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New York Times Attempts to Define
and Dictate Black Politics
By Glen
Ford
The New York Times,
the nation‘s preeminent corporate mouthpiece,
has unabashedly called for the dissolution of
independent Black politics in the United States.
Although the paper's Sunday magazine cover story
may seem at first skim to be simply an overlong
paean to Barack Obama, its intent goes way
beyond the presidential race, and is embedded in
the title: "Is Obama the End of Black Politics?"
Author Matt Bai and his employers fervently hope
the answer is, Yes.
The wishful headline sits
atop a pile of false assumptions and outright
untruths about contemporary and historical Black
politics. Hardly a cogent set of facts can be
found in the entire piece; it is comprised
almost wholly of unsubstantiated assertions
mixed with non-sequiturs in quotation marks. But
the thrust is quite clear: African Americans
have not only outgrown group politics, as
supposedly proven by Obama's march to -
rather than on - the White House, but
Obama's brand of "race-neutrality" shows that
Black politics is obsolete, and should be
abandoned.
To arrive at such a racially
presumptuous conclusion, Bai must build on
several false or debatable premises that have
nevertheless become accepted wisdom among the
corporate media:
The only authentic
Black politics is electoral politics.
Mass movements, direct action and other
non-electoral strategies are relics of the past,
and rightly so. More Black faces in high places
automatically equals Black progress, regardless
of the political content of these
office-holders' policies. It is an
unquestionable sign of general Black progress
when African American candidates gain white
support.
Black solidarity must
decline and ultimately fade away as a
political motivator as opportunities for (some)
African Americans expand. A growing Black middle
class inevitably leads to increased Black
political conservatism. Blacks have no
legitimate reasons to pursue political
solidarity except those directly related to the
upward mobility of their class.
A unique and
pronounced age gap exists in Black America,
that stands in the way of "transition" to a less
confrontational, more cooperative society.
(Black elders are the bottleneck in this
regard.) Young Blacks are politically more
mature than older Blacks, since they are further
removed from the events of the Sixties and thus
are not plagued by disturbing memories.
Based on these assumptions,
Times readers may conclude that African
Americans who struggle for group rights and
objectives are behaving like superannuated
dodderers in their second childhoods. Matt Bai
thinks so. The following sentence gives new
meaning to the term, convoluted reasoning:
"For a lot of younger
African-Americans, the resistance of the civil
rights generation to Obama's candidacy signified
the failure of their parents to come to terms,
at the dusk of their lives, with the success of
their own struggle - to embrace the idea that
black politics might now be disappearing into
American politics in the same way that the Irish
and Italian machines long ago joined the
political mainstream."
Amazing, isn't it, that Bai
and his ilk purport to know more about Black
youth and their elders than the two Black age
cohorts know about each other? Indeed, if we are
to follow Bai's logic to its natural conclusion,
whites understand and communicate with young
Blacks better than Black parents do. It all
makes sense once you accept the assumption that
young Blacks think more like whites than their
parents, whose minds have been deformed by too
close exposure to the nightmarish Sixties,
during which time they became distrustful of
white people, and have never recovered.
Fortunately, we can dismiss
Bai's assault on Black elders out of hand, since
it relies on facts nowhere in evidence. Where
are the graying Black legions that are resisting
Obama's candidacy as a bloc? Every Black
demographic, no matter how you slice it, is
overwhelmingly pro-Obama for president. How
could it not be so, with the Black Obama vote in
the late primaries hitting 90 - 95 percent! For
every aging Black radical (like myself) who
refuses to drink the Obama'Laid, there are eight
of his peers with Obama signs on their front
lawns, and three octogenarians thanking God they
have lived long enough to vote for such an
attractive, well-spoken young Black man who
might actually become president.
Such is the near-irresistible
pull of race, and race solidarity - the
uncontainable pressure of the pent-up
aspirations of centuries, finally finding vent -
in this election cycle.
