The New Orleans hurricane disaster’s impact on, among
other things, refocusing attention on America’s racial-class divide
could well prove the tipping point that determines the political
and economic future of Black and Urban America. At about the time
Hurricane Katrina was bearing down on New Orleans from the Mexican
Gulf, I became aware of the death of perhaps black America’s greatest
thinker and critic over the past several decades, Harold Cruse.
Cruse’s Crisis
of the Negro Intellectual (William Morrow & Co.,
1967), provocatively subtitled "a historical analysis of the
failure of black leadership," caused all kinds of black-on-black
tremors when it first appeared in 1967, followed twenty years latter
by his equally seminal but less well-known Plural
But Equal (William Morrow & Co., 1987).
But what, one might wonder, does Harold Cruse have
to do with Hurricane Katrina? The connection is in the timing of
my own knowledge of Cruse’s passing, coinciding with the New Orleans
disaster and its immediate race-class and wider political reverberations.
This prompted, by association, a reflection on Cruse’s many prophetic
insights on the intertwined fate of blacks and America’s cities.
Katrina’s devastation, and the Bush administration’s faltering response,
rudely re-awakened national and international awareness of America’s
unresolved racial and class dilemmas. It also exposed the closely
related precariousness of America’s cities highlighted by Katrina’s
swamping of New Orleans.
To underline these linkages, The
Nation had written that as far as the nationally
dominant Republican party was concerned, "New Orleans and cities
like it have for a long time been written off as expendable."
This was by way of explaining House Speaker Dennis Hastert’s initial
reactions to the New Orleans devastation to the effect that its
rebuilding "doesn’t make sense to me" and that "it
looks like a lot of the place could be bulldozed." Cruse, on
the other hand, at a time when ghetto insurrections were defining
the plight of blacks in the cities, was at pains to point out that
"the large cities, especially in the North, are where the decisive
struggles of the Negro movement will be waged. It will be a difficult
and complex struggle, but the Negro movement must win political
and economic power within these urban communities, while seeking
cultural freedom and equality there and beyond…"
Various and sundry ideological, partisan and public
policy constituencies are engaged in trying to decipher the meaning
of this most devastating of America’s hurricane seasons for the
country’s near-term political future, and the fact that race (and
class) has suddenly taken on renewed salience. Crucially, though,
how does America’s black political leadership stack up in the stock
taking - or does it? - apart, that is, from the predictable outrage
at the impact of Katrina on New Orleans’ ‘left behind’ black victims?
Revisiting Cruse’s original intellectual and leadership crisis perception
seems a fitting place to start in grappling with these questions.
Cruse, after all, warned that "the Indian world
of the reservation exemplifies the fate awaiting the American Negro,
who is left stranded and impoverished in the ghettoes, beyond the
fringe of absorption. He will be pushed there through the compulsions
of the American capitalist dynamic if, as the most populous ethnic
‘out’ group, the American Negro fails to galvanize his potential
as a countervailing force." Tellingly, Cruse, a widely acknowledged
ex-communist member of the African-American Nationalist camp, counseled
that "the Negro group cannot act out this role by assuming
the stance of separatism. The program of Afro-American Nationalism
must activate a dynamism on all social fronts." Moreover, at
the time of writing, he was scornful of the nationalist tendency
to express distrust of "the white man’s Federal power to aid
and abet the Negro’s struggle" while leaping on the "band-wagon
of every anti-poverty handout from the Federal power, and then complain
that the Federal power is not doing enough" yet "refuse
to launch an independent political party of their own in order to
deal more effectively with the Federal power."
Cruse was not an easy read for many a black activist
and intellectual during this age of militant protest and rhetorical
offensives. Rather than African-Americans waging a "race struggle
over civil rights," with its individualistic assimilationist
implications, Cruse argued that "American group reality"
mandated "a struggle for democracy among ethnic groups."
African-Americans constitute one of the main ethnic-national blocs
within a greater American republic still grappling with an unresolved
"American nationality question" growing out of "a
specific American historical condition - involving three racial
stocks - the white, the black and the red."
