Black politics and the challenges for the left

Monthly Review, April, 1990 by Manning Marable

BLACK POLITICS AND THE CHALLENGES FOR THE LEFT

In the 1980s, there were two fundamental responses by African-Americans to the economic and social crisis generated by Reaganism. The first was represented at the local level by the mayoral campaigns of Harold Washington in Chicago and Mel King in Boston, and at the national level by the Rainbow presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. These electoral campaigns were the products of democratic social protest movements, the consequence of thousands of protests against plant closings, cutbacks in housing, healthcare, and jobs, racial discrimination in the courts, and political process at the local level. The Jackson campaigns were a revolt against both Reaganism in the Republican Party and the capitulation of the Democratic Party to the repressive policies of the Reagan administration. In capitalist societies with parliamentary governments, the Rainbow campaign would have been expressed as a multiracial, left social democratic party, a political formation calling for the state to eliminate racial discrimination and disparities of income between people of color and whites and to expand federal expenditures for human needs, employment, and education. Jackson's discourse was grounded in a tradition of resistance and the previous struggles against Jim Crow, a heritage which defined politics not simply as an electoral phenomena, but as the struggle for power on a variety of fronts. In effect, the Rainbow campaign called for a progressive social contract, a positive relationship between the people and the state which would guarantee full employment, universal health care, and housing; safeguard civil rights, and create the material and social conditions for a more democratic and egalitarian order.

The black petty bourgeoisie supported Jackson's effort along with the African-American working class and the unemployed, but for different reasons. The poor and working class had been hit with a severe deterioration of wages, the expansion of drug traffic in their neighborhoods, and the collapse in public transportation systems, health care, and social infrastructure. Voting for Jackson was a protest against Reaganism, racism, and the political domination of the two-party system. The black middle strata mobilized for different reasons. In the period 1979-87, African-American managers and professionals actually had larger income increases than whites with identical educational backgrounds and vocations. (Conversely, the rate of income growth for blacks in all other vocational categories was much lower than that of whites.) Much of the gain to this new professional/managerial stratum had come from affirmative action policies of the federal government. More than half of all black college graduates have jobs tied directly to public-sector spending. Reaganism represented a very real threat to the fragile gains of the middle class elite. The Democratic Party's failure to vigorously contest cutbacks in economic set-asides for nonwhite entrepreneurs, the non-enforcement of affirmative action and equal opportunity legislation, and the destruction of the Civil Rights commission also alienated and outraged most middle class blacks. They saw Jackson as a symbolic advocate of their own interests.

In the quarter century since the passage of the historic Voting Rights Act of 1965, the number of black elected officials has soared from 100 to 6,700. The overwhelming majority of these are elected from majority black constituencies. The principal reason for this is that most whites simply will not vote for a black candidate, regardless of his/her political program, party affiliation, or personality. This means that in virtually all cases, African-Americans never consider running for statewide offices or in Congressional or mayoral races in which whites constitute more than sixty percent of the electorates. Consequently, since middle class black politicians look to black workers and the unemployed for votes, they are usually forced to articulate a social democratic-style agenda to win popular support. Their own immediate class interests are not fully served because the weight of the black petty bourgeoisie is very small compared to that of other classes within the black community.

The second response to the economic and social crisis is a form of electoral accommodationism. "Accommodation" is historically a gradualistic response within African-American politics, which seeks reforms by cooperation with the white corporate establishment, collaboration with the more conservative elements of the major parties, and an advocacy of private self-help and the development of a minority entrepreneurial strata. Booker T. Washington was the architect of accommodation during the era of Jim Crow, the first prominent advocate of "black capitalism." Nearly a century later, in a period of expanding racial segregation and manifestations of racist violence, in a political context of pessimism and defeat for the black left, and in the social chaos spawned by drugs and the decay of social institutions, the political space for a new type of accommodationism has developed. The new accommodationists seek to articulate the interests of sections of the white middle class and corporate interests, rather than the black community. The accommodationist reformers still use the discourse of the civil rights movement, but lack any political commitment to civil disobedience or disruptive activities to achieve more equal rights and economic justice for the black working class. Unlike Booker T. Washington, this new leadership of the black middle class does not have to embrace legal racial segregation to win white support, but it does have to espouse a compromising approach to black political and economic development and to do nothing to challenge the brutal class oppression and social deterioration in the urban ghetto. This neo-accommodationist approach can be described as "post black politics."