Civil rights and civil wrongs: Racism in America today

By KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR

IN THE summer of 2003, President George W. Bush made a five-day whirlwind trip across the
African continent. His first stop was Goree Island in Senegal, through which many thousands of
Africans once passed before being herded onto slave ships. In a speech he delivered on July 8,
Bush denounced slavery and lauded the struggles of slaves and their supporters in their fight to
end the system of slavery. He went on to comment that the slavery and racism that was its result
continue to shape American society:
My nations journey toward justice has not been easy and it is not over. The racial bigotry fed
by slavery did not end with slavery or with segregation. And many of the issues that still trouble
America have roots in the bitter experience of other times.1
Speeches like this one have become the modus operandi of the Bush administration on the
question of racism. The formula is familiar: Acknowledge that the problem exists, while actively
undermining any effort to deal with the problem. For example, when earlier this year the Bush
administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court in favor of dismantling affirmative action, Bush
made this statement defending his administrations position:
Our Constitution makes it clear that people of all races must be treated equally under the
law. Yet we know that our society has not fully achieved that ideal. Racial prejudice is a reality in
America. It hurts many of our citizens. As a nation, as a government, as individuals, we must be
vigilant in responding to prejudice wherever we find it[w]e should not be satisfied with the
current numbers of minorities on American college campuses. Much progress has been made;
much more is neededand because were committed to racial justice, we must make sure that
Americas public schools offer a quality education to every child from every background.
Americas long experience with the segregation we have put behind us and the racial
discrimination we still struggle to overcome requires a special effort to make real the promise of
equal opportunity for all.
Here Bush makes the case for affirmative actionpointing out the persistence of racial inequality
yet concludes, as evidenced by actually filing the brief, that affirmative action programs aimed at
redressing racial discrimination should be dismantled by the federal courts.
Candidate Bush ran as a "uniter, not divider" and coined the phrase "compassionate
conservative" as a way of describing his approach to politics and policy decisions. Yet, from Bushs
days in the governors mansion in Texas, to the campaign trail for the presidency, to the White
House itself, he has used race both to build his political career and to shore up and solidify his right-
wing, Christian fundamentalist base.
In Texas, Bush oversaw the execution of over 150 death row inmatesa disproportionate number
of whom were Black and Latino. Bush stopped on the campaign trail, returned to Texas and oversaw
the execution of Gary Graham (also known as Shaka Sankofa), an African American man sentenced
to death at age 17.
Bushs campaign stop in South Carolina was also illuminating on issues related to race. He
refused to condemn South Carolinas continued insistence on flying the Confederate flaga symbol of
slavery and white supremacy. Moreover, he accepted an invitation to speak at the controversial Bob
Jones Universitywhich maintains a policy against interracial dating. Bush decided to say nothing
about the policy as he accepted an honorary award from the school.

In 2000, Bush won less than 10 percent of the Black votea low even for Republicans. To make
matters worse, as the 2000 election debacle unfolded in Florida, it became clear that the election
shenaniganswhich included wiping 57,000 names, mostly Blacks, from the list of eligible voters
were not unintentional errors, but instead involved orchestrated and systematic efforts at
disenfranchising African American and immigrant voters.5
Rather than a break from the past, however, the Bush administration represents an acceleration

1
of more than two decades of attacks on the gains of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It is no
coincidence that Bill Clinton also made a 1992 campaign stop in Arkansas to oversee the execution
of a retarded Black man. These accumulated attacks have resulted in a lack of access to well paying
jobs, good schools, affordable housing, affirmative action and government-sponsored entitlement
programs that are aimed at blunting the effects of racism for African Americans.
The Bush administration also represents the changing class nature of racism and its impact on
Blacks as a whole. On his staff are the two highest-ranked African Americans ever appointed to a
presidential cabinetNational Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of State Colin Powell.
One would be hard-pressed to argue that these two key figures of Bushs inner circle are just
puppets or "Uncle Toms" within the Bush administration. In Bushs campaign for war against Iraq,
both Rice and Powell were central to sell the war at home and abroad.
These two are not the only African Americans on top of the heap. Currently, the CEOs of
American Express, Merrill Lynch and the AOL division of Time Warner are African American. These
are just a few examples of a greater phenomenon of some Blacks who now benefit from the
system.6
That both of these realities co-existconditions of deprivation for the vast majority and increasing
wealth and power for a tiny minorityraises questions about fighting racism today. What are the
conditions under which this fight will unfold? Who are the allies in this fight? What is the possibility
of building a movement that can actually take on the Bush agenda and the broader challenges of
fighting for racial justice in the U.S. today? This article will attempt to address these questions.