Cruse was an ardent nationalist, but warned against
separatism at a time (including today) when conventional black and
white American wisdom on race simplistically conflated race nationalism
with racial separatism; when the choice put before us was to either
integrate as individuals into a color-blind nonracial America or
make a clean break with an American identity of any kind. Yet, the
de facto separatism of much of black America is a reality - nationalism
or not. If, therefore, integration is still on America’s agenda,
it must be pursued from this uniquely African-American group reality
and not from the disempowering assumptions of the assimilationist
myth of individualism.
Cruse’s vision was to turn this de facto separatist
reality into a countervailing political and economic empowerment
advantage for blacks, thereby bridging the gap between black separatism-cum-nationalism
and integrationist assimilation. Whether this is still possible
in 2005 and beyond looms as a major challenge confronting black
America. The string of increasingly ideological conservative electoral
triumphs that has ushered in right wing Republican dominance over
Washington, interacting with the plight of blacks unveiled by Katrina’s
devastation, would appear to underline the essential defeat of the
"Negro movement" as Cruse perceived it. But the battle
is not yet over though, from a black perspective, it would have
to be judged as an "uphill struggle."
However, the shape that such a defeat could take was
chillingly sketched out last year by a series on "Wanted: A
Plan for the Cities to Save Themselves," by The Black Commentator
web journal: "The fatal blow will come when the Black and Latino
populations of America’s cities - the only potential mass base of
opposition to corporate rule - are dispersed from the urban centers.
It is here, in the geography of the cities, that the line of resistance
to the rule of the rich must be drawn. Therefore, we must
take the offensive now, while Blacks and Latinos still represent
urban majorities, and while the corporate schemes to co-opt and,
ultimately, displace these populations are still fragmented and
uncoordinated." (See BC, July
29, 2004)
In the wake of Katrina, the web journal’s audio
commentary raised this warning: "One of the premier Black
cities in the nation faces catastrophe. There is no doubt in my
mind that New Orleans will one day rise again from its below sea
level foundations. The question is, will the new New Orleans remain
the two-thirds Black city it was before the levees crumbled?…New
Orleans is a poor city. Twenty-eight percent of the population lives
below the poverty line. Well over half are renters, and the median
value of homes occupied by owners is only $87,000. From the early
days of the flood, it was clear that much of the city’s housing
stock would be irredeemably damaged. The insurance industry may
get a windfall of federal relief, but the minority of New Orleans
home owners will get very little - even if they are insured. The
renting majority may get nothing. If the catastrophe in New Orleans
reaches the apocalyptic dimensions towards which it appears to be
headed, there will be massive displacement of the Black and poor."
If this New Orleans rebuilding scenario is borne out,
the de facto urban black separatism and isolation of the poor that
currently characterizes the plight of blacks throughout much of
urban America could be but a transitional way-station to urban black
dispersal, communal fragmentation and marginalization. While such
a fate hints at the magnitude of the challenge confronting the black
leadership generally and black politicos in particular, this is
getting a bit ahead of the story. The point for now is that the
isolation of pre-hurricane New Orleans’ ‘left behind’ black community
could not have been more complete than if an avowedly ideological
‘go-it-alone’ program of black separatism had been openly and actively
pursued and acquiesced in by Louisiana’s white political establishment.
On the other hand, had such a course been consciously
pursued, it is arguable whether it would have resulted in the situation
motivating New York Times neo-conservative columnist David
Brook’s rebuilding prescription: to "culturally integrate"
the urban black poor. "The only chance we have to break the
cycle of poverty," in Brook’s view, " is to integrate
people who lack middle-class skills into neighborhoods with people
who possess these skills and who insist on certain standards of
behavior."
The black nationalist paradigm assumes a culturally
integrated African-American "nation" transcending socio-economic
class divisions though one would imagine this is hardly what Brooks
has in mind. But given the plight of New Orleans’ black underclass
which can be replicated throughout urban America, there are many
questions that go begging beyond the issue of how the black poor
"culturally integrate." How, for example, does America’s
non-ideologically pragmatic black leadership begin to transform
an existential situation of de facto urban black isolation resembling
"the Indian world of the reservation" into one of black
political and economic empowerment? After all, with or without a
nationalist program, an isolationist separatist reality is a fact
of life for many African-Americans.
