4
Civil rights aren’t just the tools of courts and lawyers. Popular social movements have used the language of civil rights to raise awareness of injustice, rally a complacent public to action, and press for concrete change from government and businesses. Rights aren’t just the language of lawyers and the jargon of jurists; they are also a popular patois used to name moral wrongs and shame those who caused them. Ideally, such popular rights could redeem legal rights, bringing the pragmatism of the concrete streets to the chilly conceptualism of the marble courtroom and the ivory tower. Alas, the reverse is often the case. Popular civil rights activism is often as immoderate as the most aggressive lawsuit, as inflexible as the most rigid rule, and as impractical as the most scholastic rumination.
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By the time the Jena Six scandal came to a head in the autumn of 2007, civil rights activists had spent decades trying to bring the moral authority and social momentum of the civil rights movement to bear on more complex and impersonal social evils. Hard-core “race” men and women would turn out for activists such as the Reverend Al Sharpton and his less famous counterparts in other cities to protest the latest racial outrage, whether real or concocted. For the most part, sympathetic people of all races would nod in agreement, furrow their brows in concern, and then go on with their business. But occasionally someone or something would strike a chord that reverberated with thousands of people nationwide.
Despite Sharpton’s bold claim that the Jena Six protests marked the beginning of the twenty-first century’s civil rights movement, in many ways they echoed Louis Farrakhan’s brash and insistent call, in 1995, for the Million Man March. It was an unlikely occasion for a civil-rights-style demonstration because there was no occasion for such a demonstration. There was no specific racial injustice to be brought to the attention of a complacent public, no landmark racial justice legislation to be pressed in the halls of Congress. There was only the familiar set of social problems that had plagued inner-city black communities for decades: crime, joblessness, broken homes, failing schools. Nor did the Million Man March call for a renewed public commitment to racial justice: there was no demand for more aggressive civil rights laws, no impassioned plea for investment in inner-city neighborhoods, no emotional reminder of the nation’s unfulfilled commitment to integration.
Instead, the Million Man March was to be a “day of atonement” and “reaffirmation” for black men. Black men were to atone for the reckless and destructive behavior that was destroying black families and neighborhoods—drugs, gang violence, promiscuous sex—and reaffirm their commitment to their families and communities. This was a message that had been central to the ethics of the black community since the era of Booker T. Washington, the founder of the Tuskegee Institute, and it was a message that people of all races and political dispositions could support: personal responsibility, self-reliance, moral discipline, the straight and narrow.
But self-reliance didn’t require a march on Washington. The Million Man March was awkward because it tried to combine the two great warring ideals of black uplift: Booker T. Washington’s strategy of industrious self-help and the political activism that found its most erudite advocate in W.E.B. Du Bois—a founder of the NAACP—and reached its apotheosis in the lunch counter sit-ins and freedom rides of the 1960s. The result was an assembly whose substance was in direct opposition to its form: a group rally for individual self-reliance; a mass protest in service of personal atonement. It was the form of the Million Man March that was responsible for much of its appeal: like the march on Jena, Louisiana, it was buoyed by nostalgia for the civil rights movement, for the moral certainty of an unambiguously noble cause, for the courage and heroism of speaking truth to power, for the nurturing solidarity of a community united in resistance to a common oppressor.
Substantively, however, the Million Man March had neither courage, nor solidarity, nor certainty. The central message of personal atonement and the primacy of the family echoed the prevailing neoconservative ethos of the time; far from a courageous challenge to the status quo, it harmonized with a growing popular exasperation with racial politics, hostility to social welfare policies, and celebration of a narrowly defined conventional family. Had the spokesperson for this idea been a less notorious figure than Louis Farrakhan, the Million Man March might have inspired the admiration of the ideological right; as it was, prominent conservatives expressed their support for many of the ideas underlying the march, even as they condemned its demagogic leader.
Meanwhile, the deliberate and explicit exclusion of women exacerbated these reactionary tendencies and guaranteed that the march would breed resentment and division rather than solidarity. The speakers at the march admonished black men to show more respect for women and take responsibility for their offspring. Farrakhan added an unmistakably patriarchal gloss to the theme of responsibility: “We wanted to call our men to Washington to make a statement that we are ready to accept the responsibility of being the heads of our households, the providers, the maintainers and the protectors of our women and children.”1 The subtext—made palpable by the exclusion of women from the march itself—was that black men had allowed overbearing black women to control their families, to the ruin of all concerned, and that men must reassert their dominance.
Because of such unabashed male chauvinism and the unrepentant racial bigotry and anti-Semitism of its spokesman, Louis Farrakhan (despite the theme of atonement, Farrakhan refused to atone for his well-publicized and oft-repeated slur that Jews were “bloodsuckers”), the march split the black community. Prominent black women condemned the march. The former Black Panther and UC Santa Cruz professor Angela Davis complained, “No march movement or agenda that defines manhood in the narrowest terms and seeks to make women lesser partners … can be considered a positive step.”2 Mary Frances Berry, then chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, remarked: “I do not trust Louis Farrakhan … to lead us to the Promised Land.” Congressman John Lewis, a veteran of the civil rights movement, did not march; General Colin Powell begged off, citing a conflict with his book tour, but when pressed, he admitted to being “concerned my presence on the stage with Farrakhan would give him a level of credibility I would not like to have seen.”3
As for moral certainty, even many of those who marched were ambivalent. For instance, Mayor Kurt Schmoke of Baltimore insisted, “I don’t accept hate-filled, anti-white, anti-Semitic language coming from anybody,” but he joined the march “because I think it is an important event [that] will probably be seen as significant in the history of African Americans.”4 Schmoke’s response was telling: he referred not to the actual ideals, goals, or likely achievements of the march but rather to how the march would be perceived. The march was valuable because other people valued it. Like the student who enthused that the Jena Six protest was his generation’s “chance to experience” the civil rights movement, Schmoke marched because the march itself was an event.
