Matt Bai’s NY Times Magazine article, “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?”, was an interesting read. The nut of the argument is that Obama, if elected, will signal a generational shift, the coming of age of a new generation of black political leaders who are not of the civil rights era but who also don’t concern themselves exclusively with race. Bai wrote:
Obama joined the Congressional Black Caucus when he arrived in 2005, but he attended meetings only sporadically, and it must have been obvious that he never felt he belonged. In part, this was probably because he was the group’s only senator and thus had little daily interaction with his colleagues in the House. But to hear those close to Obama tell it, it was also because, like Booker and other younger black politicians, he simply wasn’t comfortable categorizing his politics by race. One main function of the black caucus is to raise money through events, because many of the members represent poorer districts. Obama, already a bestselling author by the time he was sworn in, should have been a huge fund-raising draw, but he never showed much interest in headlining caucus events, and he was rarely asked.
And:
This point about whether Obama was “black enough,” a senseless distinction to most white voters, came up often in my discussions. It referred to the perception among some black leaders that not only had Obama not shared their generational experience, but also that he hadn’t shared the African-American experience, period. Obama’s father was a Kenyan academic; his family came to America on scholarship, not in chains.
What’s been developing over the years is the rise of neo-black politicians like Obama, politicos who tended to be elite-school educated, comfortable with whites and have, to varying degrees, passed through America’s dominant institutions: Massachusetts’s Gov. Deval Patrick; Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama; Newark’s Mayor Cory Booker; D.C.’s Mayor Adrian Fenty; Philadelphia’s Mayor Michael Nutter.
They are not part of the “race first” crowd of the old guard of black politics, officials who came to a position of leadership during the civil rights and black power eras, where an elected official had to take a “black line” to show his racial bona fides. But because they could parlay “blackness” into elected office, they didn’t have to necessarily deliver.
A case in point is the Congressional black Caucus (CBC). As I’ve noted elsewhere, the late, controversial Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. passed more legislation as the chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor— Medicaid, Medicare, Head Start, etc.—than anything the CBC has done collectively in the numerous years of its existence. And given the rise of conservative politics of the last 30 years, the CBC has never significantly organized their constituents to push back against the Republican agenda. Instead, black political power was organized and channeled through the Democratic Party, not outside it.
The Democrats have used blacks to boost themselves into office, but have jettisoned them when becoming concerned about their close association with their most loyal voting bloc.
As political scientist Robert Smith noted in “We Have No Leaders,” most black Democrats, despite the rhetoric of blackness or black solidarity, are more institutionally wedded to the Democratic party than to their actual constituents, which would explain why most members of the CBC, like most blacks, sided with the Clintons initially. Bill Clinton, until Barack Obama’s arrival, was the titular head of the Democratic Party, and lest we forget: the “first black president.”
What this generational shift also portends is that if Obama does become president, it’s more likely that he will usher in the era of black political leaders who are identifiably black but who do not make overt or covert racial appeals to blacks; they want to either transcends race yet don’t want feel that they have to hide their “blackness” much the same way that some politicians don’t have to deny their Irish or Italian ethnicity.
However, what we should watch isn’t whether or not an Obama presidency would be speaking out on racial matters or support issues like affirmative action. What should be of concern is whether or not Obama and his cohorts, represents the outlines of a neo-black politics that has incorporated the certain aspects of Bill Clinton’s neo-liberalism: attack the weak, reward the rich, and triangulate oneself on enough issues so that what is said is heard differently by different audiences.
In an interview with Adolph Reed, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, he argued that Obama’s rap basically is that “that structural problems are too big, that real solutions come from the neighborhood, grassroots and from churches and NGOs, and that’s like a hallmark of neo-liberalism.”
Furthermore, in Reed’s view, what “Obama has to offer is not a policy program that addresses inequality; he never talks about inequality. He talks about opportunity and responsibility…”
And “opportunity and responsibility” are essentially GOP talking points, which are under-girded by the economic marketplace and the marketplace of personal virtues.
Because Obama doesn’t generally speak about inequality, according to Reed, he has yet to galvanize white lower class voters who may be attracted to a series of programs that go beyond and revitalize the New Deal.
That’s a long shot, for Obama, like most neo-liberals, tends to favor marketplace solutions that farms out the government’s role in providing a level playing field to the less than $200,000 crowd. After all, he’s spoken about increasing the government’s budget to faith-based organizations rather than strengthening the laws to protect union organizing, despite Wal-Mart’s fear that an Obama presidency would undermine its concerns.
At the end of the day, a potential Obama presidency wouldn’t really mean the end of black politics, for effective black politics had ended years ago. Given that 25 percent of blacks are still mired in poverty and social dysfunctions, it is striking that African American leadership of the past thirty years has never tried to effectively mobilized black America for internal redevelopment while at the same time press for more government programs to help alleviate what’s going in the country’s urban Bantustans and in third world-like rural enclaves.
Old school race leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton may talk about poverty, but their personal track records have been one of using racial politics as a means of personal self-aggrandizement, of becoming the latest HNIC that whites have to defer to. John Edwards may well have been the last American politician to talk frankly about what everyone really knows: that the “two Americas” is not necessarily either a black or white one, but one that is increasingly composed of socio-economic blocs that are fractured along class lines.
Americans, including blacks, are much more comfortably talking about race than class since race is literally is in everyone’s face, and when you speak of race there’s no demand that one know facts. Just one’s visceral opinion will do. Class, however, and the economic structures that support it, makes most Americans uncomfortable because that could entail just having to do something about it.
What an Obama electoral win might portend, however, is a black version of Clintonism, a combination of neo-black politics and neo-liberalism, in which policies that affect lower and middling classes are passed as a form of tough love while the wrecking crew that has pretty much destroyed the nation’s economic, social and political infrastructure over the past twenty years wait out their exile.
Pay close attention to Obama’s Democratic acceptance speech in Denver on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s seminal speech at the storied March on Washington. Will he present a racial healing or unity speech that will seek to transcend social rancor or rank political partisanship, or will he offer the nation a bold set of ideas and programs that will strike at the heart of the nation’s ravages of social and economic inequities?
In other words, will he have the audacity to truly audacious?
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