Neither white liberal nor conservative leaders in
the Democratic and Republican parties want to be seen endorsing
racial segregation, whether of old-style Jim Crow vintage imposed
by white southerners or self-imposed by blacks. Especially from
the perspective of left-liberalism, this would not be considered
"politically correct." At the same time neither parties’
white elites have an overriding commitment to improving the plight
of the black poor in or outside America’s cities. Redressing the
backlogged legacies of centuries of black slavery and oppression
disadvantaging the competitive chances of African-Americans relative
to all other - mainly immigrant (including Afro-West Indian and,
more recently, continental African) - ethnic groups has never been
a priority investment on America’s agenda. This predicament is compounded
by the plight of the cities which is the bottom-line of the American
black future as well as a story in its own right. It is intimately
interwoven with the structural realities of a black separatism that
neither white nor black leaders wish to own up to much less show
any inkling of how to address apart from acquiescing in a corporatist
solution of black dispersal-cum-urban "Negro Removal."
To appreciate the magnitude of this urban "big
picture," New Orleans should be seen through the prism of Frenchman
Bernard-Henri Levy’s May 2005 Atlantic impressions of his
journey retracing the route taken by Alexis de Tocqueville 200 years
ago. In a section aptly billed "They shoot cities, don’t
they," Levy’s panorama of contemporary America’s bleak urban
terrain spans from Buffalo, New York to the city of my birth, Detroit,
Michigan.
With a hint of dubious American exceptionalism, Levy
preambles his narrative on a culturally aesthetic note: "That
a city could die: for a European, that is unthinkable. And yet…Buffalo,
a city that was once the glory of America, its showcase, where two
presidents once lived (and where one was shot and another inaugurated),
a city that on this late July afternoon - the anniversary, by the
way, of Tocqueville’s visit, in 1831 - offers a landscape of desolation."
On to Cleveland: "Here too, deserted neighborhoods. Empty parking
lots. Cars prowling along Euclid or Prospect, between Fifth and
Sixth East. Winos in municipal buildings. Empty churches, or all
bricked up, yet I keep being told about the renewal in America of
evangelical faith and morality… And finally Detroit, sublime Detroit,
the city that during the war, because of its car and steel factories,
vaunted itself as "the arsenal of democracy," and that
once one has entered it - whether in the Brush Park area, north
of downtown, or, worse, East Detroit - seems like an immense, deserted
Babylon, a futuristic city whose inhabitants have fled: more burned
or razed houses; collapsed facades and roofs that the next big rain
will carry away… An observer who knew nothing of the history of
the city and riots that forty years ago accelerated the exodus of
the white population to the suburbs might think now that he was
in a bombed metropolis…"
Could it be that the urban panorama Levy describes
in his Tocquevillian safari is the "reservation" exemplifying
"the fate awaiting the American Negro" that Harold Cruse
warned about? Bearing in mind House Speaker Hastert’s dismissiveness
about rebuilding New Orleans as a reflection on the politics of
race and ideology in today’s America, the bottom line could be summed
up as follows. Basically, white America has abandoned the cities,
except for smatterings of super-rich, driving the gentrification
of downtown enclaves and historic old communities such as Harlem
at the expense of blacks and Hispanics. New Orleans was no exception.
It became an extreme case of the general rule of urban American
neglect, as its below sea level geography always meant it was a
city living on borrowed time. But "borrowed time" applies
to many other cities as well. Public policy and private interests,
interacting with increasingly conservative white political power
have conspired to disinvest in the nation’s infrastructure: water
mains, roads, railroad tracks and beds, bridges and much else that
make a modern urban industrial civilization functional. "White
flight" begetting capital flight and exclusionary zoning rules,
along with banking industry redlining, created the nation’s inner
city black separatist reality.
A major part of the current predicament afflicting
America’s cities, which have become the threatened political and
demographic strongholds of black America and much of the Democratic
party, is rooted in, and compounded by, America’s inequitable electoral
system. This is a historical legacy of the fact that the U.S. was
conceived as a "white man’s country" with the intent of
protecting the interests of a propertied white male settler elite.
The feared excesses of popular democracy had to be pre-empted through
embedded minority-rule devises. These constitutionally structured
inequalities have become increasingly pronounced as predominantly
white small-town, small-state and/or suburban and up-state electoral
constituencies out-vote major urban areas in election after election
- albeit by close margins which are increasingly subject to vote-rigging.