In another context one might have argued that individual personalities were unimportant compared with the gravity of the injustice or the importance of the cause the march was to draw attention to. But the Million Man March did not highlight any discrete injustice or advance any specific cause. This made the individual personalities involved of central importance, a fact that did not escape the notice of Louis Farrakhan, who, in his remarks to the crowd, did his best to eliminate the option of embracing the message but shunning the messenger: “Although the call was made through me, many have tried to distance the beauty of this idea from the person through whom the idea and the call was made … You can’t separate Newton from the law that Newton discovered, nor can you separate Einstein from the theory of relativity. It would be silly to try to separate Moses from the Torah or Jesus from the Gospel or Muhammad from the Koran … So today, whether you like it or not, God brought the idea through me … If my heart were that dark, how is the message … so clear, the response so magnificent?”5
Even as the dutiful employees of the National Park Service cleaned up and the hundreds of thousands of black men piled into cars, trains, Greyhounds, and chartered coaches to head for home, the Million Man March had inspired others. The Promise Keepers, a men’s fundamentalist Christian organization, planned their own gathering and day of atonement on the mall. Like Elvis to the Million Man March’s Junior Wells, the Promise Keepers sang the same tunes to a larger audience. “Stand in the Gap: A Sacred Assembly of Men” was the largest gathering ever at the National Mall. Like the Million Man March, Stand in the Gap sought not a political revolution but a personal one. Like the Million Man March, the Promise Keepers traced many social ills to the decline of the traditional, male-dominated family and admonished men to seize control of their households from potentially recalcitrant wives. The Promise Keeper Tony Evans insisted: “I am not suggesting that you ask for your role back, I am urging you to take it back. There can be no compromise here.”6 Meanwhile, at a sister rally, ambiguously named “Chosen Women,” a female speaker told the faithful throng: “Our job is to submit to our [husbands as our] teachers and our Professors … even if we know they are wrong. It is then in God’s hands.”7
The similarity between the Million Man March and the Promise Keepers was neither coincidental nor the result of simple mimicry. Both movements grafted the style of the civil rights movement onto what was basically an encounter group, staged on a scale undreamed of by the practitioners of est and Gestalt therapy. The goal—other than that of aggrandizing the movement leaders, which, as Farrakhan’s speech made clear, was always primary—was to disguise group therapy in the macho garb of political activism: “solidarity” was bonding on steroids; “empowerment” was a macho synonym for self-actualization; “speaking truth to power” was the talking cure with a Y chromosome; “pride” was a tough guy’s self-esteem; and the call for “atonement” was a fist-pumping way of saying, The first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem. As in any therapy session, the experience was all: although there was vague talk of economic investment in black communities and voter registration, this was an afterthought. Any practical goal, political agenda, or policy objective would only impede the gestalt—as counterproductive as asking an analyst how you’ll know when you’re no longer neurotic.
The biggest irony was that both the Million Man March and the Promise Keepers—for all of their patriarchal muscle flexing and boys’ club exclusivity—had lifted this blend of the personal and the political directly from 1970s feminism. Both were consciousness-raising on a grand scale, politics turned inward; even the targets of social critique—the home, the family, and the individual trapped in an oppressive domestic relationship—were those first identified by feminists. Feminists had good reason to politicize the intimate and the private. The home, family, and intimate relations were (and are) mechanisms of women’s inequality, and women have been conditioned from their earliest years of life to accept—even crave—that inequality. So for feminists, the centrality of consciousness-raising made sense. But men weren’t trapped in this distinctive cultural iron cage, except to the extent that the male social role is the necessary complement to that of the female. Male consciousness-raising—whatever its racial cast—took on all of the worst aspects of feminism—narcissism, myopic self-pity, ressentiment—but left behind feminism’s redeeming potential for liberating insight. Thirty years after Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, men were using the syntax of feminism to bemoan the loss of male authority and prestige and deploying the tools of the women’s movement to keep women in their place.
The rickety fit between the style of political protest and the substance of navel-gazing group psychotherapy led to some stark contradictions. For instance, a central theme of the Million Man March was that black men should make greater efforts to be industrious, responsible providers for their families. The leaders of the march asked those who could not march to stay home from work as part of a national “day of absence.” This was an oblique reference to Douglas Turner Ward’s 1965 play depicting the mysterious and sudden disappearance of all black people from a small town in the Jim Crow South. Tellingly, when Ward’s play was staged again almost thirty years later, the New York Times critic remarked that it was “direly in need of an excuse in 1993.”8 The same thing could be said of the Million Man March itself. A stated goal of the march was to encourage responsible behavior, but sacrificing at least a day’s wages and perhaps the goodwill of one’s employer for the sake of a symbolic gesture is not the action of a responsible provider. The march’s leaders claimed that they hoped to improve the public’s perception of black men, but they encouraged their disciples to skive off from work, effectively reinforcing one of the worst racial stereotypes: the shiftless Negro.
* * *
The activism of the 1960s had its share of self-indulgence and self-destructiveness, but it was redeemed by a focus on a handful of unquestionably profound social issues: racism, war, feminism, environmentalism. But today the aesthetics of mass protest meet the micro politics of the blog, and every hobby, pastime, and personal preference is a potential inspiration for righteous indignation. Nowhere is this truer than in San Francisco, the epicenter of the counterculture and of digital culture, where lifestyle is inseparable from ideology and the personal isn’t just political but a matter of civil rights.
San Francisco is home to some of the most crowded streets in the United States. Only the hyper-urban borough of Manhattan puts New York City ahead of San Francisco in terms of the ratio of human bodies to square feet of real estate. With its crowds come the vibrant street life, energetic public culture, avant-garde arts scene, and gritty subculture that San Francisco is famous for. And with those crowds comes a more mundane day-to-day local culture of frayed nerves, raised elbows, and bruised ribs: a daily push and shove that continually threatens to transform the city’s lonely crowd into a violent mob.
San Francisco was a pioneer in resisting freeway construction in the 1970s, and local politicians and activists convinced state officials to demolish rather than retrofit two of the city’s remaining freeways after the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. The fruits of their efforts: a red-hot real estate market in the neighborhoods formerly blighted by freeway overpasses and some of the worst traffic in North America. Gridlock in the Bay Area rivals that of Los Angeles and metropolitan Atlanta for the worst in the nation. Road rage is a widespread local affliction: the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a group of professional anger-management counselors vowed never to return to the city by the bay after suffering the ire of clients who were livid about the lack of parking near their therapy meetings.
San Francisco’s pedestrians seize the right-of-way whether they are entitled to it or not, strolling into rush-hour traffic mid-block, purposefully oblivious to oncoming traffic. They are, all too often, proven dead right: the city’s hilly streets are now marked with white chalk outlines, symbolizing the bodies of pedestrians struck dead by cars. The outlines are a form of protest–cum–public art painted by an anonymous provocateur whose motives remain unknown: they serve to warn motorist and pedestrian alike to slow down and take care.
And then there are the cyclists. San Francisco bicyclists aspire to the status of their counterparts in Amsterdam, where bicycles are the preferred and dominant mode of transportation. Like a classic cocktail, cycling culture combines in equal measure three potent California characteristics: physical fitness, environmentalism, and the counterculture’s self-righteousness. Cyclists are a small but growing fellowship bound together by a sense of moral superiority born of their commitment to transportation with a human, rather than carbon, footprint. And what thanks do they get for reducing global warming, air pollution, and dependence on foreign fossil fuels? They are regularly run off the road, cut off at intersections, and bullied into the gutter by callous motorists.