"The writer must
maintain the fiction of a general age chasm
dividing Black Americans, or the theory on the
inevitable extinction of Black politics, does
not work."
Bai followed his assumptions
off a cliff with the "old Black folks don't like
Obama" idea. But he must maintain the fiction of
a general age chasm dividing Black Americans, or
the theory on the inevitable extinction of Black
politics, does not work. And it must work, since
Bai opens his piece with an attempt to prove
that age was an important factor in the early,
dead-even split in the Congressional Black
Caucus (CBC) between Clinton and Obama
supporters. Presumably, the 15 Clinton
supporters were among those elders who "could
not come to terms, at the dusk of their lives,
with the success of their own struggle." An
equal number were committed to Obama; the rest,
undecided.
As it turned out, there was
no chronological or ideological pattern in the
CBC's Clinton/Obama lineup, in early January.
Charles Rangel (NY), the oldest Member, was in
the Clinton column. John Conyers (MI), the
second-oldest, opted for Obama. Barbara Lee,
among the most consistently progressive Members,
backed Clinton, but so did David Scott (GA),
once dubbed "The
Worst Black Congressman" for his relatively
rightwing voting habits. Bobby Rush, the former
Black Panther who, according to Bai's reasoning,
should have been the most "resistant" to Obama's
neutralism on race, was in his fellow
Chicagoan's corner.
The CBC presidential
breakdown had little or nothing to do with age,
or with any issues of deep substance, for that
matter. Members aligned themselves at that early
date based on considerations of money, petty
faction, geography, and the betting odds.
Until Obama's victory in
Iowa, polls showed the Black vote still very
much in play. Only when African Americans were
confident that large numbers of whites would
vote for Obama did they massively align with the
Black candidate - and then they quickly became a
bloc. Nowhere is there evidence of a decisive
schism - certainly not around age. No matter.
The New York Times and its corporate
sisters make up facts as they go along, to
justify prefabricated theories on how Black
folks behave.
Here's where Bai came closest
to getting anything right:
"The generational transition
that is reordering black politics didn't start
this year. It has been happening, gradually and
quietly, for at least a decade, as younger
African-Americans, Barack Obama among them, have
challenged their elders in traditionally black
districts. What this year's Democratic
nomination fight did was to accelerate that
transition."
A change has come
over Black politics in the last decade, and it
does involve the entrance of a
relatively young crop of Black politicians.
However, the decisive factor here is not age,
but money. Corporate America made a strategic
decision to become active players in Black
Democratic politics - an arena they had largely
avoided in post-Sixties decades. In 2002, the
corporate Right fielded and heavily funded three
Black Democratic candidates for high profile
offices in majority Black contests. Two of them,
Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Alabama Congressman
Artur Davis, are featured in Matt Bai's
Times article. (No surprise there: the duo
appear in every corporate media article
celebrating the rise of the new, young, Black,
corporate politician.) The third Big Business
favorite, Denise Majette, has since slipped back
into political obscurity.
Booker, then a first term
city councilman, was (and remains) a darling of
the vast political network centered around the
far-right Bradley Foundation, of Milwaukee,
Wisconsin. George Bush calls Bradley his
"favorite foundation" - as well he should, since
Bradley and its think tanks developed the GOP's
faith-based initiatives and private school
vouchers strategies. Booker became a star of the
Bradley-subsidized vouchers "movement." (See "Fruit
of the Poisoned Tree," Black Commentator,
April 5, 2002.) In his first, unsuccessful run
for Newark City Hall, Booker far outspent
four-term Mayor Sharpe James - the most powerful
Black politician in the state - but was narrowly
defeated when his ties to school vouchers and
far-right money were revealed. Booker was
endorsed by every corporate media outlet in the
New York metropolitan area, thanks to the
ministrations of Bradley's media-savvy think
tank, the Manhattan Institute. Booker captured
the office easily in 2006, after amassing an
even bigger war chest, when Mayor James declined
to run. (James was later convicted on corruption
charges and sentenced to 27 months in prison.)