The state of Black America

The statistics, which are the clearest barometers for determining and measuring the quality of life
in American society, show that African Americans continue to lag behind whites in every possible
category. Not only does this point to the depth of racial inequality in this society, but it clearly
undermines the idea that racism is simply a matter of prejudice, existing only on an ideological level.
As the booming economy of the 1990s drew to a close, Black poverty rates dropped to a record
low of 23 percent. Black unemployment fell to a record low of 7.2 percent in September of 1999. But
this did little to close the gap of economic inequality that continues to separate Blacks from whites.7
In 1999, median income for African Americans was $31,778, compared to $51,244, for the
median income of white families. According to one report, in 1995, average white households had
$18,000 in financial wealth, while Black households possessed a total of only $200. In 2001, 30
percent of both Black and Latino children lived in poverty.

Even at its historic low of 7.2 percent, Black unemployment still was twice the unemployment
level for whites.9 These numbers did not take into account the nearly one million Black men locked
up in prison and jail, which, by some estimates would increase the overall unemployment level by
two percentage points.10 Moreover, since 2001, when the economy officially went into recession,
official Black unemployment has drifted between 10 and 11 percent. An added result of the recession
is that the drop in Black poverty rates, a result of the economic expansion of the 1990s, has been
reversed and Black poverty is again on the rise. According to the Census Bureau, 24 percent of
Blacks now live in povertyup from 22 percent in 2001.11 Additionally, there was a 3 percent
decrease in the Black median income.

