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"The great political divide in America
today is not red vs. blue, north vs. south, coastal vs. interior,
or even rich vs. poor – it
is now clearly black vs. white." This was the conclusion
of the Bay Area Center For Voting Research upon the release of
their report listing the 236 US cities with populations of 100,000
or more in order of how "liberal" or how "conservative" they
are. Researchers at BACVR reached what is to us at BC an unsurprising conclusion:
“The nation’s remaining
liberals are overwhelming African Americans.
“The BACVR study that ranks the political
ideology of every major city in the country shows that cities
with large black
populations dominate the list of liberal communities. The research
finds that Detroit is the most liberal city in the United States
and has one of the highest concentrations of African American
residents of any major city. Over 81% of the population in
Detroit is African American, compared to the national average
of 12.3%. In fact, the average percentage of African American
residents in the 25 most liberal cities in the country is 40.3%,
more than three times the national rate.
“The list of America’s most liberal cities reads like a who’s
who of prominent African American communities. Gary, Washington
D.C., Newark, Flint, Cleveland, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and
Birmingham have long had prominent black populations. While
most black voters have consistently supported Democrats since
the 1960s, it is the white liberals that have slowly withered
away over the decades, leaving African Americans as the sole
standard bearers for the left….
“While there are some noteworthy pockets
of liberals who are not African American, these places end
up being the exceptions.
College towns like Berkeley and Cambridge have modest black
populations, but remain bastions of upper middle-class, white,
intellectual liberalism. These liberal communities, however,
are more reminiscent of penguins clustering together around
a shrinking iceberg, than of a vibrant growing political movement.”
Regular BC readers might
have already noticed that we eschew both the terms “liberal” and “conservative.”
All Americans, but most especially white
Americans seem to live in a media-created, ahistorical sort
of bubble. This reality-distorting
set of interlocking bubbles, a sort of Matrix,
not unlike that in the movie of the same name, constantly furnishes
us with disinforming explanations that really don’t explain. The
liberal vs. conservative dichotomy is the “inside the matrix” explanation
of how politics works. Outside the matrix, among the rest of
humanity it is generally understood that the ground over which
political disputes are fought is the left vs. the right.
Better than two hundred years ago, there
was a moment in the French Revolution in which that nation’s first constituent assembly
sat. On the right side of the speaker sat France’s ancient and
bloodthirsty nobles, many of whom aimed to bring back the king. Allied
with them were the Church, the country’s biggest and richest
landowner, and the masters of France’s vast overseas slave plantations
in Martinique, Saint Dominique and elsewhere in the New World. In
a few years the slaves of Saint Dominique would rebel, tear the
white stripe out of the middle of the French flag and rename
their land Haiti, in honor of its exterminated native inhabitants. On
the left side of the room sat the representatives of small farmers
and small business people, the landless farmworkers, the urban
workers and poor. And so it has been that all over the world
since that time, the political forces which prop up and defend
entrenched wealth and ancient privilege have been called “the
right,” while those who fight for the humanity and dignity of
poor and ordinary men and women and for their right to a place
in the sun have been called “the left.” Those are the terms
in general use outside the Matrix.
Words are tools for understanding reality. The most useful
ones allow us to make clear distinctions between things that
are in fact different. How do we tell whether a public policy
or a political figure is “liberal” or “conservative”? The answer
is that we can’t always, and even when we think we can it makes
little difference.
Hilary Clinton, Congressmen David Scott (D-GA)
and Artur Davis (D-AL) and General Wesley Clark are all supposed “liberal” Democrats. But
all supported the war in Iraq, and none of the three who had
a vote cast it against the Patriot Act. Democratic Senator Pat
Leahy is a liberal, and voted John Roberts onto the Supreme Court,
just as “liberals” before him voted for Clarence Thomas. “Liberal” Democratic
Senate leader Harry Reid supports Bush’s latest right wing crony
appointment to the Supreme Court, and “liberal” Senator Barack
Obama voted for “tort reform” that protects wealthy corporations
from suits by ordinary citizens.
On the other hand we are constantly told
that the Black Church is “conservative.” But BC’s February
3, 2005 issue quotes a Chicago Tribune article saying that
the National Baptist Convention, which encompasses four denominations
and claims 15 million African American congregants earlier this
year
“…declared their opposition to the war
in Iraq and to the nomination and expected confirmation of
Alberto Gonzales as
attorney general.
”They also called for a higher minimum wage, discontinuation
of recent tax cuts, investment in public education and reauthorization
of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, some provisions of which
are up for review in 2007….
”Leaders also demanded that
Bush stop privatization of prison construction, reinvest in
children's health insurance
and increase global relief for black nations such as Sudan and
Haiti.”
So the “liberalism” of Hilary Clinton, Harry Reid, Barack Obama,
or David Scott gives us no clue as to what they actually stand
for, any more than the supposed “conservatism” of the black church
explains Rev. Jesse Jackson, Dr. Martin Luther King or the National
Baptist Convention. The labels “liberal” and “conservative” hide
more than they explain. It’s only when we emerge from
the Matrix to ask which side political personalities, organizations
and social forces line up on, the left or the right, that we
get useful answers.