According to Robert Dahl, in his How Democratic
is the American Constitution? the American Constitution of 1787
had little to say about minorities, with the exception of affording
geographical minorities extensive protections. Power was
decentralized to the states, and "in the federal legislature
small states were given equal representation in the Senate."
In effect, they saddled the nation with an inherently conservative
geopolitical bias. This was traditionally reflected in an alignment
of mainly small western/Rocky Mountain states and the former slave
states of the Deep South. Together, these regions constituted a
geopolitical combination that once resulted in congressional alliances
between southern Democrats ("Dixiecrats") and conservative
Republicans before the latter replaced the Democrats as the dominant
party in the south.
The specific inequalities in this constitutionally
inspired geopolitical bias are two. First, is the fact that all
states are accorded two members of the Senate no matter how big
or small the state. This is known as the "constant two"
advantage. The other inequality was the Electoral College. This,
again, is weighted toward small states. Through an electoral college
based on the combined numbers of Representatives and Senators
from each state, small states won, not only representation in the
Senate beyond proportion to their populations, but overrepresentation
in the electoral college as well. The Senatorial "constant
two" advantage combined with the small state bias of the electoral
college exposes the woeful inadequacies of the historic Voting Rights
Act of 1965 which has increasingly been manipulated by white conservatives
with black political and civil rights establishment complicity.
The result: black America has been lured into a political cul-de-sac
of isolation without any leverage on the wider system.
In 1994 - ironically, the year in which black South
Africans achieved their political liberation - Chicago labor lawyer,
Tom Geoghegan, writing in The New Republic foreshadowed the
racial implications of the 2000 elections and what they may hold
for future elections. According to Geoghegan: "It is now clear
that in the next century the U.S. will become a multiracial society
unlike anything in our past. By some official estimates, the non-Hispanic
white population could drop to 72 percent in the year 2000 and to
60 percent in the year 2030… In the new multiracial America, the
big-state minorities individually will have less voting power than
they do now… As the U.S. becomes more multi-racial and stranger
to the people-of-the-interior, the non-Hispanic whites in most of
the small states will get more and more heavily weighted votes [italics
added]." And yet, Geoghegan wondered: "Right now, some
American black leaders are obsessed with creating minority districts.
The idea is to get around Shaw v. Reno, and to get more black
representatives into the House. But who benefits? Why do blacks
in the U.S. need more minority districts? No group is more in need
of the changes we could get from a little dash of majority rule.
What point is there in pumping up the Black Caucus in the House
if everything gets shut down in the Senate?"
At the time these observations were made, the Democratic
party controlled both houses of congress. In 2005, with both the
House and Senate under Republican control, the Black Caucus has
become all the more marginalized. This situation magnifies the disadvantages
of African-Americans being politically beholden to one party. It
plays into the constant refrain that blacks should not "put
all their eggs in one political basket," the assumption - a
faulty one - being that more would be gained if more blacks voted
Republican; that blacks are taken for granted by the Democrats and
lack leverage.
Given the rightward drift of the Democratic party
this is largely true. But the notion that the black vote would be
taken less for granted by the Democrats if more blacks voted Republican
is spurious reasoning given the choice that both parties would present
to African-Americans: a centre-right party competing with an extreme
right party, both trying to out-compete the other on which can more
effectively limit the role of government in economy and society
to placate the corporate dictatorship of the managerial class depicted
by John Kenneth Galbraith in his insightful essay on The Economics
of Innocent Fraud: Truth for Our Times (Houghton Mifflin Co.,
2004).
The black condition in America and the plight of the
cities, coupled with the urgent need for refurbishing the nation’s
infrastructure cries out for more, not less government. The unfolding
politics of post-Katrina recovery, in fact, could foreshadow a reversal
in both parties’ Reagan era-induced "withering away of the
state" proclivities (Move over Karl Marx!). Only an intellectually
and politically bankrupt non-ideological pragmatism devoid of any
strategic sense of a black imperative for constructing countervailing
power would countenance a strategy calling for African-Americans
to split their allegiance between Democrats and Republicans. Rather,
the African-American electorate and its political leadership would
appear more in need of urgently considering options for molding
the black vote into a "third force" catalyst for major
constitutional and systemic changes. The terms of an outdated American
federalism need to be renegotiated and the post-Katrina recovery
seems a likely point to start.
