignored black people in New York, he ran for the Senate and for mayor, getting a surprising number of votes. It did not matter to the have-nots that Sharpton was a professional protester who brags, ''I am not an ambulance chaser. I am the ambulance.''
It did not matter that he was a dream for many in the white media, a quotable ''black leader'' who was easy to dismiss as a buffoon. It did not matter that the mothers of Amadou Diallo and Darrell Cabey (the boy paralyzed by the gratuitious subway gunfire of Bernhard Goetz in the mid-1980s) sought distance from Sharpton when he began drawing more attention to himself than their pain and calls for healing.
None of that mattered because no one screamed ''No justice, no peace'' as he did. He screams so well that during his civil disobedience protests of the police shooting of Diallo, 100 rabbis and rabbinical students were among those arrested. Abner Louima, the victim of the gross, 1997 assault by New York police, said Sharpton was ''there when no one knew who I was, to restore my dignity and to give me the confidence to move forward.''
To that degree, white politicians have to shoulder some responsibility for Sharpton's rise from his racist ashes. Had they cleaned up the police and moved forward on economic development there would be no perceived need by the have-nots for a Sharpton. Sharpton would not enjoy a clout in which Gore, Bradley, and Hillary Rodham Clinton must go through him to get to the have-nots.
But even though one can successfully argue that Sharpton's existence is due to white racism and even though millions of white people seem comfortable with race panderers running for the White House, Sharpton's mimicking of mainstream gutter politics is still nauseating.
It never occurred to me that after centuries of struggle for equality, the top black power broker in the 2000 New York Democratic primaries would be a man whose toxic past would shame Du Pont. It cannot be of a great comfort, given the moral high ground on racism black people held for so long, to have a lead-off batter whose home runs for justice come with wild strikeouts or an ambulance that kills as many causes as it saves.
Sharpton may be a hit with his home crowd. He may even ask the right questions. He himself is not the ambulance or the answer.
Derrick Z. Jackson is a Globe columnist.