The Core of the Left Lives in Black America
BACVR director Jason Alderman calls the revelation
that the core of the American left lives in black America “disheartening.” We
at BC can understand why a self-described white “liberal” might
feel that way. But it should be no surprise. Almost three years
ago, Black Commentator coined the term “the
black consensus” to define the persistent fact that African
Americans, across lines of gender, class and generation held
to a set of political opinions well to the left of America’s
so-called mainstream. The BACVR study only reaffirms what BC said
three years ago:
“African Americans remain in remarkable, consistent agreement
on political issues, a shared commonality of views that holds
strongly across lines of income, gender and age. The Black
Commentator's analysis of biannual data from the Joint Center
for Political and Economic Studies confirms the vitality of
a broad Black Consensus. Most importantly, the data show that
Black political behavior has not deviated from recent historical
patterns, nor is any significant Black demographic group likely
to diverge from these patterns in the immediate future….
”African Americans are and have always been, in fact, clumped
together on the left side of the conventional American political
spectrum. An objective reading of the JCPES survey confirms
some of the underlying basis for Blacks' liberal voting patterns – which
is long term bad news for the Right and self-styled Black conservatives.
Still, this is not good enough news for Black progressives,
since the task of organizing people for political action requires
an understanding of how they actually feel about issues as
they relate to their own lives and in the context of their
group's particular world view, rather than within the framework
presented by American corporate media.”
Black Leaders Must Make African American
Issues American Issues
Organizing black communities around what African Americans already
believe is however, not what a sizeable chunk of black
leadership wants to do. At last month’s CBC week, Rep. Mel Watt
treated CBC
Monitor’s Leutisha Stills to an uncivil rant about how inappropriate it
was to cast issues like war and peace or universal, single-payer health
care as “black issues.” Rep. Watt’s prescription for black leadership
would instead free our elite from its bothersome constituents
and enable them to rent themselves to the highest bidder on just
about any matters except funding HBCUs and maybe voting
rights.
This kind of leadership dooms black America
to non-representation and continued political isolation, as
well as making invisible
on the greater American political scene the fact that tens of
millions of citizens already favor national health care as a
human right, an education of equally high quality for all, have
opposed the war in Iraq from the start, and hold an array of
other political views that the corporate media might call “ultra-liberal” but
are actually leftist. At this time, black political leaders
are in the best position of any American leaders to publicly
stand up for single-payer health care and other reforms, because
there is no doubt that their constituencies would unequivocally
support them.
If Barack Obama for instance, was to experience a flashback
to his early unequivocal opposition
to the war in Iraq, or his days in the Illinois State Senate,
when he supported universal health care via the Bernardin Amendment,
the rightward running room for white Democrats would suddenly
and dramatically narrow.
To its credit, the BACVR report poses an
important question for black and white American leftists, and
maybe for “liberals” too. If
African Americans are the core and base of the left in America,
why are we so vastly under-represented in its leadership?:
“Despite being
the core of America’s liberal base, a major split exists between
who the nation’s liberals are and who leads them politically.
White politicians still control the levers of power within the
Democratic Party, and black faces are rare around the decision
making tables of America’s liberal advocacy groups.”
This is probably a question that white leaders
of the Democratic party would rather not see asked too loudly.
White Democratic party leaders and some of
their black colleagues have always known that black America
is where the left lives. They
count on its votes, but need to muzzle its voice, and have honed
to a fine art the practice of appearing just a wee bit less openly
hostile to black aspirations than Republicans. A despicable
strategy perhaps, but its continued success depends on black
leadership being allowed, as Rep. Watt and others desire, to
follow the money instead of being held accountable to the black
consensus, to the actual will of their black constituents, who
are firmly on the left.
The only folks who seem unaware that the
left lives in black America are actual self-described white
leftists, and the modest
number of blacks who listen much too attentively to the corporate
song that an imaginary “post-civil-rights” generation of conservative
blacks is about to emerge. Fortunately no evidence exists which
might substantiate this oft-repeated claim. BC advises
brothers and sisters in the former group to turn off the TV and
radio for a few weeks. Put down the Wall Street Journal and
the Atlanta Constitution. Talk to your black neighbors and friends,
if you have any. Talk to your parents and their friends. Talk
to your pastor unless you’re in a mega-church, in which case
(s)he won’t have time to talk to you anyway. Forget about “conservative” and “liberal.” Look
instead for indications of whether the black people you talk
to are on the right, or on the left and we suspect that you too
will find where the left lives.
White Leftists Must Solicit Black Participation, or
be Irrelevant
For the white left, the situation is more
complex. African
Americans have overwhelmingly opposed the war in Iraq from its
outset, but the black presence at last month’s large antiwar
demonstrations in Washington, in San Francisco and elsewhere
lagged far behind the actual percentages of black vs. white opposition
to the war. By failing to find ways to effectively unite with
the broad leftward current that flows through the heart of black
America white leftists also doom themselves to the margins of
America’s political life.
Right now it is Ramadan, and devout Muslims
turn to face Mecca several times a day. It is hard to imagine
white Americans going out to convince their fellow whites of
anything if they cannot
make common cause with their black neighbors who are already
of the same stripe.
BC Associate Editor Bruce Dixon can be contacted
at [email protected].
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