"African Americans tend to be the last to be hired when the economy is booming. That means
that they also tend to be the first to lose their jobs when a downturn hits," according to Stephanie
Armour writing in USA Today in December 2002. She goes on to say, "job losses have been deep in
manufacturing and construction, they have also hit retailers, which lost 39,000 jobs in November.
Jobs in those industries tend to be disproportionately held by African Americansdepartment store
hiring was down by 17,000, the worst November for store hiring since 1982."13 In July 2003, the
New York Times reported:
Unemployment among Blacks is rising at a faster pace than in any similar period since the
mid-1970snearly 2.6 million jobs have disappeared overall during the last 28 months nearly
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90 percent of those jobs were in manufacturingwith Blacks hit disproportionately harder than
whites.
The disproportionate impact of layoffs on African Americans in the recession of the early 1990s
further illustrates how racism compounds an already bad situation when the economy begins to
contract. The Wall Street Journal reported during the recession of 19901991, a significant number
of major corporations cut Blacks jobs at a much higher rate than for white workers. J.P. Morgan,
where Blacks represented 16 percent of the workforce in 1990, responded to the recession by
relocating its clerical and data processing operations from New York City to Delaware. Black
employees suffered almost 30 percent of total job losses. At Coca-Cola in 1990, Blacks made up
almost 18 percent of the labor force. When the company decided to cut its workforce in response to
the economic downturn, over 42 percent of Black workers absorbed job cuts. Sears, which had a
Black workforce of 15.9 percent, closed its distribution centers concentrated in central cities and
reduced its clerical staff. More than 54 percent of all Sears employees who lost their jobs in the
recession of 19901991 were African American, which was three and a half times the rate of job
loss for whites in the company.
Two recent studies show, on a base level, the racist obstacles African American applicants face.
The University of Chicago found that job applicants with "Black sounding" namessuch as LaKisha or
Jamalwere twice as likely not to be called back for an interview as applicants with "white sounding"
names.16 Another study found that even white applicants with prison records were called back more
frequently about jobs than African Americans with no prison record at all.17
Unemployment today for young Black men aged 16 to 19 tops out at more than 30 percent,
double that of young white men in the same age category.18 In spite of that appalling statistic, Bush
announced that he will cut funds for urban job training programs by 70 percent, from $225 million to
$45 million.
A study recently conducted by Cornell University found that "nine out of 10 Black Americans, or
91 percent, who reach the age of 75 spend at least one of their adult years in poverty," compared to
52 percent of whites. The study goes on to say, "that by age 28, the Black population will have
reached the cumulative level of lifetime poverty that the white population arrives at by age 75."20
Access to health care is a major problem for African Americans. Twenty-three percent of African
Americans have no health coverage at all.21 Poverty and a lack of health insurance mean that
Blacks die on average six years younger than the rest of the population. It means that Black infant
mortality rates are more than twice that for white babies. The same deadly mix has helped to
produce an AIDS epidemic among African Americans. Today, Black womenonly slightly more than 6
percent of the populationmake up 68 percent of all new AIDS cases for women, and 63 percent of
all new pediatric AIDS cases are of Black children.22
The toll the criminal justice system has had on the lives of African Americans has been well
documented in this journal and elsewhere. Blacks make up 13 percent of the population but
represent 50 percent of the nations prison population. In Baltimore, Maryland, and Washington,
D.C., more than 50 percent of the Black male population is under the jurisdiction of the criminal
justice system. Black men are 6 percent of the population but are more than 40 percent of those on
death row.23
Black youngsters are dealt with no more sympathetically. A report compiled by the U.S.
Department of Justice showed that Black and Latino youth are treated much more harshly in the
juvenile justice system than their white peers. Among first-time youth offenders, African Americans
are six times more likely than whites to be sentenced to prison by juvenile courts. For drug offenses,
Black youth are 48 times more likely than whites to be sent to prison.24 Currently, while there are
603,000 Blacks enrolled in institutions of higher education, there are 757,000 who are locked up in
federal and state prisons. Moreover, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics projects that 30 percent of
Black boys who turn 12 this year will spend time in jail in their lifetime, if current incarceration rates
stay constant.25
Even those vestiges of racism that were supposed to have been wiped out by the civil rights
struggle of the 1960snamely segregationhave reappeared in Americas public school systems.
Ironically though, the five most segregated cities in the U.S. today are in the North: Detroit,

