What Booker Would Tell Barack
The National Urban League released its annual State of Black America report this week. Among the highlights are the fact that African Americans remain six times more likely than whites to be incarcerated and three times more likely to live in poverty. I have my own views about the ways in which the “state” of black America is a much more complicated question than it appears to be on the surface — and the fact that most parties trying to answer it have a vested interest in a particular slant. But what remains clear is this: the work is not yet done.
None of us imagined that we would be seeing the Urban League send its report to an urban President, much less an African American one. But it gets at a bigger set of questions. Few of us recall that the Urban League was born out of the same philanthropic forces that produced and supported Booker T. Washington. At the turn of the last century Washington built a political empire with his philosophy of thrift, morality and, most significantly, pursuit of economic development rather than political power.
A good deal of the Urban League’s early program could be seen as an attempt to adapt Bookerism to a population that was rapidly shifting from Jim Crow serfdom into industrial city life. (Part of that Washingtonian legacy is seen in the division of labor in black leadership to this day – while the NAACP and others devoted their efforts to fighting civil rights battles, the NUL has always been more concerned with the economic side of the equation.)
In the bloody context of disfranchisement, lynching and mob violence, Washington seemed to have a point in emphasizing quiet economic growth and self-sufficiency but his noted critic W.E.B. Du Bois saw this approach as virtual race treason. Economic accomplishments were meaningless, he argued, without the political power to protect them. There were always subtler shades to their positions but the higher decibels tend to kill nuance.
By any calculation, W.E.B. DuBois not only won that argument but used the 20th century to run up the score. There is a direct genealogy tying the Harvard-educated black historian to the Harvard-educated black President. You can, without turning history into calisthenics, see Barack Obama’s entire life — from birth to inauguration — as a referendum on civil rights causes. Under any other circumstances, a biracial black lawyer who relied on millions of black voters to win the Presidency would be a heavy-handed metaphor for the NAACP’s legal battles to end the “white primary” in the 1930s, its efforts to uproot restricted access to law schools in the 40s, Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 and the Voting Rights Act and racial intermarriage victories of the 1960s. But here history is. As close as we can humanly come to containing multitudes. If we were still in need of a final punctuation on Du Bois’s argument it came around 10 p.m. on November 4, 2008.
A black President is the ultimate extension of Du Bois’s vision, not Washington’s; there is a kinship between Dreams from my Father and Souls of Black Folk but only a vague familiarity with Up From Slavery.
And yet…
If we take a look at the State of the Black Union report on lagging wealth, home-ownership and income within the black portion of America it would seem as if that dispute remains unsettled; that one side has piled up the points only to see the game head into overtime. We (wisely) recognize Du Bois as the godfather of the civil rights movement but Washington’s stillborn economic dream shadows us, a silent signpost of the road not taken.
Quite simply black America has waged a more effective civil rights movement than economic rights movement.
This doesn’t mean that we have paid no attention to the issue of economic development — it has been a primary concern of figures as diverse as Madame CJ Walker, Marcus Garvey, Earl Graves and Louis Farrakhan. But it simply has not had the same bandwidth as the struggles for civil rights. This might be because a “Whites Only” sign is a tangible totem of the tilted social order; poverty is diffuse and relative. And I’m inclined to think that economic development posed a kind of threat that even social equality might not have — there were generally speaking far more black men lynched for demanding wages than for the faulty specter of threatening white women.
However we slice it, the result is black America occupying a status more asymetrical than at any time since some of us were free and the rest were slaves. It is March 27, 2009. Some of live in the White House; some of us live on the street.
And this is essentially what Booker would tell Barack, or more precisely, what he would tell the rest of us because if you think that a President can save you — even one with a swagger, who lives on the South Side of town and ditches auxilary verbs, then you’ve been missing the whole point.
Jessica Boyd
I know you’d rather not spend your time lighting into us undergrads, but all jokes aside, considering the present relevance of Du Bois’s 1956 speech, “Why I Won’t Vote,” I’m not quite seeing how “a black President is the ultimate extension of Du Bois’s vision.” What similarities do they share besides those in their personal backgrounds? If Du Bois developed a progressively radical, emancipatory rhetoric regarding the black community, is that not inconsistent with the expectations and capabilities of Obama’s newly-acquired position? What has this election proven other than the successes of assimilationism? We’ve always known that’s possible.