Cyclists began to fight back against the hegemony of the horseless carriage, forming the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, which has successfully lobbied the city to convert street parking and traffic lanes into designated bicycle lanes, with the stated goal of making all of San Francisco’s roadways “bike friendly.” They also fought back by driving as aggressively as the worst motorists: professional and weekend warrior alike adopted the bike messenger’s daredevil maneuvers, darting in and out of traffic, sailing through stop signs and red lights, jumping curbs, bullying pedestrians off sidewalks, and heaping abuse—verbal and physical—on drivers who get in their way. Most notorious of all, the bicyclists fought back by forming a monthly mob scene known as Critical Mass, in which hundreds of cyclists with axes to grind or time to kill ride through the city’s major thoroughfares in a parade so dense as to block motorist, pedestrian, and chicken alike from crossing the road. These unauthorized events often stretch for miles and tie up traffic for blocks in every direction. Most motorists and pedestrians wait resignedly, if impatiently, for the parade to pass by. A few do not. Pedestrians who dare to breach the column find themselves quickly run down; numerous injuries have resulted, and police—powerless to stop the events—warn both motorists and pedestrians to steer clear. Motorists have occasionally tried to nose their way across the parade or have inadvertently steered into it (because Critical Mass is not authorized, its route is neither publicized nor marked). Those who have have been made to regret it: in April 2007 a mother and her two children visiting from a nearby suburb made the mistake of steering their car onto a Japantown street that had been commandeered by Critical Mass. Cyclists surrounded their car and pummeled it with fists, feet, tire pumps, and bicycle frames, breaking windows and causing over $5,000 in damage. Critical Mass participants were unrepentant: they claimed that the driver sped through the crowd of cyclists, knocking one off his bike, and then tried to drive away. Police later concluded that she may have inadvertently tapped a cyclist’s tire while trying to maneuver amid the dense crowd of cyclists.
If Critical Mass was supposed to inspire public sympathy for cyclists, it has achieved precisely the opposite. Public opinion in liberal San Francisco is overwhelmingly negative, even among many cyclists. When a San Francisco blogger wrote a sympathetic piece about Critical Mass, comments were almost unanimously critical of the mass cycling event. Here’s a sample: “A ban can’t come soon enough. Critical Mass isn’t a recreational activity, it is an invitation to thuggery and vandalism. Prior to the first Critical Mass, I actually had a lot of respect for cyclists. Not anymore.” “No other organization routinely breaks traffic laws, impedes other road users and, in general, acts like a bunch of 3-year-olds on a playground. As a bike rider, I’d love to see Critical mAss shut down.” “Critical Mass is a Critical Mistake. I can’t believe they have been allowed to terrorize the City this long. Would they even stop long enough to allow an ambulance to get through? I don’t think so.”9
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Organized mass protest was central to the black civil rights movement, as it had been to the women’s suffrage movement before it, and as it would be to the antiwar movement, the gay rights movement, and countless other social causes. At its best, mass protest is a powerful tool of political opposition: a bold and striking reflection of society’s most serious frustrations and noblest ambitions. But increasingly, mass protest has become self-centered and civil disobedience has become safe and predictable. Organized pressure groups of every political perspective clamor on an almost weekly basis for an overstimulated and inured public’s attention. Mass protests on college campuses are a rite of spring and a yearly initiation into the world of higher learning as conventional as the tailgate party or the dorm room one-night stand. As a result of this explosion of activism and outrage, serious injustices must compete with superficial gripes, the profoundly aggrieved share space with narcissistic attention seekers, and well-considered propositions are drowned out by unreasonable demands and half-baked proposals.
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that much of today’s social protest is motivated by the self-image of those protesting more than the urgency of the cause. Like a Che Guevara T-shirt or a Palestinian kaffiyeh scarf bought at Urban Outfitters, social activism has become a fashion statement for impressionable young people searching for a personal style and for older folks who really ought to find more age-appropriate attire. The demonstration in Jena, Louisiana, offered a cathartic fantasy of moral absolutes and heroic struggle to a generation that confronts frustrating moral ambiguity and the tedium of protracted negotiation and piecemeal reform. The Million Man March was ultimately an excuse for a big get-together—a group hug that was palmed off as a demonstration. Such aimless activism cheapens the legacy of the civil rights struggle and demeans the real risks and sacrifices of those for whom civil disobedience was a matter of moral and practical urgency.
Worse yet, as civil disobedience bleeds into a kind of extended public therapy, it loses its capacity to inspire. The faceless corporations and governments, the implacable bureaucrats, and the complacent bourgeoisie are supposed to sit up and take notice of the rage and indignation spontaneously bursting forth in the form of a mass demonstration, their comfortable daily routines disrupted and their fragile illusion of stability and control shattered. But social protest is now an expected part of life in every postindustrial mass democracy on the planet. Social protest no longer challenges the status quo; it is the status quo. Governments are resigned to mass protest: cities issue permits for political demonstrations, assign extra police (who appreciate the inevitable overtime pay), and prescribe planned gathering sites and march routes to maximize exposure and minimize inconvenience. The bourgeois-capitalist-white-supremacist patriarchal state may even welcome such domesticated mass demonstrations as a useful safety valve for frustrations that, if pent up, might lead to more serious unrest. Corporate managers, ensconced in the high towers of capital, coolly calculate which losses occasioned by boycotts and strikes are manageable and which must be appeased with some symbolic gesture or acceptable sacrifice; meanwhile, they compensate for any losses by taking advantage of the boycotts and strikes their competitors will inevitably face and by marketing the accoutrements of radical chic to an all-too-receptive buying public. Bureaucrats study mass demonstrations as a social phenomenon, taking photographs, gathering data, making calculations, comparing incidents. And the bourgeoisie sniff in annoyance when yet another demonstration threatens to delay happy hour or picking up the kids from day care, but of course everyone understands—it was announced on the news, after all—the day care will waive the late-pickup fee, the martinis will be just as cold a half hour later, everyone has a contingency plan in place because we all know this is just part of living in a big city, and after all I did it when I was a bit younger and more naive or idealistic. What did Churchill say: If you’re not a radical at twenty, you have no heart … Hell, maybe I’ll just pull over and join them … What are they protesting this time, anyway?
Obama and Racial Justice in the Twenty-first Century
“I’d like to cut his nuts off.” That’s what the Reverend Jesse Jackson—civil rights veteran, former presidential candidate, and man of God—said of the first black nominee of a major political party. Unbeknownst to him, Jackson’s microphone was still live as he whispered his disdain for Obama to a fellow guest on Fox News on July 6, 2008. And Fox News—no doubt after a great deal of agonizing and soul-searching—decided to run the footage. They had a duty to the public, the Fox anchor Bill O’Reilly explained: Who was he to keep this important news from the American people?