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Milwaukee, New York City, Newark and Chicago.26
The day before the national Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday in January 2003, the Civil Rights
Project at Harvard University released a study showing that American schools are re-segregating.
According to researchers at Harvard University, "The South went from being the most segregated
region in the country to being the most integrated. Now the reverse is happening." But the study
went on to point out that although re-segregation in the South was happening most rapidly, schools
in the Northeast and on the West Coast are still more segregated. In fact, according to the study,
the countrys most segregated schools are in New York City. This trend in schools was precipitated
by court decisions weakening desegregation orders from the 1960s.27
All of these terrible numbers are underscored by the fact that, when it comes to making the laws
that have an impact on the lives of African Americans, there is a woeful lack of representation. In
the history of the U.S. Senate, one of the most powerful decision making bodies in the country,
there have only been four Black senators. Today, there are none. There have been two African
American governors in the history of the U.S. Today, there are none. There is just one African
American on the Supreme Courtright-winger Clarence Thomas.
This picture of racial injustice in the U.S. points to the systemic nature of racism. The degree of
racial disparity and inequality are not just the result of ignorance or a lack of tolerance. The greatest
proof of this is not just the conditions that exist today, but the deterioration of conditions for African
Americans in the aftermath of the social justice struggles of the 1960s, which points to the
institutionalization of racism.
The social movements of the 1960s pressured the U.S. government to devote more resources
into fighting poverty and creating opportunities for African Americans access to higher education,
and, as a result, Black poverty decreased. The Americans for Democratic Action explains in detail:
In 1960, before the Johnson administrations War on Poverty, there were 39.9 million poor
persons in the nation. During the mid-1960s the president and Congress adopted a series of
programs directly geared to helping those caught in poverty. Those programs (plus a strong
economy) succeeded in reducing the poverty ranks by 15.8 milliona reduction of 40 percentto
24.1 million. As a result, the poverty rate (the percentage of poor in the total population)
dropped dramatically from 22.2 percent to 12.1 percent.28
If racism was caused just by ignorance and prejudice, then economic disparity between races
should have ended in the sixties. The civil rights and Black power struggles exposed racist injustice,
the administration of Lyndon Johnson reacted and implemented the "war on poverty," and that
should have been the end of the story. Instead, the disparity never disappeared, and began to grow
again shortly thereafter. According to the Washington Post:
Basically, by the mid-1970s young college educated Blacks were earning the same amount as
their white counterparts. There was no racial disparity. Income growth of college-educated
African Americans, after surging in the 1960s and into the mid-1970s, slowed nearly to a halt,
while incomes of similarly well-educated whites increased substantially. The result, economists
said, has been a widening earnings gap between the best and the brightest Blacks and whites, a
fact of economic life in the 1990s that stands in stark contradiction to many popular assumptions
about Black success. The survey reflected these disparities in relative Black and white earnings
over the past 20 years. Nearly half45 percentof all Black college graduates interviewed said
their income had not kept up with the cost of living over the past five years. In contrast, 29
percent of all college-educated whites said their income hadnt kept pace with inflation.29
According to one report on income disparity between Blacks and whites, "In the late 1960s,
median household income for Blacks was about $19,000 (in 2001 dollars); for whites, the figure was
about $34,000. Theres still a $15,000 spread, with those figures at about $29,000 for blacks and
$44,000 for whites."30
By the 21st century the economic gap, as measured by median income, has returned to the same
level as at the end of the sixties. The economic advances of the civil rights and Black power
movements have been virtually erased.
Has anything changed?

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 It would be wrong, nevertheless, to conclude that things are just as bad as they were before the
civil rights movement. Many of the legislative gains from that periodfrom affirmative action to
ending segregationare under attack. But the impact of the movement has been longstanding,
fundamentally changing the attitudes and perceptions of millions of people about African Americans.
In 2001, the Kaiser Family Foundation, in conjunction with the Washington Post, conducted a
survey called, "Race and Ethnicity in 2001: Attitudes, Perceptions and Experiences." The study found
that, on a whole range of issues, whites are more sympathetic to the realities of African Americans
in U.S. societyand they also have closer contact and relationships with Blacksthan 35 or 40 years
ago.
The survey found that 65 percent of whites thought the federal government should be
responsible for ensuring that minorities have access to schools that are equal in quality to whites. It
found that 55 percent of whites felt the federal government was responsible for ensuring that
minorities receive equal access to health care. Sixty-nine percent of whites felt it was the
governments responsibility to make sure minorities received "treatment by the courts and police
equal to whites." Sixty-three percent of whites thought that "there are still major problems facing
minorities in this country." On social issues, the findings were equally telling. When asked if it were
better to marry someone of their own race or a different race, 53 percent said it didnt matter.
Eighty percent of whites said "race should not be a factor" when it comes to adopting children. When
asked if "you live in a racially integrated neighborhood," 61 percent of Blacks responded yes and 44
percent of whites said yes.31
These all should be contrasted to the dominant ideas prior to or at the beginning of the civil
rights movement. In 1958, 44 percent of whites said they might or definitely would move if a Black
person became their next door neighbor; in 1997 that figure was 1 percent. In 1961, 50 percent of
respondents said they would vote for a well-qualified Black person for president; by 1987 that figure
had risen to 79 percent. In 1963, 63 percent of whites said whites and Blacks should attend the
same schools; by 1985 that number had risen to 92 percent. Also in 1963, 60 percent of whites
agreed that whites have a right to keep Blacks out of their neighborhood; by 1988 that figure
dropped to 24 percent.32 According to authors of The Forgotten Majority, Ruy Teixeira and Joel
Rogers:
The list goes on and on, but all the changes tend to be large and all are in the same direction:
more tolerance, less racism. Moreover, where available the data indicate that the [white working
class] moved even more heavily in this direction than did other whites. These are impressive
changes. Indeed, comprehensive analyses of public opinion change establish that racial attitudes
are the area of public opinion where the largest and most consistently liberal attitude changes
have taken place.33
None of this is offered up as evidence that racism ceases to exist, merely that ideas within the
population at large have changed considerably, thanks to the struggles fought by the civil rights and
Black power movements. In contrast, the previous statistics outlining the conditions of Black
America point to the depths of institutional racism in U.S. society. While racism can still manifest
itself in ideas, its most significant expression is systemic: how it affects Blacks ability to obtain and
keep jobsthereby decreasing poverty levels, accessing quality education and health care and
avoiding the disproportionately harsh impact of the American criminal justice system.
Who benefits from racism?
While statistics may show that attitudes of the majority of whites have shifted over the last 35
years, there remains the common perceptionparticularly among the leftthat all whites benefit from
the racial oppression of African Americans. There is little argument that whites who run the
boardrooms in corporate America, control the courtrooms in the judicial system and exert the most
influence in the government benefit not only from the oppression of African Americans but also from
the oppression of all workers.
Nevertheless, many left-wing intellectuals argue that all whites derive some benefit from being
white. Indeed, many academics, notably historian David Roediger, call these so-called benefits
"white privilege." Roedigers book, The Wages of Whiteness, as its title implies, confirms the idea
that there is a benefit or a "wage" for simply being white in the U.S., regardless of class or