The stakes involved in such a renegotiation are high.
The rebuilding of New Orleans, and the Gulf Coast generally, may
be where corporate schemes for re-taking urban America cease to
remain "fragmented and uncoordinated." The Bush administration
and its conservative allies are feverishly grappling with how to
make concessions to the recovery imperatives of massive government
intervention without abandoning their ideological commitment to
private sector hegemony over state and economy if not to
actually dismantle government. While this internal struggle could
well expose unsustainable contradictions within Republican conservative
hegemony in Washington, the black agenda within the scope of New
Orleans and general urban recovery on a national scale could still
wind up a casualty in what, essentially is a white-on-white struggle;
one that will also determine intra-Democratic party political and
policy alignments as well.
To summarize these contradictions, President Bush,
in his September 15 speech to the nation pledged to spend whatever
it takes to rebuild the Gulf Coast, triggering no little amount
of consternation among conservatives about the New Deal/Great Society
scale of such an undertaking. But is this a sustainable commitment
by Bush, under a conservative agenda that has over-extended the
U.S. military in a $5 billion a month Iraq occupation coupled with
rising oil prices and growing dependence on China and Japan’s buying
up American debt: Cruse’s "compulsions of the American capitalist
dynamic" coming home to roost in American economic and strategic
decline?
Some commentators, like Noam Scheiber, writing recently
in The New Republic, perceive a political trap that Bush
Republicans have created for themselves by having crafted what essentially
amounts to a white working class Christian nationalist coalition
mandating that the GOP "constantly dole out both generous tax
cuts and generous spending" in order to remain the majority
party. This exposes a Republican dilemma. While the GOP is highly
dependent - as are the Democrats - on money from corporations, since
the ‘80s a smaller and smaller portion of the party’s votes come
from affluent voters, "even as its funding continues to come
from the business community."
In effect, the Democratic and Republican parties,
in socio-economic class and cultural terms, appear to be trading
constituencies as the GOP becomes more dependent on a "downscale"
white working class receptive to appeals to religiosity and cultural
issues like abortion, gun control and gay marriage, while affluent
professionals, repelled by this baggage are becoming a core Democratic
constituency. The problem is that, in socio-racial terms, this affluent
constituency tends to be fiscally conservative and anti-public sector
which much of the black lower-middle and working classes and the
poor are dependent on. And thus far, urban "revitalization"
pushed by desperate black mayors of major municipalities has been
pegged to attracting affluent whites and corporate capital back
into the cities - but at what costs?
As The Black Commentator describes it (August
14, 2003), revitalization "strategy" has, essentially,
been characterized by a process of giving away the public’s assets.
In addition to direct gifts of land and structures, plus tax abatements
stretching into future generations, an array of federal and state
programs evolved to subsidize the return of private capital and
affluent populations. Municipal powers of eminent domain were made
available to condemn, clear and shape the economic and physical
contours of the city to capital’s specifications. "Basic public
functions such as zoning have become processes through which corporations
plot the destinies of cities. Elected officials are neutered and
their publics are not served, the root of the political crisis that
afflicts Black and brown cities." Hence, the fear that rebuilding
New Orleans may foreshadow the massive displacement of the black
and poor who make - or made - up 67 percent of the city. Well over
half of these are renters who will not qualify for President Bush’s
proposed Urban Homestead Plan. More suitable would be a rental voucher
scheme similar to the special vouchers used by an estimated 10,000
persons (out of 20,000 affected) to move into stable apartments
after being made homeless by the Los Angeles earthquake of 1994.
According to The Black Commentator’s Radio
BC, "in place of the jobs that have been washed away,
there could be alternative employment through a huge, federally
funded rebuilding effort. But this is George Bush’s federal government.
Does anyone believe that the Bush men would mandate that priority
employment go to the pre-flood, mostly Black population of the city?"
Rather, depending on how the rebuilding scenario unfolds linked
to the unfolding conservative Republican debate on how to pay for
the post-Katrina recovery, the Bush administration may discover
a formula for placating its business community funders and affluent
whites. This could accelerate a trend toward black urban de-concentration
and dispersal while retaining the GOP’s increasing white working
class base. This will be accompanied by a deracializing strategy
of co-opting Hispanics, Asians and other non-black minorities into
what Cruse warned might emerge as a "pro-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant
‘racial’ coalition" if "the Negro leadership is hampered
by deficient conceptualizing of American group reality." The
update of this 1967 warning in 2005 is that: "The Black leadership
in the cities - on which national Black power rests - was gained
by default during the Great Urban Divestment. Unless new or re-educated
Blacks emerge during the current period, as capital and affluent
non-Blacks seek to reshape the cities, African Americans will lose
their pivotal role in the national debate, and progressive politics
will collapse."
