Norman Kelley: The Slow Death of Black Politics
/- Orignally published by the NY Press [here
]
- From Norman Kelley's book "The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome"
"I'm qualified, probably more qualified than any other person who is expected to be on the Democratic ticket for 2004, because I actually have a following and I speak for the people."
So boasts Rev. Al Sharpton as he prepares his campaign to secure the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, a campaign that has all of the markings of a Jesse Jackson redux. The reverend's entrance into the race is evidence of a decaying black political culture where ego trumps politics. His presence in the race is the last gasp of a dying black political culture that has transformed over a generation from bold, effective and results-oriented politics to rhetoric and symbolism.
The prize for Sharpton, of course, is to become the third Head Negro In Charge, a symbolic political mobilization that replaces effective politics.
The HNIC syndrome has witnessed the rise of symbolic leaders--Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan and now Sharpton--who may be charismatic, but are politically unaccountable to the very people they claim to represent. Namely African Americans. This transformation has been underway since the 1970s, but most African Americans have yet to confront it. Because black America has not faced up to the moribund nature of black politics, it has witnessed the rise of these symbolic leaders.
Sharpton's run mirrors Jackson's attempts to move the Democratic Party back toward its progressive roots. Jackson ran twice for the Democratic nomination--in 1984 and 1988--and while he did increase black participation in politics, the party soon moved rightward with the ascendance of the Democratic Leadership Council and the subsequent election of Bill Clinton. Even Sharpton's formal announcement of speaking for the "disaffected" mirrors his former mentor's Rainbow Coalition, Jackson's insurgent vehicle that was always more shadow than substance in his quest for being a protest power broker. And yet Sharpton's candidacy, in the eyes of some, does have its virtues.
"Compared to some of the other candidates in the race, he's just as qualified," says David Bositis, senior researcher of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black-oriented think tank. "But he's not going to get the nomination."
But because the black vote is important to Democrats, Bositis thinks Sharpton could force the major candidates to confront topics that might otherwise be ignored. These include issues of economic justice, a whole variety of criminal justice issues and low-income housing. A similar rationale is offered by the candidate himself: "Even if I lose," Sharpton has said, "I have the option to negotiate points with the Democratic Party."
Like Jackson, Sharpton may also be compelling enough to convince young blacks to vote when they otherwise might not. And they "may stick around to vote some more," argues Bositis.
Some in Big Media have already dismissed Sharpton as a joke and a nuisance. Handicapping the 2004 Democratic aspirants on public radio, Time columnist Joe Klein called Sharpton "a criminal, a buffoon and a waste of time."
Others, like Robert C. Smith, professor of political science at San Francisco State University and author of We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post-Civil Rights Era, while not as hostile, are still less optimistic about Sharpton's agenda.
"I think [his candicacy] is a mistake," says Smith. "I don't think he can achieve any of the objectives he's laid out for himself in the campaign." Smith is one of a number of black political theorists who view today's generation of black leaders as functionally "irrelevant." This is due to their inability to "mobilize the limited resources of the Black community as part of a strategy and program to extract from society the resources necessary to reconstruct urban African American communities," Smith (with co-author Ronald Walters) wrote inAfrican American Leadership.
Smith, who calls himself a "strong supporter" of Jackson's two forays in the 1980s, sees the objectives of Sharpton's and Jackson's campaigns as identical. "Hardly any of [Jackson's] objectives were achieved," says Smith, who believes Jackson's two presidential bids unintentionally moved the Democratic Party to the right. Smith thinks Sharpton may have similar unintended consequences on top of failing to broaden the Demorcratic base or nudge the party leftward.
"I can't see anything for black leadership or the black community that will be served by his candidacy," says the professor. "I think the only thing it will do is what Jackson's candidacy did, which is...to enhance his status as a national leader. [This is] one of Sharpton's principle objectives."