Mar 27, 2009 @ 10:50 pm
AmericanException
No “lighting into” necessary, though I’m fairly sure you already know where I’m going to come down on this question. I’m referring to the Du Bois argument in the context of the Booker T. Washington debate, the position he held for the majority of his political life. (If we’re going to talk about Du Bois’s 1950s era positions we’d also be stuck trying to explain his relative lack of concern for the millions of people Stalin killed and which Kruschev revealed the same year Du Bois wrote that essay.)
In the 1956 election, black voters had a choice between a Republican who didn’t care about black concerns at all and a Democrat who understood black concerns but opted to ignore them — and chose a segregationist as his vice president. Clearly that is not the same as the political slate in 2008.
Also, I don’t know that we can say that Du Bois later rhetoric was more emancipatory than his earlier work. More radical certainly but given the number of black communists who died at Stalin’s hands, the dogmatism of the Communist Party USA, the show trials and brutal subjugation of dissent within the ranks it raises serious questions about the ultimate implications of the radical left for black liberation. And, as I’ve previously pointed out, those self-same radicals were denouncing black protests against Jim Crow during World War II, arguing that any discussion of racism weakened the US morale and diminished their ability to assist the Soviets in World War II. And let’s not talk about the Soviets selling Mussolini the resources he needed to invade and subjugate Ethiopia in the 1930s.
As for the always knowing that assimilation is possible, I think you are being dismissive of the history that transpired in the 20th century alone. The number of dead bodies in the ranks of black leadership indicate the fact that “assimilation” was not a given. Beyond that, what we are witnessing is not even assimilation. In fact, we see a consistent, overwhelming preference for black support of black institutions — like, for instance, the one that you’re currently attending. Assimilationists would have no such preference. Indeed, they would not necessarily see it as beneficial to vote for a “black” President. The assimilationist sees progress in the fact that their behavior is independent of group dynamics.
One thing that I would caution you to avoid is reduction of the opposing view to caricature or simplicity. Read the spectrum of black civil rights leaders and you’ll find that they are driven by a desire not simply to enter America, to buy the whole entity as is, but by a moral claim to change what the nation actually is. It is perfectly fine to disagree with that project but less than rigorous intellectually to reduce it to mere “assimilation.”
Finally, I am very much in line with Richard Wright’s assessment in The God That Failed — a really excellent set of essays on some of the issues we’re discussing. Wright argued that black people — Negroes as we were then called — advocated Western democratic values or they advocated Marxist revolution, but their primary goal was black liberation. Achieving this required that they go through systems, all of which were owned and controlled by white men, none of whom ultimately could be counted on as allies in our cause, but freedom required playing these ends against each other.
In that light, it is much easier to understand the false dichotomy between the radicals and the alleged assimilationists.
Mar 27, 2009 @ 11:43 pm
Jessica Boyd
Well, as per Spelman, like most HBCUs, it isn’t above critique. (One of my friends who’s a current student just wrote on this very issue about your alma mater: http://kwameturesociety.blogspot.com/2009/03/howard-and-negro.html). It may be a black institution, but considering its history and current traditions, one could debate whether or not it serves a universal black interest for liberation. From our founders and current individual and corporate donors to the tea parties, literal and figurative gates guarding us from the surrounding community, departmental lack of Africana studies, career services advice, and free packs of hair weave that were distributed from Student Activities (no joke), I’d say, Spelman is just as much a Euroversity as any PWI. I have similar issues with Spelman that I have with Obama, I was just oblivious to the contradictions when I made it my #1 choice. I know that everything and everyone black isn’t reaching for the same goal, especially with black America being so far better off MATERIALLY than it has been in the past. But more money, more problems, right?
The way we THINK is still debilitating on an individual, and therefore, communal level. Case-in-point, I was baffled after Angela Davis’s speech at Ebenezer, where she seemed to be a confused mixture of her former revolutionary and recently retired selves. I had a “well-educated and worldly,” Morehouse student ask me in response to my desire for her to have a focus, “Who says that black people want to be free? Most black people just want equality!” If you look at the student bodies at most HBCUs alone, especially the top 3, it’s apparent that the “false dichotomy” is very real, at least in spaces where more radical racial politics are even allowed.
