color line: Danger ahead?, The

New Crisis, The, May/Jun 2001 by Lewis, David Levering

When W.E.B. Du Bois predicted that racism would be the paramount problem of the 20th century he expected the United States to remain locked into the Black-white racial paradigm well into the next millennium, In less than a generation, however, the African American population has been surpassed by Hispanic Americans. Already, too, white Americans realize that the nation is headed toward a black, brown and yellow majority.

Du Bois' famous prophecy about the importance of the color line imposes itself with an urgent pertinence, therefore, as the Bush administration - a presidency with less legitimacy than any since that of Rutherford B. Hayes - pursues policies supposedly intended to take us beyond our nation's Black-white obsessions into a 21 st century of multi-racial merit.

Just as the welfare reform of the Clinton presidency has largely de-racialized the politics of welfare (even though the quality-- of-life consequences are yet to be fully calculated), so the second Bush administration - with its precedent-shattering nominations of African Americans to serve as national security adviser and head the departments of State and Education, a Hispanic to head the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and an Asian American to head the Department of Labor - appears to embrace Martin Luther King Jr.'s imperative that people be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. As a result, many Americans of color may be inclined to believe that those multicultural Cabinet appointments, the Bush rhetoric of pragmatism and all the talk of cross-party cooperation does promise a shift beyond the wedge polltics of race and the culture wars of the recent, roiled past.

That promise may be partially fulfilled, if only on the surface, in the arena of class alliances.

Thirty years before sociologist William Julius Wilson predicted that America's racial conflicts would metamorphose into problems of class, WE.B. Du Bois presciently warned that "in the Negro group, we are going to develop...economic classes whose interests dash."

The emergence of what Du Bois might have called this "talented third" of the Black population presents the Radical Right in the United States with a singular opportunity for political mischief. If the migration of large numbers of African Americans into the GOP for the first time since 1934 seems improbable, there are, nevertheless, unmistakable signs of a coming transracial conservatism. The growing number of Black professionals who declare themselves politically conservative is a natural consequence of their increased presence in the upper ranks of Fortune 500 companies. Moreover, the Radical Right's social agenda has a definite appeal in the historically deep undercurrents of Black religious and cultural conservatism. There are Blacks of all income levels whose views on abortion, patriarchy, sexual preference and family values are congruent with those of the Christian Coalition.

In addition, the U.S. political center has moved far to the right, and Democrats have joined Republicans in believing that all social problems - race included - have their solutions in a free, unfettered market economy. The Radical Right would like nothing better than to create a class coalition of blacks and browns who will collude (wittingly or not) in the consignment of the bottom third - or even more - of Americans to the Darwinian solutions of the market: survival of the fittest, winners take all.

Though not indispensable, such an alliance would be an important ingredient in the Bush administration's strategy to liquidate government regulatory power over the economy and the environment, to recalibrate the tax code for the benefit of giant corporations and billionaires, to hand over Social Security billions to speculators, to pipe oil across the Alaskan wilderness and to fund "Star Wars" missile defense schemes.

All of those steps are aimed at furiously accelerating the redistribution of wealth to the richest of the rich.

That effort has been underway since the Reagan years and was powerfully advanced under President Clinton. The fuzzying of the real issues of money and power confronting all Americans has become all the more problematic because of the waffling and collusion of the Democrats, the political party that once told us - in a moment of candid sloganeering - that it was "the economy, stupid." Now, however, the Democrats have ceded the economic debate about equity and opportunity to the bottom-line operations of the decentralized government, reduced taxes, balanced budgets, family values and public character.

The author of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) began public life by decrying racism as the principal contemporary scourge. By the time he made his welltimed exit on the eve of the historic March on Washington, Du Bois had repeatedly amended what he called his "pert phrase" to read that the "present Problem of Problems is what we call labor." Complicated by brown, black, yellow and white demographics that he could not have foreseen, the ever-insightful Du Bois fully perceived another permanent verity: that, with race and class, as with all else, the perennial problem is the cash-line.