As it is, progressive left-of-center politics in America
is in turmoil due to the ongoing political identity crisis within
a center-right Democratic party. This state of affairs is accompanied
by uncertain efforts by progressive constituencies outside the party
to regroup and force the Democrats back toward the left. It is within
this context, in the August 2004 run-up to the November election,
that a Harper’s Magazine forum on "Liberalism Regained:
Building the next progressive majority" produced some insightful
comments by former National Rainbow Coalition executive director,
Ron Daniels, independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader and
City University of New York political analyst and author, Frances
Fox Piven. The conclusion that Ron Daniels, as the lone black voice
in this forum, arrived at is particularly instructive in light of
Cruse’s advocacy of an all-black political party.
After Nader opined that "outside groups supporting
the Democratic Party don’t have any leverage at all" with Piven
concluding that "the Democratic Party will never change without
social movements that threaten it from outside," Daniels observed
that "what we don’t have right now is the outside piece of
that equation." He then made a telling admission: "With
the Rainbow Coalition, I think our tactical mistake was to take
all that energy inside the party. You’ve got to have pressure from
outside to keep the inside honest. And that is where some of
the independent campaigns play a part. Independent campaigns can
put forward new issues and compel new voters [italics added]."
Here, Daniels was referring to the Ross Perot factor in 1992.
Pointing out that Perot’s 19 percent support represented
a huge voting bloc outside both the Democratic and Republican parties,
Daniels concluded that "we need an organization, even if
it’s not a party, that can serve as a catalyst in American politics.
It could support progressive or moderate Republicans in critical
situations, but could also be advancing progressive Democrats. It
also would have the capacity to sponsor independent candidates in
municipal or state elections, while still supporting the Democrats
for national office [italics added]." This sounds an awful
lot like what Cruse had in mind when he lamented the fact that "Afro-American
Nationalists refuse to launch an independent political party of
their own" to leverage countervailing power in "the large
cities…where the decisive struggles of the Negro movement will be
waged." And, indeed, the struggle is more difficult and complex
in 2005 than in 1967. Any new nationalist initiative would need
to confront not just "the white man’s Federal power,"
but his corporate power as well, including the neo-liberal globalizing
logic of the "compulsions of the American capitalist dynamic"
that were not so apparent in the late ‘60s.
The complexity of the struggle, in 2005, is compounded
by a number of circumstances that will challenge the intra-black
politics of navigating the countervailing power imperatives of an
all-black political party on the one hand, with the equally compelling
imperatives of interracial coalition-building on the other. For
example, the American group reality that, in Cruse’s view, demands
a "struggle for democracy among ethnic groups," must now
accommodate a growing African immigrant infusion into black America
that has already upset the "African-American" identity
apple cart. This was graphically displayed in the 2004 Illinois
senatorial contest between winning Democratic candidate Barack Obama,
of Kenyan descent, and his fellow black Republican challenger, Alan
Keyes. Keyes derided Obama for not being a real African-American
since he was not of slave descent.
Then there is the broader "third world"
multi-racialization of America stemming from other immigrant infusions
from South, East and Southeast Asia and the Middle East as well
as Latin America. Thus, African-Americans - Nationalists and non-Nationalists
alike - will have to muster a level of multi-cultural sensitivity
that has not been amply evident from past political encounters between
black political actors and constituencies and other non-white ethnic
groups in the past.
Assuming that this growing "third world"
multi-ethnicity can be navigated with reasonable deftness, African-American
Nationalism via an independent political party would need to craft
a limited objective strategy of mobilizing an urban black political,
economic and social reconstruction agenda. It would need to be geared,
first and foremost, to local municipal and metropolitan electoral
politics; then, moving up the chain to state and national election
campaigns. This would be much as depicted by Ron Daniels: supporting
progressive or moderate Republicans in critical situations as well
as advancing progressive Democrats while sponsoring its own candidates
in municipal or state elections while leveraging its "countervailing
force" in supporting Democrats for national office. Such a
coalitional all-black political party strategy would, of necessity,
need to be coupled and calibrated with interracial coalition-building
to give voice and momentum to a broad urban progressive reform "social
movement" of renewal for America’s cities; a movement that
could expand into a national agenda for generating an American infrastructural
renaissance.