The Black Freedom Movement class I’m taking at Emory has been excellent at revising the classical narrative of the movement from one of a condensed period to a longer epoch. I’ve come to understand that black power was a natural progression from civil rights, especially on the grassroots level. But apparently, especially judging from continued black disunity and the Morehouse student’s statement, freedom and equality ARE different goals and entail different tactics. The relationship between civil rights/assimilationists and black power/radicals has become a dichotomous relationship because then, people abandoned ship after King and Malcolm X were assassinated and now, have no interest in sacrificing their ties to capital.
Mar 28, 2009 @ 1:45 am
Leigh
Part of what I think you are saying is we get caught up in the either or argument of Dubois or Washington and the nuanced truth is there is a more hand in hand relationship once you get past the headline rhetoric? Any outlet(economic or political) is one that the majority controls and any strategy must eventually deal with that. I always feel like that there is not one without the other, political progress and economic progress that is. I do think however that it has been somewhat easier for the majority to give way, so to speak, on the political side without really giving way on the economic side.
Mar 28, 2009 @ 3:15 pm
AmericanException
At this point, I don’t think anyone would argue otherwise — at least not without having to figure out a way to explain away the obvious chasm between the presidency and the prison system, both of which are features of black america’s reality in 2009.
Mar 28, 2009 @ 7:50 pm
WestIndianArchie
The political goals of the revolution are much more tangible than our social and economic goals.
Mar 30, 2009 @ 2:45 pm
AmericanException
But shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t the economic benefits be most tangible? I’m only asking this to be provocative, but what would Booker T. say were he reincarnated and saw a black man in the White House while most of us still lag far behind on economic indicators? I suspect it would be: told you so.
Mar 31, 2009 @ 8:39 pm
Leigh
What are those tangible goals if they are not economic and social? If we are not able to bring that political power to bear on the economic and social circumstance that we find ourselves in what is the point?
Apr 01, 2009 @ 3:02 am
B Gardner
Its a three-legged stool: social, political & economic progress working in tandem is what would raise the people as a whole.
Sadly, I don’t believe that in 2009 the “hand-in-hand” idea is popular, and they work more in separate silos.
While there were always the leaders at the forefront demanding equal rights and political representation, there were the others who worked within the system as it is, behind the scenes, making progress economically– mostly born out of a need within the black community that majority institutions in the private sector refused to cater to (insurance, hair/skin care, medical, etc).
These days, blacks are building successful companies that compete on a global scale. Its just that its a very small number of people who are economically-minded, financially-savvy, and business-oriented in comparison to our population as a whole. Judging by the record numbers of African-American voters, it seems easier to get black folks rallied around the political aspects of our progress.
Imagine the effects if the same numbers of black folks took personal financial planning and home ownership courses?
Apr 01, 2009 @ 5:03 pm
M
Your critiques of DuBois’s notable blind spots when it comes to Communism are dead on, and so it is with some trepidation that I say (as much in response to other comments as to your original post):
The idea that there is a place within a capitalist economy for Blacks to be anywhere other than where we find ourselves now seems absurd. The notion that our current situation is a result of our not taking “personal financial planning and home ownership courses” rather than a system designed to reproduce us as perpetual low-wage, non-specialized, non-union workers seems absurd to me at best, and dangerously Cosby-esque at worst. And while we cannot emphasize the political (or at least the politically symbolic) over the economic, it seems that Dr. King, Malcolm X, and a number of our other leaders throughout the Diaspora and Africa (Nyerere, Lumumba, Sankara, Maurice Bishop, Walter Rodney, etc.) have come to similar conclusions: there is no real possibility for our advancement within the system as it currently stands. It’s not tenable. It simply must be brought down.
On another note, I was interested when you said, “there is a kinship between Dreams from my Father and Souls of Black Folk but only a vague familiarity with Up From Slavery.” I’m fascinated with Dreams From My Father, but I wonder how much of its congruence with DuBois comes from the narrative arc — a personal/political journey. If he wrote more extensively on his work in Chicago, do you think it might have more of a Washingtonian ring to it?
Apr 03, 2009 @ 6:37 pm