What sets the contemporary genre of inspirational black hero films [like Black Panther] apart is the way the fantasies they enact connect with the race-first sensibilities prominent among black and other professional-managerial strata. These race commentators share a body of ideological assumptions and material interests, deeply invested in parsing, interpreting, and administering inequality in terms of racial disparities. Specifically, this genre of critique typically looks to measure and remediate the exclusion of black professionals from traditionally white power elites....
The striking hostility to...[class-based] politics within the higher reaches of antiracist activism illustrates the extent to which what bills itself as black politics today is in fact a class politics: it is not interested in the concerns of working people of whatever race or gender. Indeed, a spate of recent media reports have retailed evidence that upper-class black Americans may be experiencing stagnant-to-declining social mobility—which is taken as prima facie evidence of the stubbornly racist cast of the American social order: Even rich professionals like us, elite commentators suggest, are denied the right to secure our own class standing. It is also telling that the study that provoked the media reports – Raj Chetty, et al., “Race and Economic Opportunity in the United States: An Intergenerational Perspective” – rehearses the hoary recommendation that “reducing the intergenerational persistence of the black-white income gap will require policies whose impacts cross neighborhood and class lines and increase upward mobility specifically for black men.” These include “mentoring programs for black boys, efforts to reduce racial bias among whites, or efforts to facilitate social interaction across racial groups within a given area.” That’s pretty thin gruel, warmed over bromides and all too familiar paternalism and no actually redistributive policies at all....
The black leadership role was always at best an accommodation to disfranchisement, going back to its first modern incarnation with Booker T. Washington and his cohort of racial advocates. It is a politics of elite transaction. That is not in itself necessarily a bad thing—President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “black cabinet,” or Federal Council of Negro Affairs, advised him on matters related to black Americans. But unlike today’s freelance racial voices, they were administration functionaries, and most had standing in racial advocacy, education, labor, and government institutions prior to joining the “cabinet.” The backdoor dealings between King and Johnson during the Selma campaign that DuVernay found too messy to include in her portrait of King’s heroic persona were also part of mundane political maneuvering, the inside-outside game of institutional politics. King and the SCLC, like FDR’s black cabinet, had constituencies that underwrote their standing as representatives of racial interest—which in turn gave them leverage to make political demands and pursue policy agendas. A. Philip Randolph used the March on Washington Movement to pressure President Roosevelt in 1941 to issue “Executive Order 8802,” prohibiting racial discrimination in the national defense industry. Randolph, Bayard Rustin, the Negro American Labor Council, and others organized the 1963 March on Washington as part of an inside-outside strategy to build support for a jobs program and passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
All this painstaking political effort could not be farther from the careerist pursuits of contemporary racial voices, whose standing depends entirely on the favor of powerful opinion-shaping elites in corporate media and elsewhere. Thus, for example, Touré Neblett and others in MSNBC’s stable were unceremoniously expunged from the lineup of talking heads when the network reconfigured its marketing priorities. More dramatically, Melissa Harris-Perry, apparently believing that her viewing audience gave her leverage, openly rebuffed the network’s demand to reorient her program to fit in with its election coverage. In short order, she and her program vanished without a trace from its schedule. Such incidents, and scores of others like them, make it indelibly clear where the lines of authority run when it comes to winning elite-media recognition as a black voice....
The race voices I’ve discussed express a particular class perspective among black Americans, one that harmonizes with left-neoliberal notions of justice and equality. That harmony may help explain why those racial voices—like the black political class in general—are so intent on disparaging the social-democratic politics associated with Bernie Sanders, even though a 2017 Harvard-Harris survey found that Sanders was far more popular with African Americans than with any other demographic category except declared Democrats. He boasted a 73 percent favorable rating among black voters—higher than his approval numbers among Hispanics, Asian-Americans, and considerably higher than those for whites or even 18-34 year-olds....
Recent Comments