It's Far Too Early for Blacks to Reject Racial Identity Politics

I’m beginning to get really nervous about mainstream media’s newest and latest obsession, the one where they go out of their way to heap almost unqualified praise upon black politicians who have recently become so “intelligent” and “sophisticated” that they have begun to reject “racial identity politics.”

If I didn’t know better, I’d be tempted to believe that the people who control the Associated Press, CNN, the New York Times and other media outlets and news services, had somehow gotten together and agreed among themselves to promote this new, “black politicians should separate themselves from black issues” agenda. The same story is clearly being repeated about local and national elected officials, and across all media platforms. Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time that national media collaboration has occurred around black political aspirations.

I’m still waiting for the media to praise white politicians who no longer seek white votes, or Hispanic politicians who don’t seek Hispanic votes or right wing conservative politicians who don’t seek right wing conservative votes. Maybe they’ll get around to that next…but I wouldn’t count on it.

A recent example of this new-found respect for certain (mostly Ivy League-educated) black politicians can be seen in the July 16 edition of Newsweek, which features a very pensive “black and white” photo of Barack Obama on the cover. In fact, the headline they chose for the cover is, also, not so creatively, “Black and White.”

As if the Obama feature alone hadn’t done enough to establish the candidate as the country’s leading “black politician who happens not to have a black agenda,” two “side bar” articles, were added to the mix to deliver the “coup de grace.”

One emphatically states that Obama’s inability to take the “minority vote” (Newsweek carefully didn’t say “black vote”) for granted is a reflection of the "progress" we’ve all made in America’s struggle to get “beyond race.” The other sidebar article says that Obama, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and new Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, represent a “sea change” in black politics, wherein African-American candidates have learned to appeal to all races by stressing “consensus over conflict.”

The magazine even stoops to referring to these “new” candidates as the “post-racial” politicians. Maybe I missed it…has school segregation by race ended in this country; has employment discrimination ended; have bank financing and healthcare become, all of a sudden, equally available to blacks and whites? If these things have finally occurred, I’d be perfectly willing to accept the concept that we’ve, somehow, entered a new, “post-racial” era in American politics. But until then, it appears that the media's interest in having us all be "post-racial" is more a reflection of their own "black issues fatigue," than any real belief on their side that racial disparities have, at long last, been eliminated.

Please note that Newsweek’s reporters were also especially careful to point out that Booker graduated from Stanford, and from Yale Law, and that Patrick and “new black politician” / Alabama Congressman Artur Davis both graduated from Harvard.

Do media now want us to believe, in their own carefully constructed absence of black national leadership figures, that black Americans should wait for inspiration and political direction primarily from those in our community who are Ivy League-credentialed?



While we’re on that subject, is it ever going to be possible for a black scholar to receive mainstream exposure and credibility without having an Ivy League affiliation? I mean no disrespect to Cornell West, Michael Eric Dyson or Henry Louis Gates, but when will mainstream and black media begin to confer similar levels of academic authority upon professors from Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU’s)? Unless this begins to happen, the impression continues to be tacitly made that any black professor at a prestigious mainstream university has inherently more to offer us than any black professor at any of the HBCU’s. That's a dangerous concept, on a number of levels.

I’m also beginning to get nervous about the media’s ongoing obsession with Obama’s mixed-race heritage, with the repeated implication that any focus by him on issues important to the black electorate would constitute a subtle form of disrespect for his white mother’s ancestry and for issues related thereto. Why does it have to be an either / or decision? Why can’t Candidate Obama speak as forcefully for black issues as he attempts to do for mainstream issues?

Maybe those who are leaning toward this dangerously premature “post-racial” premise, should acquaint themselves with the “one-drop rule,” which has been used for at least the last 150 years in this country to establish the “official racial designation” of mixed race children.

Coincidentally, in the Year 2000 Census, the U.S. Government invited Americans to self-identify, if they wanted to claim “two or more races,” and 6.8 million persons did so. Included in that figure were 1.8 million people who previously self-identified as black, who were, thereby, officially removed from the black population count. Those who think this “mixed-race” issue is a new phenomenon should be reminded that the U.S. has done this before, resulting, back then, in a self-destructive wave of elitism and separatism within the national black community that still lingers today in many subtle ways.