And why did Jesse Jackson want to castrate the man who was likely to become the first black president of the United States? “He’s talking down to black people … telling niggers how to behave,” Jackson had whispered on the candid footage. Obama had just given a speech to the NAACP in which he stressed the need for an emphasis on education, personal responsibility, and dedicated parenting in the black community. There was nothing especially controversial or surprising in Obama’s speech; it had been expertly crafted to offend no one. It was neither overtly liberal nor overtly conservative, but it touched on themes that might appeal to either ideological camp: it made no radical policy proposal; it broke no new ground. Indeed, the Republican Party nominee John McCain’s address to the same group, marked by all of the hallmarks of a colonial magistrate’s careful, diplomatic salutation to a foreign and potentially hostile tribe, was in its own way more daring, with its suggestion that vouchers might help to improve the quality of public education in black schools—a slightly risky attempt to press one of the few conservative pet policies that might appeal to blacks.
What was it about Obama’s speech that pushed Jackson’s buttons? Why did Jackson think that Obama was “talking down” to his audience? It wasn’t the substance of Obama’s comments, which echoed themes that both Obama and Jackson himself had sounded many times in the past. Jackson’s bitter aside reflected a much deeper and more long-standing animosity, unexpressed but never far beneath the surface of his public endorsements. Obama had been making Jackson and many other black community leaders nervous for quite some time. Some complained that Obama had few, if any, blacks in the most important decision-making positions in his campaign. Others were distressed by what they saw as Obama’s betrayal of Trinity United Church of Christ’s Reverend Jeremiah Wright—and with him, all of black liberation theology. But these specifics were little more than excuses. No one of them, nor all of them in combination, could explain the unease and tentativeness that black opinion leaders like Jackson felt about what should have been an unambiguous cause for celebration—a black man with a real chance of becoming president.
“Barack Is the New Black,” read the bumper stickers displayed proudly on bright red Mini Coopers, on sleek and sedate silver BMWs, on pimped-out Cadillac Escalades, on rusted “vintage” VWs, on Vespa scooters, stuck right next to Union Jacks or those red, white, and blue target emblems popularized by the mods in the 1960s, and on bicycles that raced through the financial districts of major cities or across college campuses. This slogan had not been approved by Barack Obama, Obama for America, or the Democratic Party. But by the middle of 2008 it had become the unofficial theme of an informal subcommittee of Obama supporters. Obama was a new kind of black politician. He had consciously and conspicuously avoided the style—and much of the substance—of black politicians of Jackson’s generation. Jackson was a brash, belligerent, speak-truth-to-power race man in the Black Power tradition, a somewhat more respectable Stokely Carmichael, a cleaner-cut Al Sharpton but still unmistakably a product of the long hot summers, a field marshal in the culture wars of the 1960s and 1970s.
Obama wasn’t angry or belligerent; he was poised, confident, and unflappable. The older generation of black activists—and this included many who in fact held public office—tried to pressure other people to take action on their behalf. They lectured white liberals and railed against conservatives. The basic model was oppositional, and the tools used—mau-mauing, dramatic confrontation, public embarrassment, the guilt trip—were the tools of the weak. Obama didn’t raise the roof about social injustice, hoping that those in control would take some notice; he had every expectation that he would be in control. Obama and the black politicians of his new generation didn’t speak truth to power; they were power. And as such, they used the language and tools of the powerful: moderation and compromise, backed up by the proverbial big stick.
Obama was leaving Jackson and his breed of angrier race politics behind, and that cast a shadow of doubt on his racial loyalties. In February 2008, when the black television and radio host Tavis Smiley held the annual “State of Black America” conference in New Orleans, the presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton made the obligatory appearance, but Obama politely declined, citing a prior commitment in Springfield, Illinois. The Princeton University professor and prominent race relations commentator Cornel West attacked Obama, suggesting to the largely black audience that his absence cast doubt on Obama’s commitment to the black community: “The problem is … him going to Springfield the same day Brother Tavis has set this up for a whole year … is not fundamentally about us. It’s about somebody else. He’s got large numbers of white brothers and sisters who have fears and anxieties, and he’s got to speak to them in such a way that he holds us at arm’s length … [but] you can’t take black people for granted just because you’re black … he’s got to be accountable, and starting off in Springfield, Illinois, is not impressive to me.”10
Earlier, when Jackson and Al Sharpton led the civil-rights-style march to Jena, Louisiana, Obama steered well clear of the controversy. Jackson commented to the press that he thought Obama had been wrong not to speak out about the Jena Six. “If I were Obama, I’d be all over Jena,” Jackson chided. But Obama was poised to become the Democratic Party nominee for president in part because he wasn’t “all over” every racial scandal that offered a photo op. Obama was judicious and measured rather than righteous and opinionated; he avoided controversy, while Jackson and Sharpton chased it. Obama was a viable candidate for president because he wasn’t Jesse Jackson. Obama’s critics and ambivalent supporters among black opinion leaders understood this fact. But they also resented it, and they resented Obama for his willingness to distance himself from the symbolic issues that had historically defined black political activism.
* * *
Obama pulled together an unlikely coalition of college students, hard-core progressives, and political independents and raised millions of dollars from small individual donations. Obama, with his Ivy League pedigree and inspiring but nuanced rhetorical style, reminded some of a black Adlai Stevenson: he might appeal to latte-sipping intellectuals and idealistic liberals, but racism, they predicted, would stop Obama cold in the vast, conservative, and backward American heartland. Yet some of Obama’s most impressive victories were among politically moderate white voters in Midwestern and Western “red” states such as Iowa and Nebraska, corn farmers and cattle ranchers who had never seen the inside of a Starbucks.
Obama was not alone in his new, less confrontational style of politics. He was part of a cohort of new black politicians who have won office not by appealing to narrow racial solidarities but by drawing broad support from voters of all races, and in some unlikely locations. Mayor Cory Booker of Newark has made reform of that city’s notoriously corrupt racial politics one of the hallmarks of his tenure as mayor. He ran against a corrupt black mayor, Sharpe James, who beat Booker in 2002 by slandering him, according to an account in Esquire magazine, as “a white, gay, Jewish Republican funded by the KKK.”11 Booker returned to so thoroughly trounce James in 2006 that the incumbent mayor threw in the towel before Election Day. Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts ran an Obama-style campaign in 2006 (or one might say that Obama ran a Patrick-style campaign in 2008) and became the commonwealth’s first black governor. Mayor Michael Nutter of Philadelphia won election in 2007 as a pragmatic reformer who combined such liberal positions as smoking bans and support for gay rights with more conservative policies such as mandatory curfews and warrantless police searches in high-crime areas. This cohort of younger politicians have rewritten the playbook by which blacks can win election. Their success suggests that white racism is no longer the insuperable barrier to black success that it has been for all of American history and that the old style of black politics, which relied heavily on racial bloc voting and influence peddling within the black community, may be obsolete.
