The Ambivalence of the Black Left After Obama
A groundswell of racial and economic justice activism is challenging the Democratic Party’s monopoly on Black voters as Black progressives remain uncertain about their long-term place in the two-party system.
Last August when Jill Stein, then the Green Party’s presumptive nominee for President, announced her pick of Amaju Baraka for Vice President, she acknowledged that she had considered former Ohio state senator Nina Turner for the job as well, but decided that Turner would not be a good fit due to her lingering desire to “try to save the soul of the Democratic Party.” While not a slight against Turner (she goes on to praise Turner’s “passion to fight for the people” in spite of their differences), Stein’s statement made clear who the Green Party is for: people committed to building a truly independent political party outside of the two-party system.
But the wave of progressive activism that has swept the country since the beginning of the decade appears less willing to stake a claim to a role outside of the two party system — or inside the Democratic Party. While Senator Bernie Sanders’ insistence on a “fundamental restructuring of the Democratic Party” has spawned several political groups hoping to elect progressive candidates to office in the 2018 mid-term elections, he has not ceased criticizing Democrats, or considered giving up his independent label and becoming a Democrat. Nor have Sanders’ demands helped to mend the rift between mainstream liberals and progressives over the party’s messaging on economics and civil rights.
Divisions existed among black voters as well throughout last year’s presidential race, but in my view they received much less scrutiny than the shifts in partisan support among working class and college-educated white voters. Although Hillary Clinton went on to win black voters overwhelmingly in the general election, she narrowly lost black millennial voters to Sanders in the Democratic primary and consistently failed to match Obama’s numbers with black millennial voters in the polls leading up to Election Day.
Some news articles published in the weeks before the election correctly identified the source of black millennials’ disillusionment with Clinton: her complicity in policies enacted by her husband that hurt black communities, namely welfare reform and anti-crime legislation. Clinton was also running to be the heir apparent to the first black president, and the cultural attachments that black voters shared with her husband 20 years ago seemed irrelevant (if not absurd) to those growing up in the age of Barack Obama.
But I wouldn’t lay all of their disillusionment at the feet of Hillary Clinton. Obama’s overall popularity with young voters tended to obscure their growing disaffection with the status quo, beginning with Occupy Wall Street and most recently channeled through Black Lives Matter. The disconnect between Obama’s popularity and the resurgence of left activism during his presidency illustrates in some ways the black left’s relationship to the Democratic Party: it is a leftism that, on the one hand, recognizes the cultural significance of Barack Obama’s presidency for black Americans and is motivated to participate in the electoral process because of his success; but, on the other hand, it is vocal about Obama’s failures to protect black communities from the worst of the Great Recession (including the well-documented foreclosure crisis) and the nation’s increasingly militarized police forces.
In a recent post about the Republican Party under Donald Trump, I identified two types of black conservatism that have become instrumental in the defense of Trump’s racism and xenophobia. Similarly, I find that the critique of Obama and his party falls into two broad categories, one rooted in racial justice progressivism and the other in left economic populism. Although the influence of black leftism is visible in the Democrats’ resistance movement, neither strand discussed here is necessarily pro-Democratic Party.
Racial Justice Progressives
Racial justice progressives are mostly critical of the limits of symbolic representation to achieve racial equity. They contend that while Barack Obama’s electoral victory represents a broader historical and cultural achievement for black people, he didn’t produce many policies that significantly improved the quality of life of black Americans while in office. In fact, as Ta-Nehisi Coates pointed out in his review of the Obama presidency, Obama’s approach to race relations tended to be guided by a belief in the innocence of whites — “ascrib[ing] the country’s historical errors more to misunderstanding and the work of a small cabal than to any deliberate malevolence or widespread racism" — and he would demand black people take responsibility for their own communities. Coates further explains
I had met the president a few times before. In his second term, I’d written articles criticizing him for his overriding trust in color-blind policy and his embrace of ‘personal responsibility’ rhetoric when speaking to African Americans. I saw him as playing both sides. He would invoke his identity as a president of all people to decline to advocate for black policy — and then invoke his black identity to lecture black people for continuing to ‘make bad choices.’
The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 was in some ways an indictment of Obama-era post-racialism, as police brutality, mass incarceration, and other criminal justice issues were placed in the national spotlight. Due to the efforts of these activists, the Democratic National Committee passed a resolution last summer declaring the party’s support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Still, racial justice advocates see the limits of such symbolic victories and demand full-throated efforts to advance a black-specific agenda — namely through reparations.
Black Economic Populists
Black economic populists center their critique of the Democratic Party on its relationship to big money, and the party’s full-on embrace of neoliberal orthodoxy since the 1980s (at the expense of organized labor). They are far less persuaded by claims of Obama’s cultural significance to black communities when income inequality between whites and blacks worsened under his leadership. For many, Obama’s presidency was proof that the racial identity of the president does not make much of a difference in the lives of black voters if he or she is committed to the survival of neoliberal capitalism; therefore, black liberals must shift their focus away from institutional diversity and individual black gains toward a broad-based class movement that fights for all Americans.
Last May, Bernie Sanders picked Cornel West, a black civil rights activist and public intellectual, to be part of the drafting committee for the 2016 Democratic Party platform. While the final draft of the platform contained several Sanders-backed proposals such as the $15 minimum wage, higher taxes on the rich, and more scrutiny of trans-national trade deals, West ultimately endorsed Jill Stein for President, deeming the Democrat’s nominee a “neoliberal disaster” in a Democracy Now! interview:
Though I’ve discussed racial justice progressivism and economic populism as two distinct critiques of Obama and the Democratic Party, West, by connecting civil rights activism with anti-capitalism, demonstrates in the above video that these two strands of black leftism are not ideologically incompatible with one another. In fact, I would argue that the current debate over whether the left should prioritize class or ‘identity’ issues tends to ignore the existence of a black left, particularly the black radical tradition, that has tied the liberation of all black people to the dismantling of capitalism. Of course, black progressives disagree on whether, or to what extent, a political system can be just under capitalism; and how much, if at all, black representation within that system truly represents progress. But on the whole they agree that racial and economic justice are interconnected.
Although they found success in shaping the Democratic Party’s national platform last year, the black left continues to walk an unsteady line between reforming and resisting the two-party system. There are some fairly prominent black progressives like Nina Turner who support Bernie Sanders and his agenda to remake the Democratic Party into a people’s party with little regard for traditional partisan labels. And there are black scholar-activists like Michelle Alexander whose work on race and mass incarceration continues to inform the left’s policy goals on policing and criminal justice reform. But for the most part, the black left has been unable to organize into the kind of easily identifiable electoral force (à la Tea Party) that can threaten to unseat Democrats who ignore their agenda.
But if calls to shift the Democratic Party’s focus away from its black and brown base and appeal more directly to white voters through race-neutral rhetoric start to gain traction among party leaders, black left activists may have no choice but to try and emulate the Tea Party’s success.