This is exactly the HNIC syndrome, in which maverick presidential campaigns and Million Man March franchises are high-profile symbolic actions instead of real programs or policies. Like Jackson's campaigns or Farrakhan in the afterglow of the MMM, Sharpton will become a nationally known entity, the putative "president" of black America, the titular head of a purported progressive insurgency.
Sharpton has long harbored ambitions to be the next HNIC. His recent association with Michael Jackson and the now-forgotten National Summit for Fairness in the Recording Industry held this past summer was a means toward a related and specific end: money and prestige. The summit came about as Jackson was in the middle of negotiating his contract with Sony Music. Jackson owes Sony money and may have been trying to sever relations without paying them back and without losing his interest in the 251-song Beatles catalog, which he owns jointly with Sony. The summit was supposedly held to prod the music industry on behalf of black recording artists, but some suspect that Jackson used it as a means to put pressure on Sony by attracting the public's racially sensitive eye.
Last year Jackson approached Sharpton before a Democratic Party fundraiser at the Apollo and spoke to him about doing something about the music industry; the two of them have known each other since the 1980s. The fundraiser, which raised $2.7 million dollars for the Democratic Party, marked the beginning of another chapter in a long Jackson-Sharpton relationship.
Both men had something the other needed. For Jackson, it was Sharpton's talent at making people squirm if and when he throws a spotlight on them. For Sharpton, it was the green milk needed to nurse a modern political campaign, media exposure and legitimacy.
Yet the July "summit" fizzled in the summer's heat when Jackson called then-Sony head Tommy Mottola a "racist" and rode up Madison Ave. on a double-decker holding aloft a caricature that depicted Mottola as a devil. As Jackson made his charges, Sharpton was silent. The following day, however, after being inundated with calls from blacks in the recording industry who took issue with Jackson's antics, Sharpton started moon-walking away from the King of Pop.
When asked if he plans to look into Jackson's accusation that Mottola called a Sony artist a "fat, black nigger," Sharpton has said he would be "actively investigating the charge." Needless to say, that investigation, along with the summit's concerns regarding "financial justice" for all black musicians, has since faded, aided and abetted by Jackson's idiosyncrasies. The recent reemergence of alleged child molestation charges and other curious details concerning Jackson's personal life have only served to further sandbag the original mission of the summit.
While the July summit could have been a watershed event, re-establishing a new and fairer relationship between black artists and the recording industry, it also had the ear-markings of a possible post-civil-rights shakedown, the kind of politics that is mostly a desire for, in Richard Nixon's words, "a piece of the action."
Usually when a summit or march is called and the masses show up, a "leader" feels that his following has achieved a critical mass. He can then represent before the powers that be. Said leader can then also negotiate on behalf of another party: himself. Anyone remotely aware of Rev. Jesse Jackson's recent history might see the faintest outline of such a play in regard to the music industry initiative. One might refer to Kenneth Timmerman's Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson. While implacably hostile to Jackson, Timmerman nonetheless shows how the civil rights movement became an industry.
Sharpton's music industry initiative was a convergence of personal agenda, self-interest and ambition. It was African American power politics masking itself as intervention to end the "economic servitude" of a class of rich musicians at the expense of those less rich. It also shows how black music, whether pop or hiphop, has increasingly been seen as a realm to launch or jumpstart would-be political movements. Russell Simmons' alignment with Ben Muhammad, former head of the NAACP and recently of the Million Man March franchise, in establishing the Hip Hop Summit Action Network (HHSAN) is another case in point. As many noted, Simmons' recent threat to protest Pepsi for dissing Ludacris smacked of a Rev. Jackson-style shakedown; boycotts and summits are the symbolic tools of the trade for HNICers.
Black politicos like Sharpton, Simmons and Minister Conrad Muhammad (founder of Conscious Hip Hop Activism Necessary for Global Empowerment, or CHHANGE) understand that hiphop culture, as well as being a marketing tool for products, is also the base of an up-and-coming, if yet to be realized, political constituency. See Simmons' Phat Farm and slavery reparation ads. The main way to get to that constituency is through music, by linking up the culture industry with politics. In other words, young black consumers (and white ones) are more than just a marketing demographic--they're also a political one.
