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January 14, 2005
On Kelley's Black Hole
I got a a wake up call this morning on Norman Kelley's new HNIC book. Although it has been talked about at Vision Circle, I haven't seen nor heard much about the book.
I like his broadside:
Black America has no future-oriented vision of itself within the context of American reality. Its politics of the past 40 years has come to a halt, and the leaders of those years have offered nothing of programmatic substance. And in the face of the New Right, for the past 25 years, nothing but symbolic posturing has been offered as leadership. If professional and working middle-class African-Americans yearn for solutions to problems and a reasonable level of economic well-being, they are going to have to cast down their own buckets in the clear waters of organizational efficiency, political accountability and self-generated economic mobilization. As of this moment, there seems to be no other way.
But I wonder how real is his view of white nationalism in the below:
At this point in time and history, on the 76th anniversary of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birth, African-Americans have no viable political agenda and economic program or platform to withstand the resurgent phenomenon of white nationalism, an aspect of the conservative movement that has been developing in the country in plain sight for the past four decades. This is due to the decline of effective black political leadership.
While it's true that most blackfolks live in virtual segregation, I'm not sure that it is not an expression of their will. In other words, I'm starting to buy into the 'self-segregation' argument. (Note my stuff on 'selling out' for life expectancy). Because what is black politics other than a refusal of non-racial politics? (Ooh, that stings!) There is no left, nor right issue blacks might want to support that isn't already discussed in non-black settings. Remember that even the left brainwashed Black Commentator said that Howard Dean's talk about race was the most substantial progress in 40 years. But who black is talking to Howard Dean today? Nobody. There is nothing constructive going on in the old mold.
White nationalism may be an instructive force in America as surely as black nationalism is. But a clear understanding of the economic forces in this country are not racialized. Wall Street doesn't bank on race. It may take some doing to deal with that because the bank on Main Street is more likely to. But America is going to Wall Street, not Main Street, and Wall Street is going towards the global marketplace. This may be the political leadership blackfolks need to hear: a way to get past the spectre of white nationalism, a new mountaintop to point their children towards routed in the kind of 'clear waters of organizational efficiency, political accountability and self-generated economic mobilization' Kelley speaks of.
Let me tell you what I believe. American blacks are better off than Albanians and twenty dozen other ethnic groups around the world, and until such time as our plight raises the eyebrows of the Marxists at the UN and the humanitarian NGOs of the world, the level of political activism we need will remain at levels far below those of the Civil Rights Movement. The devolution of black leadership is a direct consequence of the fact of its earlier success, and everyone has moved on. At some point even those skeptics like Kelley are going to have to admit that the reason there is no Bayard Rustin today is because we don't need a Bayard Rustin today.
Furthermore we'll all have to admit that King and all his associates did not collectively have any sophisticated ideas about what we should be doing in 2005 way back in 1965. If King was working on a Poor People's Campaign, and organizing strikes of service workers, he'd be right on target today in dealing with Mexican immigrants, but not the black mainstream. The Black Power movement crested by 1974: by the time the Symbionese Liberation Army (on the ass end of the late freight) recieved their smackdown, every sensible black thinker had realized that the revolution would not be televised because there would be no revolution. There would only be progress, reform, and evolution, none of it radical.
Black America has, by and large, arrived at the middle and there is no extraordinary white political agenda to keep them from that, therefore there is no call for an extraordinary black political agenda to counter that. We may long for the days when the Ebony 100 Most Influential Blacks list was an inspiring parade of stars, but that was then. This is now.
Posted by mbowen at January 14, 2005 07:17 AM
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The moderate-conservative Republican takes issue with the defeatism in liberal Norman Kelley's new book, The Head Negro in Charge Syndrome: The Dead End of Black Politics: "American blacks are better off than Albanians and twenty dozen other ethnic g... [Read More]
Tracked on January 16, 2005 03:47 PM