Part of Obama’s appeal was that he implicitly promised to bring America’s long, ugly racial struggle to a heroic conclusion: the charismatic black president would heal the nation’s racial wounds just as he promised to bridge its ideological chasm. But some had begun to suggest that if dust-bowl aggies and high-plains cowboys were ready for a black president, the nation had already gotten beyond race. Obama’s surprising success suggested that the nation was already post-racist.
This fueled the nagging concerns and resentments of old-school black opinion and political leaders. At least some of Obama’s considerable support among white voters was the result of an implicit promise: that if America could elect a black president, this would prove that the nation had finally overcome the long-lived evil of racism. Voting for Obama was like reparations on the cheap. Obama hadn’t encouraged this kind of thinking. But as a savvy politician he had to have understood it was at work, and he hadn’t discouraged it. Obama’s success might actually make it harder for traditional civil rights activists to get attention and sympathy for their causes. And while many hoped that the nation’s first black president would aggressively address the racial injustices that still mired the nation’s inner cities in poverty and despair, what mandate would Obama have to confront racial injustice when his candidacy had implicitly promised a “post-racial” America?
Meanwhile, some began to ask whether race wasn’t actually an advantage for Obama (and, by implication, for other blacks as well). In a New York Times op-ed, the noted feminist Gloria Steinem had suggested that Obama’s race might be a political asset: “Racism stereotyped black men as more ‘masculine’ for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming.”12 Walter Mondale’s 1984 running mate, Geraldine Ferraro, went even further, suggesting that Obama was, effectively, the beneficiary of a kind of electoral affirmative action. “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position,” she insisted. “He happens to be very lucky to be who he is.”13
Lucky? Had black skin—what W.E.B. Du Bois called a badge of insult—become a sign of privilege? The idea that black race could be an advantage wasn’t new: the decades-old opposition to affirmative action was driven in large part by resentment that blacks had turned past oppression and white liberal guilt into a present-day advantage. The 1986 movie Soul Man—a postmodern inversion of John Howard Griffin’s classic work of investigative journalism Black Like Me—took the idea that black skin could give you a leg up to its reductio ad absurdum. The protagonist, an ambitious white college student who hopes to attend Harvard Law School, resorts to megadoses of tanning pills and an Afro wig to pass as black and qualify for a minority scholarship. He attends Harvard as a black man and has a series of unexpectedly difficult (and comical) encounters with militant black students, white sexual fetishists, and pervasive racism before he eventually repents his deception.
The film reflected the changing racial climate and increasingly competitive economy of the 1980s. Despite still tense and often hostile race relations, overt racism was rare, and businesses and government were, at least formally, committed to racial equality. At the same time, blacks were heavily represented among popular musicians and professional athletes—those rare individuals who personified sexiness and cool in the popular culture. As a result, naive whites could imagine that being black might be kind of fun. Soul Man perceptively tapped into an inchoate fantasy of temporary metamorphosis: What if I woke up, not as a cockroach, but as a black guy? I could get into a great college on affirmative action, get lucky with all of those girls with jungle fever … and then go back to being white when it’s time to land that job on Wall Street. The temporary nature of the transformation was, of course, critical: no one in 1986 really believed that the meager advantages of race-based scholarships and admissions preferences outweighed the day-to-day injuries of racial prejudice. But had this changed in the twenty-odd years that separated Soul Man from the candidacy of Barack Obama? Had America become post-racist, as many in the media began to argue when Obama became a viable candidate for the presidency?
In reaction to such millenarian suggestions, some insisted that Obama’s success said little about the demise of racism because Obama wasn’t really black. Obama, the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother, was one of a growing number of Americans of mixed racial parentage, and part of his compelling personal autobiography, Dreams from My Father, involved his struggle to come to terms with this atypical racial identity. For most people, Obama, like so many Americans of mixed parentage before him, was simply black. But for others, Obama personified a crisis—whether welcomed or feared—for the meaning of race itself. Even as Obama’s political successes gave currency to the notion of a society that was post-racist, some insisted that Obama himself—his biography, perhaps even the very core of his DNA—was racially enigmatic, post-racial.
Obama inadvertently helped to promote such unconventional ideas about race, but they predated his rise to prominence. For instance, the novelist, Nobel laureate, and esteemed commentator on American race relations Toni Morrison asserted in a 1998 New Yorker article that Bill Clinton was “our first black President.” She insisted that the fair-haired and pink-cheeked Clinton was “blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.”14 Ten years later, in 2008, Obama—someone most people would instinctively call an “actual black person”—was on the verge of being elected. As the contest for the Democratic nomination heated up in heavily black South Carolina, the civil rights veteran and Hillary Clinton supporter Andrew Young picked up Morrison’s line, arguing, “Hillary Clinton … has Bill behind her and Bill is every bit as black as Barack.”15
Young wasn’t the first to question Obama’s racial bona fides. Obama’s former opponent for the Illinois senatorial race, the black conservative Alan Keyes, had complained that Obama wrongly “claims an African-American heritage.” Contrasting Obama’s presumptuous claim to blackness to his own valid one, Keyes channeled the spirit of left-liberal multiculturalism to perfection: “My ancestors toiled in slavery in this country … My consciousness, who I am as a person, has been shaped by my struggle, deeply emotional and deeply painful, with the reality of that heritage.”16 Later, the columnist Debra Dickerson echoed this opinion, writing for Salon magazine: “Obama isn’t black … ‘Black,’ in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves. Voluntary immigrants of African descent (even those descended from West Indian slaves) are just that, voluntary immigrants … It can’t be assumed that a Nigerian cabdriver and a third-generation Harlemite have more in common than the fact a cop won’t bother to make the distinction. They’re both ‘black’ as a matter of skin color and DNA, but only the Harlemite, for better or worse, is politically and culturally black.”17
Obama’s detractors have made much of the fact that he is the son of an African immigrant and not the descendant of American slaves. This makes him unlike most American blacks, including almost everyone in the civil rights establishment, but it also joins him to an increasingly prominent segment of the black middle class and elite—immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean—who, for many reasons, have been disproportionately successful among Americans of African descent. In 2004, when Obama was still campaigning for election to the Senate, the Harvard professors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Lani Guinier worried publicly that a growing percentage of “black” students admitted to Harvard were the children of African or Caribbean immigrants rather than descendants of American slaves.18 In this sense Obama represented a crisis in black identity precipitated by recent waves of immigration from Africa and the Caribbean—people who were undeniably black in terms of phenotype and ancestry, but who did not share the experience, culture, or oppositional politics of American blacks.
