I'm not sure why reporters, intellectuals, pundits and the like are always trying to declare the end of black "something." In a piece for the New York Times Magazine, Matt Bai asks whether Barack Obama is a symbol of "the end of black politics". Bai's article is, in my view, a bit off the mark.
For a lot of younger African-Americans, the resistance of the civil rights generation to Obama’s candidacy signified the failure of their parents to come to terms, at the dusk of their lives, with the success of their own struggle — to embrace the idea that black politics might now be disappearing into American politics in the same way that the Irish and Italian machines long ago joined the political mainstream.The rise of prominent and exceptionally talented black politicians and political minds is not a sign of this happening. It is certainly the result of doors opened by the civil rights movement, but "black politics" will not disappear until black neighborhoods disappear, until problems that disproportionately affect black people no longer do so, and until black people are as invisible among whites as Irish and Italians are.
But that's not really what Bai is referring to. The question Bai is asking, more politely, is whether black people will finally stop bitching about racism if Barack Obama becomes president. It's a question, quite frankly, that people love asking, and it's not clear to me why people find the idea that a group of people uniting around similar political interests so offensive or unusual. It is in fact, quite odd for Bai to quote James Rucker, the head of the first major black grassroots online organization, in an article that posits black politics as potentially being at an "end."
The generation divide Bai refers to is better characterized as a difference in approach to racial inequality. It relies on a rhetorical scheme that posits black problems as almost race neutral "American" ones -- note the "Fatherhood" plank of the Democratic Party platform -- in an effort to avoid the pitfalls of white resentment, or relying on white American's sense of guilt regarding past injustices. Obama has been doing this since his 2004 speech at the Democratic Convention: "There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America -- there’s the United States of America." This approach also recognizes that petitioning the government for help from the outside has not been completely effective.
Another misconception is that this new black politics simply embraces "personal responsibility" where the previous generation didn't--as Ta-Nehisi Coates points out, they were saying the same thing about Jesse Jackson in 1988, who for many today, embodies the so-called politics of "black victimhood".
This is not the end of black politics, this is a new black politics. Black people will stop pursuing their interests as a group when racism, systemic, cultural, or internalized, ceases to be a problem. Until then, people should recognize that his is how democracy works.
Finally, as Dana pointed out last week, I'd like to mention the absence of black women from this piece. Carolyn Cheeks-Kilpatrick is the chairperson of the Congressional Black Caucus. One of the founders of the CBC, Shirley Chisolm, ran for president in 1972, twelve years before Jesse Jackson. Before Barack Obama was a major figure, Carol Mosely-Braun held his Senate seat. These are not marginal figures in black politics, old or new. Yet, black women are almost entirely absent from Bai's article. For all the progress that's been made, there's something terribly old school about that.
--A. Serwer
