While interviewed by radio WPFW (Pacifica Network) former Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, who chaired the famous black political conventions of the 1970s, mentioned that when Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) approached the Obama wing of the Democratic Party about including the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in the convention’s events, she was rebuffed.
Hatcher ruefully noted that at convention that had nominated its party’s first black candidate for the office of the presidency, there was no articulation of a black agenda.
As noted by public intellectuals, such as Adolph Reed and Houston Baker, Sen. Barack Obama has studiously avoided any association with a so-called black agenda, which would be nominally targeting money and resources to distressed black communities. Such an agenda would be the death knell to a politician who is trying to be post-racial.
“Obama himself hasn’t touched it [a black agenda],” said Baker, “and hasn’t been near these disastrous things that have been going on, the devastation of the black majority in this country. He has nothing but a passing interest in it. He’s a centrist.”
By any estimation, Obama, while not the first choice of the political black establishment, had become the overwhelming choice of the black electorate in the primary, and is expected to get over 80 percent of the black vote in the general election.
For a number of black Americans, the excitement about electing the first black president may well overwhelm any concern about a so-called black agenda. The first job, in the eyes of many, may well be merely making sure that Obama gets the keys to the White House. When he gets in the brother is going to work it out.
But as Baker noted when Clarence Thomas became a Justice at the Supreme Court, “I don’t understand this kind of thinking already demonstrated at one branch of government that once in office we’re going to find someone deeply committed to the eradication of the prison industrial complex.”
Obama may well feel free to go forward without considering a black agenda due to the simple reason that the CBC has been demonstrably weak in actually articulating an agenda blacks themselves could reasonably implement.
While CBS have various “freedom” agendas or progressive budgets that sought to alleviate the stress of black and working class communities, it is interesting to note that the late Adam Clayton Powell, while in the minority as a then-Negro congressional member, got more progressive legislation passed during the 1960s than the more than 40 members of the CBC has passed in the thirty-five years or so in its existence.
For example, Powell, as chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, passed landmark legislation that provided either legislative impetus or funds for federal programs for minimum wage increases, education and training for the deaf, vocational training and standards for wages and work hours, as well as aid to elementary and secondary education. In a record that’s still unbroken, Powell had steered 50 bills through Congress.
Even more interesting, Powell, who was certainly more fair-skinned than Obama cultivated a sense of “blackness” and talked about “audacious” black power when those concepts were incendiary, yet he got the job done of being a legislator who could be said to have improved the life-chances of millions of Americans, black and white.
To be sure, the last 30 years of Republican dominance has been predicated on demonizing any advance of blacks as coming at the expense of whites, especially stressed lower class and middle class whites. Black intellectuals on the right, aided and abetted by well-funded think tanks, have help create the kind of talking points that pare down a “black” agenda to a list of grievances or just plain racial pleading.
However, the last 30 years or so have also meant that the national black political class, as represented by the Congressional Black Caucus, has sorely missed an opportunity to organize and utilize whatever resources that African Americans have. The black middle class makes up roughly 60 percent of the black population, but has pretty much receded as the leadership class. Instead, it has pretty much tied the fate of black Americans as a whole to that of the Democratic Party, which sees the black vote as a reliable bloc of votes that only occasionally causes discomfort to the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Increasingly, if there is no black agenda could it be that, at least according to a 2007 Pew survey (“Blacks See Growing Values Gap Between Poor and Middle Class”), that blacks themselves, 61 percent, think the values of middle class and the poor have become more dissimilar? What would be a common black agenda?
Perhaps in Obama’s sotto voce of a black agenda, less truly is more.
But as John W. Rogers Jr., the founder of Ariel Investments, the country’s first black-owned money management firm and one of Obama’s top bundlers said in the New York Times, “I think the good news is once Barack is elected, he is going to be a beacon of hope for all of us.”
Hatcher ruefully noted that at convention that had nominated its party’s first black candidate for the office of the presidency, there was no articulation of a black agenda.
As noted by public intellectuals, such as Adolph Reed and Houston Baker, Sen. Barack Obama has studiously avoided any association with a so-called black agenda, which would be nominally targeting money and resources to distressed black communities. Such an agenda would be the death knell to a politician who is trying to be post-racial.
“Obama himself hasn’t touched it [a black agenda],” said Baker, “and hasn’t been near these disastrous things that have been going on, the devastation of the black majority in this country. He has nothing but a passing interest in it. He’s a centrist.”
By any estimation, Obama, while not the first choice of the political black establishment, had become the overwhelming choice of the black electorate in the primary, and is expected to get over 80 percent of the black vote in the general election.
For a number of black Americans, the excitement about electing the first black president may well overwhelm any concern about a so-called black agenda. The first job, in the eyes of many, may well be merely making sure that Obama gets the keys to the White House. When he gets in the brother is going to work it out.
But as Baker noted when Clarence Thomas became a Justice at the Supreme Court, “I don’t understand this kind of thinking already demonstrated at one branch of government that once in office we’re going to find someone deeply committed to the eradication of the prison industrial complex.”
Obama may well feel free to go forward without considering a black agenda due to the simple reason that the CBC has been demonstrably weak in actually articulating an agenda blacks themselves could reasonably implement.
While CBS have various “freedom” agendas or progressive budgets that sought to alleviate the stress of black and working class communities, it is interesting to note that the late Adam Clayton Powell, while in the minority as a then-Negro congressional member, got more progressive legislation passed during the 1960s than the more than 40 members of the CBC has passed in the thirty-five years or so in its existence.
For example, Powell, as chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, passed landmark legislation that provided either legislative impetus or funds for federal programs for minimum wage increases, education and training for the deaf, vocational training and standards for wages and work hours, as well as aid to elementary and secondary education. In a record that’s still unbroken, Powell had steered 50 bills through Congress.
Even more interesting, Powell, who was certainly more fair-skinned than Obama cultivated a sense of “blackness” and talked about “audacious” black power when those concepts were incendiary, yet he got the job done of being a legislator who could be said to have improved the life-chances of millions of Americans, black and white.
To be sure, the last 30 years of Republican dominance has been predicated on demonizing any advance of blacks as coming at the expense of whites, especially stressed lower class and middle class whites. Black intellectuals on the right, aided and abetted by well-funded think tanks, have help create the kind of talking points that pare down a “black” agenda to a list of grievances or just plain racial pleading.
However, the last 30 years or so have also meant that the national black political class, as represented by the Congressional Black Caucus, has sorely missed an opportunity to organize and utilize whatever resources that African Americans have. The black middle class makes up roughly 60 percent of the black population, but has pretty much receded as the leadership class. Instead, it has pretty much tied the fate of black Americans as a whole to that of the Democratic Party, which sees the black vote as a reliable bloc of votes that only occasionally causes discomfort to the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Increasingly, if there is no black agenda could it be that, at least according to a 2007 Pew survey (“Blacks See Growing Values Gap Between Poor and Middle Class”), that blacks themselves, 61 percent, think the values of middle class and the poor have become more dissimilar? What would be a common black agenda?
Perhaps in Obama’s sotto voce of a black agenda, less truly is more.
But as John W. Rogers Jr., the founder of Ariel Investments, the country’s first black-owned money management firm and one of Obama’s top bundlers said in the New York Times, “I think the good news is once Barack is elected, he is going to be a beacon of hope for all of us.”
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