But while some have argued that Obama—with his mixed parentage, international upbringing, and Ivy League pedigree—isn’t representative of most American blacks, in a sense their real worry is that he’s all too representative. Obama is a symbol of a change in American race relations, from a black community unified by common neighborhoods, experiences, culture, and grievances, to a black community increasingly divided by all of the above.
Obama is successful, well educated, and cosmopolitan. He seems free from the counterproductive rage, alienation, and self-doubt that are often a toxic by-product of the American black experience. But he is not atypical: there are millions of successful blacks who share these characteristics with Obama. They represent a large and growing share of the black students I teach at Stanford Law School; they are an even larger share of the black undergraduate students that I encounter at Stanford, and, I suspect, an even larger share of the black grade school students nationwide who are likely to attend college in the future.
This is a generational divide, but more than that it is a socioeconomic divide. Many of the parents of these students are learning from their children. As Obama was about to have his first debate with John McCain at Ole Miss, I had drinks with a black man who attended that bastion of the Old South in the racially tense 1970s. He wore a blue oxford shirt, tweed jacket, bow tie, and gold-rimmed glasses—the standard uniform of the East Coast cultural elite. And he spoke—in the accent of a Beltway Brahmin—with unbridled astonishment of the changes that have taken place at his alma mater, where the Confederate flag was once proudly flown at school football games, waving in the thick Mississippi air to the sound of “Dixie”—the school’s de facto fight song. He remarked that for his son, who attends prep school in New England, race isn’t much of an issue. The civil rights leaders who have greeted Obama’s success with chilly apprehension are worried that a new generation of Americans will undermine the struggle for civil rights by prematurely declaring themselves, and their society, post-racist. But for this black alumnus of Ole Miss, a certain kind of post-racism is the ripe fruit of the civil rights struggle.
American racism is in steady decline as aging white supremacists influenced by The Birth of a Nation and Father Charles Coughlin are replaced by a generation raised on The Cosby Show and Oprah Winfrey. Legally enforced segregation is a thing of the past: today the law prohibits race discrimination by government, employers, and landlords. Elite employers and selective universities aggressively seek out minority-race applicants in order to achieve racial diversity. For well-educated blacks, acculturated to the norms of the prosperous American mainstream, racism is rarely a serious impediment to success, esteem, and well-being. Yes, there are still the vexations caused by petty insults and slights, but for many blacks the once-ubiquitous iron law of white supremacy is now an occasional and petty hindrance; the once arrogant and terrifying bigot is little more than a pathetic annoyance; the menacing Jim Crow has been reduced to an irritating gnat.
But many of America’s cities are as racially divided as they were during the era of Jim Crow segregation, racial discrimination in employment and housing stubbornly persists, racial stereotypes are a staple of popular culture, and hardly a month goes by without a new race scandal to occupy the intensive if fleeting attention of the mass media. Racist cops, prejudiced employers, and bigoted landlords seem to have little trouble knowing whom to discriminate against. In these and many other respects, racism and race seem as blatant and implacable as ever.
Today’s race relations are a good-news, bad-news story. The good news: since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s life has gotten much, much better for blacks with the resources, skills, and socialization necessary to enter the American mainstream. Racism has consistently and steadily declined, and opportunities for well-educated blacks have grown even more quickly than a rapidly growing economy. The bad news: things got worse for those without such advantages. The exodus of the more successful blacks left poor blacks without economic capital and positive role models. A changing economy shed many of the once plentiful good-paying blue-collar jobs. The War on Poverty morphed into a war on the poor: social welfare programs yielded to a “tough love” that slashed benefits and pushed millions into homelessness and abjection, and a zero-tolerance approach to law enforcement led to the incarceration of unprecedented numbers of black men.
Today “racism” does not describe a single attitude or phenomenon, but rather a number of distinct and often unrelated social problems. The joblessness, isolation, and despair that afflict poor blacks in inner-city ghettos are different in kind—not simply in degree—from the subtle bigotry, ambiguous slights, and “soft” exclusion that wealthier and professional blacks complain of.
The success of the more fortunate blacks who can tell the good-news story does not suggest any improvement in the dire circumstances of the blacks who must live out the bad-news story, nor are the benefits of policy reforms designed to help the former group likely to trickle down to the latter group. The very idea of a black community is an anachronism. Today there are, effectively, at least two black communities: an increasingly prosperous and well-educated professional class, and an increasingly isolated, poorly socialized, and demoralized underclass. These two black communities are joined by a shared history but increasingly divided by lifestyle, values, norms of behavior, and life prospects.
* * *
“Let me tell you something about niggers,” begins an article published in the November 2006 issue of Esquire magazine. “Always down. Always out. Always complaining that they can’t catch a break … Constantly in need of a leader but unable to follow in any direction that’s navigated by hard work, self-reliance. And though they spliff and drink and procreate their way onto welfare doles and WIC lines, niggers will tell you their state of being is no fault of their own.”19
“The Manifesto of Ascendancy for the Modern American Nigger” was not a racist screed penned by a white supremacist, although it occasionally read like one. It was a tendentious yet often nuanced polemic written by an African American writer and film producer, John Ridley. It relied on a distinction popularized by the comedian Chris Rock between “niggers”—the down-and-out, impoverished, and culturally dysfunctional underclass—and those blacks who are “undeniable in their individuality and exemplary in their levels of achievement.” Its prescription was a stark repudiation of the racial solidarity that has been a common theme of almost all serious black social thought since Reconstruction. “It’s time for ascended blacks to wish niggers good luck. Just as whites may be concerned with the good of all citizens but don’t travel their days worrying specifically about the well-being of hillbillies from Appalachia, we need to send niggers on their way.”
This was a shocking inversion of W.E.B. Du Bois’s notion of the talented tenth. The talented tenth were the most successful blacks who, by their efforts and by their example, were to improve the welfare of their race. As late as 1995 the Harvard professors Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West cited the idea of a talented tenth, asking how they and their students could make good on Du Bois’s promise. But since then, some prominent members of the talented tenth have publicly gone on strike. Bill Cosby, civil rights activist and longtime goodwill ambassador between the races, lamented at the Rainbow PUSH Coalition annual conference in 2004, “People marched and were hit in the face with rocks to get an education, and now … the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal … They think they’re hip. They can’t read. They can’t write. They’re laughing and giggling, and they’re going nowhere.” Cosby struck back at Afrocentrists who celebrate black cultural distinctiveness, making a pointed demand for assimilation: “With names like Shaniqua, Taliqua and Mohammed and all that crap, and all of them are in jail … They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English.” He lambasted black parents who failed to raise their children well, and attacked the culture of ostentatious consumption so prominent in many poor black neighborhoods: “These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids. Five-hundred-dollar sneakers for what? And they won’t spend $200 for Hooked on Phonics.”
