by Bruce A. Dixon
The day before being sworn in, Atlanta’s new mayor Kasim Reed pledged to the Chamber of Commerce he’d deal with downtown panhandlers in what he called a more “muscular” fashion. The hopes and predictions of white pundits that black political life would come to look like the rest of America have come true. But not because the inequalities in health, wealth, incarceration rates and other indices of disparity have narrowed. Black politics are looking a lot more like white politics because the black political elite no longer believes its mission is to fight for peace and justice. The newer, more cynical black elite are unmoored from their peace-and-justice-loving base. They are focused on their own careers, and the corporate largesse that makes those careers possible. Make no mistake about it, the black politics of a previous generation, in which black candidates and public officials were expected to stand for something beside their own careers, is over.
There was a time not so long ago, when black politics, both in the minds of black voters, and in the public aims of black politicians, differed from the politics of white America.
Black politics were different because black unemployment was chronically twice as high as white unemployment, because black infant mortalities were much greater and life expectancies shorter than in white America. Black politics were different because African Americans were more likely to live in segregated, inferior housing, attend segregated, inferior schools, and due to the enormous gap in family wealth between white and black America. Black politics were different too because even though many African Americans were in the military, black communities were far less supportive of America’s imperial wars around the world than their white neighbors. And most of all, black politics were different because black voters expected black politicians to use their political careers to advance social and economic justice. Dr. King’s last projects hadn’t been about affirmative action. They were about a strike of sanitation workers for decent wages and benefits, and a Poor Peoples Campaign.
It was an expectation that a generation of black politicians felt obliged to fulfill, or at least pretend to. Every year for a generation in the seventies, eighties, nineties, and into the first years of the new century the Congressional Black Caucus,put forward its own alternative version of a national budget always with billions for job creation in urban and rural America. White mainstream pundits bemoaned and decried the differences between black and white politics, accepting it for a while as the inevitable relic of centuries of exclusion of black faces and black voices from the halls of power. They devoutly hoped that soon, the difference would disappear. And now it has.
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