Less than a month later,
former Birmingham prosecutor Artur Davis, then
34, made a second run against veteran
Congressman Earl Hilliard, in a 62 percent Black
district. Davis had been badly beaten by
Hilliard in the Democratic primary in 2000. This
time, he outspent Hilliard by
more than 50 percent - with the vast bulk of
his funds raised outside the district. Davis won
a minority of the Black vote to beat Hilliard.
Two months later, in August
2002, the corporate-funded juggernaut rolled
into Atlanta, Georgia, where five-term
Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney faced former
Black Republican Denise Majette in an open
Democratic primary. Majette's bankroll dwarfed
McKinney's. Majette was also backed by every
corporate media outlet in the region - and far
beyond.
The massed national corporate
press turned the McKinney-Majette contest into a
national story, an opportunity to refine their
collective "analysis" of post-Sixties Black
politics. Majette would win, they agreed,
because McKinney's "Sixties-style" politics were
unsuited to her suburban Atlanta district, the
second most affluent Black district in the
country. The corporate media declared with
certainty (but with no facts to buttress the
claim) that the African American middle class
was becoming more conservative, and a younger
generation yearned for a break from the
confrontations of the past.
Majette won, but with only
about
17 percent of the Black vote; she was the
white choice. McKinney, the fiery progressive,
was the overwhelming favorite among Blacks in a
district that was the perfect test for the
corporate media's theories on Black politics.
They were proven wrong, but a useful lie trumps
inconvenient facts. Through repetition in a
monoculture corporate media, lies become
truisms.
Matt Bai's Sunday Times
article is based on the same fact-devoid theory
of Black rightward political drift and a yawning
age divide. Even before his national debut at
the 2004 Democratic convention, Barack Obama
joined Cory Booker, Artur Davis, and then Rep.
Harold Ford Jr. (TN) - once George Bush's
favorite Black congressperson - as exhibits in
an endless series of "New Black Politics"
articles, each one a clone of the last. This is
what Bai mistakenly calls "the generational
transition that is reordering black politics."
It's not about age at all - other than that the
young are hungrier and more malleable than their
elders, and thus better prospects to march under
the corporate colors.
Barack Obama does pose a dire
threat to the coherence of Black politics, but
not for Matt Bai's reasons. Obama's presidential
bid is inseparable from the ongoing corporate
money-and-media campaign to confuse and
destabilize the Black polity - an offensive
begun in earnest in 2002. Obama, a prescient and
uncannily talented opportunist, understood which
way the corporate wind was blowing at least a
decade earlier, and methodically readied himself
for the role of his life.
To the extent that African
Americans expect more from Obama than they got
from Bill Clinton, they will be devastatingly
disappointed. His candidacy has at least
temporarily caused Black folks to behave en
masse as if there are no issues at stake in the
election other than an Obama victory. It is
altogether unclear how long this spell-like
effect will last. The short-term prospects for
rebuilding a coherent Black politics, are
uncertain. But one thing we do know: the
formation of a near-unanimous Black bloc for
Obama - of which he is absolutely unworthy - is
stunning evidence that the Black imperative to
solidarity is undiminished. Unfortunately, the
wrong guy is the beneficiary - but in a sense,
that's beside the point. Black people are not
working themselves into an election year frenzy
just to commit political suicide by disbanding
as a bloc, no matter what Matt Bai and his ilk
say.
It is at least possible that
a new era of agitation and militant organization
might follow the monster come-down that must
descend on Black folks, either from an Obama
defeat in November or, if victorious, through
his ultimate (and early) betrayal of Black
self-generated hopes. But there is absolutely no
reason to believe that African Americans will
emerge from the experience in a mood to fold up
their collective, consciously Black political
tent. Matt Bai is only able to envision such an
outcome because he refuses to admit that the
racial problem in the United States is caused by
white folks. Institutional racism is engrained
white behavior. The Black prison Gulag is a
white creation. Double unemployment and
one-tenth wealth are the products of white
privilege. White people constantly replenish
Black aspirations for self-determination: for a
Black politics.