“Giving back to the community” has long been a deeply felt obligation—and a loudly voiced admonishment—for successful blacks. “Giving back” was not only a moral obligation but also a matter of self-preservation: successful blacks owed their own comfort to the efforts of past generations. Courageous struggles against slavery, post-Reconstruction backlash, Jim Crow segregation, and subtle but pervasive institutional racism had paved the way: We all stand on the shoulders of giants. And at the same time, white racism tied the fates of all blacks together: the bourgeois Negro who thought he could ignore the plight of poor blacks was a selfish fool; his position was more precarious than he knew, and the same racism that held his less fortunate brethren down would also bring him low soon enough.
But increasingly, the racism suffered by more successful blacks was different in kind—not just in degree—from the racism that plagued the underclass. And the responses to that racism also diverged. Middle-class blacks worried about an increasingly subtle bias that denied them professional networking opportunities, business contacts, and effective mentoring and inspired chilly receptions in predominantly white neighborhoods and social settings. But traditional civil rights agitation and legislation could not change such subtle and elusive attitudes: in fact, to the extent it reinforces the stereotype of the black militant, civil rights activism might even contribute to the problem. Middle-class blacks hoped to change subtle bias with the technocratic tools of management science: sensitivity training and diversity consultants became almost as common a fixture in corporate and professional America as pinstripes and wing tips.
By contrast, the underclass had to contend with failing schools, violent crime, abusive law enforcement, and a pervasive ethos of nihilism, recklessness, and despair. Traditional civil rights legislation didn’t address these problems either, so a new, increasingly angry, confrontational, and scandal-driven style of activism filled the gap. Watchdog groups monitored police and were quick to condemn any hint of bias or abuse. Religious leaders, poverty services professionals, and civil rights lawyers adopted an attitude of permanent umbrage. Community leaders became adept at organizing mass demonstrations on short notice. Rage became not only acceptable but almost obligatory—and occasionally erupted into uncontrolled and aimless violence.
This oppositional and often belligerent political stance has been a central part of black identity since the civil rights and Black Power movements. But for the significant cohort of blacks who enjoyed the fruits of those movements, blatant white racism was less and less common. And their own successes suggested that racism was not simply more subtle but also less severe than in the past. Some began to wonder whether it was injury due to racism that they shared with an increasingly dysfunctional and antisocial black underclass or simply race—and an outdated sense of solidarity. Against the harmony of civil rights solidarism—There but for the grace of God go I—a discordant refrain, voicing a kind of secessionist impulse, was just barely audible: We need to send niggers on their way.
While Obama’s mixed parentage and cosmopolitan upbringing led some to question his racial authenticity, this was a tempest in a teapot: the perfect storm that threatened racial solidarity was the split—in lifestyle and language, norms and neighborhoods—between successful American blacks and the black underclass.
* * *
In the 1970s the sociologist Nathan Glazer argued that the black experience was best understood in comparison to the experiences of other distinctive ethnic groups in American society, such as the Irish, Italians, or Jews.20 Like blacks, these groups were the targets of pervasive and invidious discrimination, and yet they eventually assimilated into the prosperous mainstream of American society and had, by and large, shed the stigma they bore in the past. With the benefit of civil rights legislation, blacks too would take their place in this nation of minorities, and the distinctive stigma of black race—W.E.B. Du Bois’s badge of insult—would fade to insignificance. Time has not been kind to this hypothesis: indeed, two decades later Glazer repudiated his own earlier position, admitting, “Even after taking account of substantial progress and change, it is borne upon us how continuous, rooted, and substantial the differences between African Americans and other Americans remain.”21
But to many, the election of Barack Obama suggests that Glazer’s prediction of successful black assimilation might have been, not wrong, but simply premature. Obama’s election signals a new type of racial consciousness among Americans. It suggests that whites are beginning to make distinctions between those blacks whom they associate with negative racial stereotypes and those whom they see, increasingly, as an ethnic group—people with slightly different accents, culinary styles, and traditions, but otherwise assimilated to mainstream norms of behavior. It’s the difference between associating a black face with gangbangers, crack addicts, and panhandlers and associating that face with jazz, soul food, and Kwanzaa.
The emphasis in the 1980s on multiculturalism may have sped this development. Multiculturalism emphasized the cultural difference between racial groups, implicitly, if unintentionally, analogizing racial difference with ethnic difference. Consider this example:
At least since the American civil rights movement, many people have become more aware of the harm suffered by ethnic or cultural minorities laboring under discriminatory practices or inequities … The conditions of the American black and the American Indian, the Canadian Inuit, the New Zealand Maori, and the Australian Aborigine have been the subject of various administrative and legislative initiatives. And the political claims of the Basques in Spain, the French Canadians in Canada, and the Tamils in Sri Lanka have been gaining wider prominence.22
The author implies that blacks are analogously situated to Spanish Basques and Quebecois, groups distinguished not by race but rather by ethnicity. It’s not a big leap from this analysis to Glazer’s, which analogized blacks with Irish and Italian Americans. And the tendency to treat race as a type of cultural difference was also reinforced by the diversity idea of racial difference, ensconced by the Supreme Court as, practically speaking, the only legally acceptable rationale for affirmative action in higher education. Under the Supreme Court’s diversity jurisprudence, racial minorities would provide a distinctive cultural perspective that would enhance classroom and extracurricular conversation in colleges and universities. This encouraged applicants to selective schools and the schools themselves to emphasize the cultural aspects of racial difference. Multiculturalism and the diversity rationale for affirmative action both reinforced the idea that racial difference was a kind of cultural or ethnic difference. College students of all races received the message that race was primarily a matter of relatively innocuous cultural difference: among the elite, the stigma of race began to morph into a stylish ethnicity.
The promise of finally shedding the unique stigma of race—still tantalizingly just out of reach—underlies the disparate set of opinions, arguments, manifestos, screeds, and jeremiads that lament the continuing dysfunctional culture of the underclass and suggest that they bear some of the blame for their own dire circumstances. The frustration of these successful blacks isn’t just a twenty-first-century iteration of the distaste and desire for social distance from poor blacks exhibited by E. Franklin Frazier’s Black Bourgeoisie.23 For Frazier’s black bourgeoisie, disdain for poor blacks was born of insecurity and self-contempt: the black bourgeoisie occupied a precarious social position that depended on the sufferance of whites; poor blacks threatened to undermine the delicate and meager esteem that the black middle class clung to in their relations with white society. But the new generation of “ascended” blacks weren’t clinging to an only slightly and precariously improved second-class status. They were close to achieving meaningful social equality with whites, and in some cases they had in fact done so. And while Frazier’s black bourgeoisie were simply embarrassed by poor blacks, who threatened to reinforce racial stereotypes and sully the bourgeoisie by association, Ridley’s ascended blacks felt not embarrassment so much as betrayal.