According to the University of Oregon’s Naomi Zack, as an example, racial categorization first appeared in the 1850 U.S. Census, when whites were not counted by race but, on the other hand, “mulattoes” were counted separately from blacks.

Zack further explains that the “one drop rule,” wherein children with mixed racial parentage were assigned to the parental racial category with the “lowest social status,” became the social rule of the land in 1900 and it was adopted by the Census Bureau in 1930. As a result, the “races” were ranked in descending order, from Northern European, to Southern European, to Arab, to Asian, to Latin American, to Native American and, finally, to sub-Saharan African. According to the U.S. Government, therefore, black designation resulted from any black ancestry, no matter how remote. That extended to “black and Chinese” or “black and Indian” ancestry, which also resulted, in black designation of the child.

A similarly divisive racial classification for blacks exists in South Africa wherein the former Apartheid government designated “Coloreds” as a separate racial class, leading to separate “colored” townships, schools, business districts and churches, and a group that voted overwhelmingly with the Apartheid National Party, and against Nelson Mandela, in the first “all races” elections in 1994.

To clearly understand the current political climate, do we really need to rehash all of this sordid history? Do we need to revisit these manufactured definitions that have determined racial “status” in America, and in South Africa, for all these years?

I think so. I definitely do.

Despite the artificiality of the historical arguments for racial designation and ranking in this country, “race” is still an important issue in American politics. That’s true because, by virtually every economic or societal indicator, the average African American, somehow, continues to have access to the fewest jobs, less household income, less and poorer quality medical care, less education, less access to bank financing and fewer contract opportunities for their businesses, than virtually any other racial or ethnic group member in this country.

Perhaps, none of that has had anything to do with race or racism. Maybe it’s all been just a terrible coincidence, but the fact remains these conditions continue to exist. Unless there is some grand national plan in place for blacks to remain on the margins of the U.S. economy and social structure forever, we need to quickly create a political, economic and social agenda to remove the obstacles to a fully inclusive American society, and that agenda needs to be endorsed by ALL elected officials.

When we hear, for example, that the American Journal of Public Health, has reported that more than 886,000 black people in this country died unnecessarily between 1991 and the year 2000, simply because they didn’t have equal access to healthcare, we can begin to recognize how important and urgent it is for both black and white elected officials to adopt a political strategy that includes a special focus on Americans who have a black racial identity.

We can’t afford to be distracted on this issue. The resurrected strategy of creating divisions within the national black community and diluting the impact of the black vote is not new.

In fact, two of the most important black leaders in U.S. history—grassroots leader / economic nationalist Marcus Garvey and Harvard-trained scholar / social activist W.E.B. Dubois - were famously pitted against each other in the national media coverage of their time.

The antagonism between the two grew to be so intense that DuBois publicly described Garvey, condescendingly and sophomorically, as “a man who suffered from serious defects of temperament and training” and as “a little, fat, black man…with a big head.” In return, Garvey called DuBois a Negro “misleader” and described him, derogatorily, as “a little Dutch, a little French, and a little Negro…a mulatto.” Each man, in his own way, was a historically significant advocate for black advancement, but they wound up playing out a shameful public attack on one another, prodded by a divisive and insensitive national media.

Clearly, continuing down such a self-destructive political path would be disastrous for our entire country, today. Our goal as a nation really should be to move, collectively, toward a new “post-racial” future. First, however, we have to work together to address the social and economic ills still being borne, in a most acute way, by African Americans, as result of what has been an undeniably racist policy for the allocation of economic opportunities and simple, human rights, in this country.

With so much work left to be done, it’s far too early to ask our politicians to reject “racial identity politics.” There’s absolutely nothing wrong with the universal adoption of an aggressive, race-based inclusion agenda, as part of an overall plan for the resurgence of what used to be called “The American Dream.”

My hope is that the Obamas, Bookers, Fentys, Patricks, etal, stand firm on that issue, media opinions notwithstanding.

I’m sure it might feel good to be “stroked” by Newsweek as being part of a “sea change” in black politics, but that, without the conviction and courage to speak directly to “black issues” and to risk temporary unpopularity with mainstream media, will not help us to solve the lingering, race-based problems we face together, as a nation.

###