Bai pretends that he is
genuinely concerned about how Blacks will fare
in the "transition" from Black politics:
"Several black operatives and
politicians with whom I spoke worried,
eloquently, that an Obama presidency might
actually leave black Americans less well
represented in Washington rather than more so -
that, in fact, the end of black politics, if
that is what we are witnessing, might also mean
the precipitous decline of black influence.
"The argument here is that a
President Obama, closely watched for signs of
parochialism or racial resentment, would have
less maneuvering room to champion spending on
the urban poor, say, or to challenge racial
injustice. What's more, his very presence in the
Rose Garden might undermine the already tenuous
case for affirmative action in hiring and school
admissions."
First, African Americans
should believe Obama when he repeatedly assures
whites that he does not recognize Black claims
to redress for past grievances, and has little
tolerance for race-based remedies of any kind.
There can be no expectation of a net increase in
Blacks' ability to alter societal power
relationships with Obama in the White House. (A
Black president might make some difference, but
not that Black president.)
And yes, there will be a
white backlash - there always is - even though
Blacks in general may materially gain nothing
from Obama's change of address. White backlashes
are beyond Black control. But they sometimes
spur African Americans to greater organizational
efforts. At any rate, Black don't need faux
sympathy from Matt Bai and the New York
Times. They're part of the reason there
will always be Black politics.
BAR executive editor Glen Ford
can be contacted at
Glen.Ford@BlackAgendaReport.com This e-mail address is being protected from
spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view
it .
Source:
Black Agenda Report
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Is Obama the End of Black
Politics? Lord, No
By Mel Reeves
Through its
Sunday magazine, the New York Times asks, "Is
Obama the end of black politics?" The most
obvious problem with the question is that it
assumes that electoral politics is the primary
form of black political struggle. Some
clarification is in order.
Most of the
struggle for black politics or a black piece of
the pie has taken place outside of electoral
politics. Rather, the most significant black
struggle has occurred in the streets. The long
list of black heroes in the quest for justice
and equality in the US—the real black
politics—includes very few politicians. In fact,
if asked to name black heroes off the top of
their heads, most blacks would instantly
nominate Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm
X—neither of whom held elective office. If you
asked most blacks to name the top ten African
Americans of all time, maybe, just maybe, a baby
boomer or two would suggest former Harlem
Congressman Adam Clayton Powell.
However the
author, Matt Bai, limited his version of
politics to the electoral kind. With one
exception, he ignored everyone on the
progressive side of the black spectrum. Clearly,
his list of promising black leaders are all
elected, relatively conservative Democrats—black
politicos such as Newark mayor Cory Booker,
Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter and Alabama
Congressman Artur Davis. Mr. Bai seems to hope
that the ascendance of the Booker-Nutter-Davis
crowd will put an end to black "whining"—and
thus, black politics.
Therefore
the very question seeks to put black folks in a
box that we should be very careful to avoid.
Electoral politics—often a game of placing black
faces in previously white places—has at best
yielded mixed results in our community. To be
fair, black elected officials have a tough job,
but they have seldom succeeded in substantially
bettering the conditions of poor black folks
without the corresponding protests of people in
the street. A simple observation of where blacks
are located along the misery index will serve to
make the point.
There
really is no such thing as a basic conflict
between the "civil rights" generation versus the
younger (or "Hip Hop") generation in our
community. Both generations are confronted with
racism. There are, no doubt, generational
competitions between those in the electoral
milieu who are jockeying for HNIC [Head Nigger
in Charge] spots. However, the author is clearly
out of touch with US history and the history of
US race relations when he suggests that, "the
resistance of the civil rights generation to
Obama's candidacy signified the failure of their
parents to come to terms, at the dusk of their
lives, with the success of their own struggle—to
embrace the idea that black politics might now
be disappearing into American politics in the
same way that the Irish and Italian machines
joined the political mainstream"
The Times
writer could at least have waited for the black
historical actors to die off before he started
revising African American history. First of all:
the Irish and Italian machines were white! Mr.