For example, in his Rainbow PUSH Coalition speech Cosby complained that “the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.” That deal was not only—or even primarily—between blacks and whites; it was a bond among blacks, forged in the Freedom Summers: We will make our stand against a weakened but still powerful white supremacy together, and we will reach the promised land together. This pact underlay the long-standing admonishment that successful blacks give back to their communities, both their time and their resources, by a continued political solidarity (hence the widespread accusation of “sellout” or “Uncle Tom”) and by serving as positive role models (which required both continued expressions of solidarity and exemplary behavior and achievement).
But some of the successful blacks who had adhered to the terms of this implicit bargain (or had suffered the condemnation and contempt of their peers when they failed to do so) started to ask whether the weaker members of the community bore some corresponding obligations. To whom much is given, much will be required, but wasn’t something required even of those to whom little was given? Cosby’s notable expression of betrayal reflected the frustrations of a man who had dedicated his career to improving the image of blacks and who had been remarkably successful in doing so. Yet for every black child who aspired to the respectability and prestige of the college-educated and college-bound Huxtables, there seemed to be two or three who preferred the tawdry bling-bling of the gangster rapper and the momentary highs of drugs and promiscuous sex.
* * *
Obama’s cool style of politics, his political moderation, and his Ivy League affect all suggest a post-racial politics. If Barack becomes the new black, perhaps whites will come to associate black race with the elite characteristics of Obama. But it’s more likely that Americans will learn—as Obama’s election proves that they are already learning—to distinguish between elite, Obama-like blacks, whom they will treat like an ethnic group, and the underclass, whom they will continue to treat as a despised and inferior race. It’s plausible that more successful blacks could eventually escape racial stigma, but only by breaking solidarity with the underclass—by sending the niggers on their way.
Obama has kept his own views on racial politics close to his belt: even his famous speech on race, delivered in response to the Jeremiah Wright scandal, was remarkable for its lack of specifics and for its ideological ambiguity. This reticence is understandable as a matter of political expediency, but it naturally fuels speculation and anxiety about what Obama’s success will mean for race relations. Obama’s visibility will undermine stereotypes and improve the public perception of blacks. This will be to the advantage of many blacks—especially those who are well positioned to improve their social and economic status by moving into good-paying jobs and into better neighborhoods. But if they do so by emphasizing the class distinctions among blacks, this latest improvement in race relations may come at the expense of precisely those blacks who were least able to take advantage of the last great improvement in race relations: the civil rights reforms of the 1960s. It’s hard to fault the more advantaged members of the black community for trying to build on their successes, but it’s also hard to think of this potential development as an unequivocal improvement in social justice. In this context, the misgivings of such left-liberal black politicians and activists as Andrew Young, Cornel West, Tavis Smiley, and Jesse Jackson—while sometimes artlessly expressed—are understandable. It was unclear whether the Obama phenomenon would mark the renewal of civil rights or the repudiation of its historical commitment to the most disadvantaged.
The civil rights movement of the twenty-first century will need to confront and exploit the social changes that Obama’s presidency symbolizes. As the black community splits along lines of income, skills, and socialization, it’s less and less valid to treat all racial inequities as the result of a single cause: racism. Blacks may slowly begin to occupy the status of an ethnic group in some contexts; for instance, Justice Alito’s concurrence in Ricci suggests that blacks in cities such as New Haven have become a privileged ethnic constituency, as many white ethnic groups have been in the past. Justice Alito probably exaggerates the power of New Haven’s black community, but there’s little doubt that black influence in economic markets and popular politics is greater now than ever before, and racist aversion to that influence is waning. As blacks become influential in business and politics, as older racial stereotypes become less widely accepted, and as people of all races become less bigoted, the civil-rights-style confrontation is no longer the only option: more constructive and cooperative approaches to furthering racial equality are available. Just as the Reverend Boise Kimber’s confrontational approach backfired in New Haven, civil rights activism often misses its mark in a society of greater racial complexity and ambiguity. While Jesse Jackson castigated Obama for refusing to march in Jena as part of the civil rights movement of the twenty-first century, Obama’s successes—and those of many others like him—may show the way to achieve social justice without the excesses and theatrics of movement politics.
* * *
Civil rights activism today suffers from a debilitating combination of nostalgia, narcissism, and false solidarity. Nostalgia leads civil rights activists to analyze and attack contemporary racial problems—of which there remain many—with the tactics of the past. But today’s most severe racial problems are different from those of the past, even if they are continuous with historical injustices. The disintegration of the inner-city black family today is not like the deliberate division of families during slavery, even if the latter contributed in complex ways to the former. The incarceration of young black men is not a new Jim Crow, even if some of the prejudices of the latter have contributed to the former. Without a discrete and conspicuous target, much of today’s civil rights protest comes off as both shrill and aimless, in stark contrast to the heroic struggles of the mid-twentieth century, where civil rights activism was resolute and focused.
Narcissism poisons civil rights activism by elevating drama and spectacle over practical results. Many of the solutions to today’s social injustices will require wonkish policy intervention, frustrating compromises, and tedious negotiations with government, businesses, and other organizations. Instead of the high drama of the Freedom Summers (as seen through the sepia-filtered lens of a Ken Burns film, from the relative safety of the twenty-first century), we face a long, slow winter of institutional reform. The real legatees of the civil rights movement will learn to wield power rather than fight it; cooperate with businesses more often than boycott or sue them; run for office rather than march on the Capitol. Sustained institutional change offers few resounding victories and fewer opportunities for conspicuous heroism. One must be satisfied with the steady accumulation of modest improvements.
False solidarity obscures the real stakes of social conflicts and allows opportunists with weak moral claims to ride the coattails of the truly deserving. Racists may not make fine distinctions within racial groups, but many of the most debilitating racial disadvantages do. The acculturated and the privileged can avoid much of the toxic legacy of past discrimination. The racial disadvantage faced by the privileged is different in kind—not just in degree—from that faced by the poor, who must struggle against social isolation, dysfunctional public institutions, counterproductive socialization, high crime, and the resulting psychological despair. Police and prosecutorial bias falls, with few exceptions, on those who have committed some crime, however petty; the poor live in environments where petty crime is commonplace and the gray-market economy often the only obvious means of daily support. Job discrimination is based more on affectations, grooming, and dialect than on skin color alone, and those with a good education can more easily shrug off their encounters with discrimination and find employment elsewhere; the poor are both more likely to exhibit the characteristics that trigger bias and less likely to have the resources to recover from it. The false solidarity that fixates on an imagined common enemy even as actual menaces become more and more diverse has preempted genuine solidarity based on a shared history and humane compassion. True solidarity requires confronting problems that are unlike one’s own; it requires empathy, not identification. Not coincidentally, we need a similar empathy among citizens, regardless of race, in order to address our most persistent social injustices.