In
July
2015, when two Black Lives Matter
activists challenged liberal
candidates running for the 2016
Democratic presidential
nomination, the late Kevin
Alexander Gray told me in an interview,
“all candidates ought to have an
agenda that deals with the issues
that the Black community are
grappling with right now, to
include police violence, to
include economics, to include all
the issues that the Black Lives
Matter activists raised.”
Gray didn’t let anyone off the
hook, including Vermont’s independent
Senator Bernie Sanders, who had launched his
first presidential campaign, and was
considered the most left-leaning candidate.
“They ought to hire Black people to advise
them in their campaigns,” he said, “instead
of just organizing a group of white men,
which Bernie Sanders is guilty of doing too,
and letting those people try to filter what
it is that the candidates get.”
Gray
was
a longtime civil rights activist
and the author of multiple books,
including The
Decline of Black Politics: From
Malcolm X to Barack Obama (2008),
Waiting
for
Lightning to Strike: The
Fundamentals of Black Politics (2008),
and
Killing
Trayvons:
An Anthology of American Violence (2014).
He
passed
away on
March
7, 2023, of a heart attack.
During
the
2015 interview, Gray echoed what many
Black
thinkers of
the
time were demanding of Sanders:
give racial justice as much weight
as economic justice because the
two are so intimately linked, and
failing to do so means accepting a
racist status quo.
It was typical of Gray to
forcefully make such connections, to have an
intersectional lens, and to choose his
values and ideals over what pundits deemed
was the practical thing to do. It’s why I
interviewed him many times over my
journalism career, and it’s what I’ll miss
most about him.
About
a
decade later, the idea of “racial
capitalism” began
to
be taken more seriously. But it
was the analysis of Black thinkers
like Gray, who had the benefit of
a long arc of political activism,
that pushed the idea forward, and
that uplifted the economic justice
demands of younger Black activists
like those leading the Black Lives
Matter movement. Today, Senator
Sanders routinely calls out structural
racism.
He and other white liberal leaders
had to be pushed into doing so.
Gray,
who
was campaign
manager
in South Carolina for
Jesse
Jackson’s 1988 presidential run,
had also been critical of the
nation’s first Black president,
Barack Obama. The first time I
spoke with Gray was
in
July 2010 when the Obama
administration fired an African
American official named Shirley
Sherrod from
her
position at the Department of
Agriculture because of a
right-wing effort to misrepresent
a speech she made.
As usual, Gray didn’t mince words.
He said to me, “I’m a Black man in America.
This country is eaten up with racism and
white supremacy—which is the other term no
one ever seems to want to use.” It would be
at least six years before the phrase “white
supremacy” finally became commonly used to
explain the rise of Donald Trump’s white
nationalist leadership.
But in 2010, Gray decried what he
said was being dubbed, “post-racialism,” and
“the sanitization of American history while
Barack Obama is president.”
His analysis was direct but also
nuanced. “We should defend him [Barack
Obama] when the attack is about him being
Black and being Black as a disqualifier for
being president or anything because that is
structural racism and white supremacy,
because that is an attack against us.”
Gray
was
not swayed by grand rhetoric. When
Obama won reelection in 2012,
analysts and pundits regaled his
2013
inauguration speech as
unleashed
from the constraints of
campaigning. The New York Times
called it “evolved
and
unapologetic.”
But
when I turned
to
Gray for
analysis,
he said, “I hear pundits and
everyone lauding it as a
progressive manifesto, but it’s
far from that.”
“You’ve got
the prison industrial complex being fed
by poor people, poor Black kids… What
the Black community needs and what poor
people need are jobs programs,” said
Gray. “And those programs are not going
to be forthcoming from this
administration or this Congress just
because they are talking about cutting.”
In
response
to Obama uplifting sacrosanct
government programs like Social
Security and Medicare in his
speech, Gray pointed out that the
Bowles-Simpson
commission—convened
in
2010 by none other than Obama—had
recommended cuts to such programs
and recommended raising the
eligibility age for Social
Security to 67. Gray said, “I’m a
55-year-old Black man. The average
lifespan of a Black man is 67.
So why would you start there?”
(In fact, Gray was 65 when he
died—a fact that hit me hard as I listened
to his archival interview.)
Gray
asked
about Obama’s second term, “Is he
going to affirmatively defend
FDR’s New Deal and Social
Security, and a pension for people
when they get old, or is he going
to give it all up to the
Republicans? That’s the basic
legislative and policy question
before we cheer and celebrate a
line in a speech!” In the end,
Gray was right to question the
president’s motives. By 2016 it
became clear that Obama’s two-term
legacy was less about progressive
transformation and more about “the
benefits of practicality and
compromise,” as one analyst
pointed out in the Guardian.
Gray understood that change didn’t
happen solely by electing Black people or
even progressives of any race to positions
of power. “People need to organize—poor
people, working people—to put pressure on
the government, at the local level and the
congressional level,” he said in 2013.
He pointed out that Obama had
become more progressive on LGBTQ rights, for
example, not because the president realized
that equality was important on his own, but
because he had been forced to evolve. Obama
has “come a long way,” said Gray. “And of
course, the reason he’s come so far on gay
rights is because the gay community has
worked its agenda—it’s filed lawsuits, it’s
filed referendums, and it’s moved the issue
forward to where it is mainstream and it’s…
politically smart to be an advocate for
equal rights.”
Such powerful and elegant analyses
were typical of Gray. He saw clearly the
connections between grassroots pressure and
politicians’ PR moves.
“Movements
are
connected to something long term,”
said
Gray to
me
once. “We have to rebuild
organizations, we have to rebuild
networks… It’s got to be led by
young people, but it’s got to
include all people. It’s got to be
multiracial, it’s got to be
multi-issue. And that’s when
movements take place, and that’s
when change takes place.”
As
usual,
he was right.
This
commentary was
produced
by Economy
for
All,
a project of the Independent Media
Institute.