Cai is comparing apples and oranges. He is
trying to wish into existence an historical
transition that has not yet occurred for black
people—and may never occur. Yes, there are more
opportunities for blacks in America, but the
hurdles of race remain extraordinarily high.
Just look at the foolishness Barack Obama
encounters on an almost daily basis. No matter
how much he panders to the fears of whites, a
significant percentage is not quite comfortable
with the "colored boy." Either the author is an
ostrich and has been living with his head in the
ground, or a 21st century Rip Van Winkle and has
been sleeping through this government's refusal
to rectify or even sincerely address the damage
done to black citizens by institutional racism.
More importantly, the misinformed writer fails
to comprehend the importance of the oil of
racism to the capitalist machinery.
The most
foolish statement of the article came from the
mouth of Cornell Belcher, an Obama campaigner
who declared, with astonishing conceit, "I'm
the new black politics. The people I work with
are the new black politics. We don't carry
around that history. We see the world through
post-civil-rights eyes. I don't mean that
disrespectfully, but that's just the way it is."
In essence,
what the not-so-young brother said, is that he
is blind and ahistorical, yet nevertheless he
and others like him are going to lead black
folks into the new millennium.
An
incredibly shallow person, Belcher puts Obama at
the center of the African American universe.
"Barack Obama is the sum of their struggle. He's
the sum of their tears, their fights, their
marching, their pain. This opportunity is the
sum of that."
No,
not-so-young man, the struggle has always been
for the full social, economic and political
equality of black America as a whole, not for
just a few individual and token achievements.
Ben Jealous, the new elected president of
the NAACP, was the only person who made any
sense in this very deceptive article when he
said, "It's still a human rights struggle. This
isn't a struggle that began in the 1930s or
1960s. It's a struggle that began in 1620."
Judging
from what we have seen and heard, even if there
is a President Obama in the White House in 2009
the struggle will continue. Unless Obama breaks
with the political-economic-social system we
know as capitalism and attempts to break the
bonds of income disparity by redistributing the
wealth and providing real equal opportunity and
equal access to quality public education,
universal health care, full employment,
affordable housing, an end to military
adventurism, and a fair shake from our justice
department, then we will have to keep our
marching boots at the ready.
Mel
Reeves is an activist living in Miami. He can be
contacted at
mellaneous19@yahoo.com
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need
JavaScript enabled to view it .
Source:
BlackAgendaReport
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
|
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|
Black Americans in Congress, 1870-2007
By Matthew Wasniewski
Black Americans in Congress, 1870–2007—
beautifully prepared volume—is a
comprehensive history of the more than
120 African Americans who have served in
the United States Congress. Written for
a general audience, this book contains a
profile of each African-American Member,
including notables such as Hiram Revels,
Joseph Rainey, Oscar De Priest, Adam
Clayton Powell, Shirley Chisholm, Gus
Hawkins, and Barbara Jordan. Individual
profiles are introduced by contextual
essays that explain major events in
congressional and U.S. history.
Part I provides four chronologically
organized chapters under the heading
"Former Black Members of Congress." Each
chapter provides a lengthy biographical
sketch of the members who served during
the period addressed, along with a
narrative historical account of the era
and tables of information about the
Congress during that time. Part II
provides similar information about
current African-American members. There
are 10 appendixes providing tabular
information of a variety of sorts about
the service of Black members, including
such things as a summary list, service
on committees and in party leadership
posts, familial connections, and so
forth. The entire volume is 803 large
folio pages in length and there are many
illustrations. The book should be part
of every library and research
collection, and congressional scholars
may well wish to obtain it for their
personal libraries.—Pictures—including
rarely seen historical images—of each
African American who has served in
Congress—Bibliographies and references
to manuscript collections for each
Member—Statistical graphs and charts |
 |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
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Ancient African Nations
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If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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