"With [the] hip hop summits, [Simmons] proved he could deliver a constituency," observes Mark Anthony Neal, author of What the Music Said and Soul Babies. According to Neal, Simmons now has to prove that this constituency can have an impact on issues and in voting.
To varying degrees, Sharpton, Simmons and Muhammad have all crossed swords over who will be the voice of the hiphop disenfranchised--and who will be the king maker in New York City Democratic politics. A few years ago, Conrad Muhammad was angry that Sharpton was stealing his thunder. Muhammad was annoyed that Sharpton had usurped his idea for a hiphop summit attacking rap music's violent and sexually explicit lyrics. Sharpton, who admitted that he didn't know much about hiphop, has sought street credibility by associating himself with hiphoppers, most notably by appearing on the cover of the February 2001 issue of The Source.
In Neal's view, Sharpton has matured politically in the last ten years. Most importantly, he's "even known by young black folks who don't follow politics."
The question remains: Can Sharpton's candidacy improve the lives of blacks and others by bringing certain issues to the table? There are currently more than 9,000 black elected officials across the nation, and while their election to public office is a testament to the political franchise won by blacks, there is a widespread feeling of unease among black voters about the efficacy of their votes in the American political system, especially in regard to their relationship to the Democratic Party.
As the 1960s black freedom movement moved "from protest to politics," as Bayard Rustin wrote, community and protest leaders became incorporated into the routines of the country's political system. By the 1970s, some of these leaders became, in effect, a national black political directorate, with power centered in the Congressional Black Caucus. Meanwhile, black America retired itself from the kind of political action that disrupted business as usual. Political energy was channeled into voting, the only legitimate form of redress of grievance as seen by dominant political elites. Yet despite continuing black discontent, there is still no existing independent black organization comparable to the conservative's Moral Majority or Christian Coalition that can make either the Democrats or Republicans pay attention to black concerns.
But Adolph Reed, a New School professor of political science and a Labor Party organizer, argues that incumbent black officials have had an incentive not to organize. "It's not in their interest to mobilize new voters or mobilize any dynamic force [in] black politics. Like with the leadership of the civil rights groups, part of their legitimacy historically has been that they can function as alternatives to chaotic or disruptive protest politics."
Part of the current problem, says Reed, is that the class of black political officials who were elected during the 1970s could "reliably get incremental programmatic benefits for their constituents." But what was true under the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations no longer holds. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan and the Republican risorgimento brought a hostility to the civil rights movement, and neither black America nor its leaders were ready for the new regime of race relations. Nor were they willing to mobilize as before in response to it.
"[Black leaders] haven't been able to respond since then," he adds. "They haven't been able to get much in the way of payoffs."
Consequently, since the 1980s, black politics has been faced with a conundrum: it has a leadership class that has institutional means but is unwilling to risk to them in order to mobilize its constituents. Freelance racial spokespersons have sensed this political timidity, but have basically used symbolic mobilization to mask a personalized racial brokerage that has no interest in effective, programmatic politics. Instead, practitioners are merely provided with "a seat at the table." In other words, unaccountable power.
Established black officials are further de-legitimized by the need to respond to such forms of politicking as endorsing Jackson's 1988 campaign or by attending the Million Man March. Blacks, in turn, make fewer demands on their leaders and themselves to effect changes within the political system. Everyone settles for the occasional succor of symbolic action.
Within this framework of the nation's racial politics, Sharpton's run has conservative implications.
"It's a way that white politicians and media analysts are accustomed to dealing with black people's interests in politics," says Reed. "That may be more significant and insidious than whatever residue that role has of its own for black people. Sharpton has always been a creature of the mainstream media."
As Sharpton said earlier, he wins even when he loses. The long-term outcome, however, will be that when he "wins," effective black politics becomes even more irrelevant than ever before. If not completely dead.