One plausible scenario could revolve around a proposal
that the Coalition of Black Trade Unions (CBTU) spearhead an urban
corporate social accountability movement directed at forcing black
mayors and corporate boardrooms into a new compact for cities that
safeguards and advances black and minority interests. The formation
of an all-black or black-led independent political party around
such a campaign, with the CBTU as its nucleus, could motivate the
consolidation of a range of disparate progressive initiatives into
a nationally coordinated social movement that could operate within
and beyond the framework of such a party. These include the CBTU’s
Living Wage Movement, the Washington, D.C.-based Good Jobs First,
the Institute for Policy Studies’ Cities for Progress and the "church,
labor and community groups" alliance comprising the Growth
With Justice Coalition which mandates "community impact reports"
for corporate urban investments.
On a broader plane, such a consolidated social movement
could help shape a broader, interracial and multicultural Urban
Progressive Alliance that would engage interactively, in tandem,
with an independent black political base. More immediately, there
is an urgent need for the mobilization of a national black political
oversight over post-Katrina Gulf Coast recovery efforts; something
that could be undertaken by the Congressional Black Caucus working
closely in conjunction with state and local black elected officials
throughout the Gulf region.
Ultimately, however, an independent black political
party initiative, in coalition with non-black progressive forces,
will have to craft into its urban renaissance and infrastructural
renewal agenda a more ambitious constitutional reform strategy.
This strategy would revolve around the need for major reform in
the electoral system linked to a federalist "New Deal"
for America’s major cities and urban states. There needs to be a
consistent and focused pro-democracy campaign for changing the Electoral
College if not abolishing it altogether. Although the Electoral
College favors Republicans, the Democratic party establishment is
ambivalent on this issue. So an independent political party would
have to take this up. One reform option on the table would eliminate
the two extra votes given to each state on the basis of Senate representation
in favor of the Electoral College being allocated on the basis of
House seats alone in proportion to state-wide popular vote.
With respect to Senate representation, Tom Geoghagen
has proposed that there be five classes of states, based on population,
allocating senators accordingly. Another alternative could be to
allocate an additional senator to states with the nine or ten biggest
cities and/or the District of Columbia, thereby reducing rural,
small-town/small-state overrepresentation in the Senate. Enhancing
urban representation in the U.S. Senate could, in turn, be coupled
with exploring constitutionally entrenched urban "Home Rule"
and/or major revenue allocation formulas for major cities in their
relationships with their states, on the one hand, and Washington
on the other. This is the kind of pro-democracy electoral and federalist
restructuring agenda that could inform the political and policy
thrust of an all-black political party interacting with a broader
Urban Progressive Alliance - in addition to a focused urban renaissance/infrastructural
renewal investment agenda.
What is needed now, in the wake of Katrina, and to
safeguard the rebuilding of New Orleans as the southern cultural
capitol of black America, is a broad-based national study commission
on issues pertaining to the future of the cities, the future of
blacks within them and options for electoral reform by a consortium
of black interests. Would that Harold Cruse were here, with his
insights and honesty, to help mold this consortium. In his tribute
to Cruse titled, "The Left: Fade to Black - Harold Cruse and
the untimely demise of the American left," cultural critic
Norman Kelly had this to say: "With the passing on March 25
of Harold Cruse, one has to take note of the post-civil rights black
intelligensia and ask, What has it developed in the last 40 years?
Interestingly, not much of anything except a great deal of attitude
in the works of Cornel West, bell hooks and Michael Eric ‘Why I
Love Black Women’ Dyson. Cruse, however, was a true public intellectual,
not a market intellectual."
Francis Kornegay is a senior analyst for international
affairs at the Centre
for Policy Studies, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is a native
of Detroit, Michigan, and served on the staffs of Rep. Charles C.
Diggs (D-MI) and Washington, DC Delegate Walter Fauntroy (D). |