5
consciousness.34 Manning Marable spells out the "benefits" of whiteness in his book, The Great
Wells of Democracy:
Whiteshave an important material asset that allows them to escape the greatest liabilities
and disadvantages of povertytheir whiteness. White Americans who are homeless, unemployed
and/or uneducated for the most part still believe in the great American master narrative of
opportunity and upward mobility. If they scrape together enough money to buy a new suit, they
will find it relatively easy to obtain employment, albeit at subsistence wages. They know with the
same set of skills and level of educational attainment as the Black householders across the
street, they stand a superior chance of being hired. Whiteness creates a comfortable social and
psychological safety net for the white poor. Everyday may not be a lucky day, but nobody has to
sing the blues for long.35
Here, Marable conflates the issues. There is the issue of consciousness: whether or not whites
think that they have an advantage because of their race. This is really no great revelation, the idea
that many whites buy into and can accept racist ideas. But this doesnt explain why many non-
whites do the same. After all, Karl Marx wrote that the ruling ideas of any society were the ideas of
the ruling class. They own the airwaves, write the schoolbooks, determine the curricula, and so on.
For example, in 1994, 50 percent of Black voters in California voted in favor of a racist anti-
immigrant referendum that was to deny undocumented workers access to basic services like
emergency medical care and welfare entitlements. While most of the African Americans probably
thought that voting yes on Proposition 187 would improve their own economic statusoperating from
the assumption that Latino immigrants were taking limited resources away from poor and working-
class Blacks. Instead, Proposition 187 helped to foster an environment of racism and scapegoating
that no doubt contributed to the passing of an anti-affirmative action referendum two years later in
California. Buying into scapegoating doesnt mean that it actually helps in the short- or long-run.
Moreover, there is a crucial difference between ideas and reality. Just because many white
workers may think they have it better (though Marable offers no evidence that this claim is actually
true) the reality that white workers and the white poor face is something entirely different. As
Marable himself pointed out in an earlier book, the real economic picture for millions of white
workers is dire:
In unprecedented numbers, millions of white people are confrontingunemployment, poverty,
and hunger. A recent studydocuments the growing crisis of non-Hispanic whites. Half of all
Americans living in poverty, nearly 18 million are white. For white female-headed households,
more than one in three are poor. From 1979 to 1991, the poverty rate nearly double for white
families headed by an individual aged 25 to 34. Whites comprise nearly half of all Americans on
AFDC and are the majority of those who receive food stamps. In 1991 12.6 million whites
received Medicaidto many of them, the American Dream has become a nightmare.36
This assessment is far from the "comfortable social and psychological safety net for the white
poor," that Marable more recently describes. In reality, the white population is divided by class. In
fact, Black median household income growth actually outpaced the growth rate of white median
household income between 1967 and 2001, according to Census Bureau figures. In this 34-year
period, Black median household income rose by 51.7 percent compared to an increase of 33.2
percent for white median household income.37 This is not a statement on the great financial gains or
future of the vast majority of African Americans. Rather, this statistic speaks to the declining
economic situation of millions of white working-class people in the U.S. over the last two decades.
This situation is exacerbated by the growing concentration of wealth in the uppermost echelons of
U.S. society. According to the latest reports, the gap between rich and poor more than doubled from
1979 to 2000.38 Moreover, "the bottom 60 percentrange from very modest gains to actual income
losses over the same period of time."39
Workers with college degrees received an income increase of 6 percent from 1979 to 1997.
Wages for those with some college dropped by 9 percent. But wages for those with only a high
school diploma dropped by 12 percent, and for high school dropouts, the decline was 26 percent.
Authors Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers explain the increasing divide among whites:

6
 On one side of the Great Divide, lacking a four-year college degree, are the vast majority
three-quartersof white adults who have not fared well over the last quarter century. On the
other side are the quarter of white adults who have a four-year degree or more for whom the
last 25 years have been a time of substantial economic progress. The fact is three-quarters of
white workers dont have college degrees, which basically means over a 20 year period 75
percent of workers saw their wages decline.40
Over the last 25 years, attacks on wages and living standards have fallen not only on white
workers, but all workers, as part of an employers offensive that aimed to shift the balance of class
forces in favor of the wealthy, at the expense of the entire working class. The 1980s became known
as "the looting decade"during which all workersBlack, Latino and whitelost ground economically,
while the rich grew much richer. As political commentator Kevin Phillips described the eighties, "no
parallel upsurges of riches had been seen since the late 19th century, the era of the Vanderbilts,
Morgans and Rockefellers." And yet even Phillips asserted that the 1990s produced an even greater
concentration of wealth in fewer hands: "by 2000, the United States could be said to have a
plutocracy, when back in 1990 the resemblance to the previous plutocracy of the Gilded Age had not
yet fully matured."41 It is no coincidence that attacks on workers living standards during this period
coincided with a concerted attack on the gains of the anti-racist struggles of the 1960s.
In fact, the attacks on Black rights and the gains of the civil rights movement didnt begin in the
1980s but got their start when Democratic President Jimmy Carter was in office. Under the Carter
administration, a 1978 Supreme Court ruling against affirmative action unofficially began the
concerted rollback on civil rights.
In 1978 the U.S. Supreme Court made its landmark Bakke decision, which set in motion a
decade of attacks on affirmative action programs. The Court ruled that Allan Bakke, a white
male, had been denied a place at the University of California at Davis medical school due to
"reverse discrimination" policies which victimized white males. The medical schools policy of
setting aside 16 of its 100 annual openings for non-white students was found to be
discriminatory against "better qualified" whites. But several important facts about the Bakke case
never surfaced in the mass media. The first is that the medical school at Davis also set aside a
certain number of places each year for the sons and daughters of wealthy (white) alumni.
Secondly, 36 of the 84 white students admitted the year Bakke applied had lower test scores
than Bakke. Bakke, moreover, had been turned down by 10 other medical schools.42
If Jimmy Carter allowed the door to be opened, however, Republicans Ronald Reagan and George
H.W. Bush kicked it completely in. As Sharon Smith wrote:
Reaganism as practiced by both political parties aimed to deepen the wedge between white
workers and those of all other races, Blacks in particular. The degree of racism emanating from
the White House was frequently staggering. Nearly every social spending cutback was justified
with a racist stereotype. "Welfare," "drugs," and "crime" have been the racist code words
scapegoating Blacks for over a decade.43
But it was up to Democratic President Bill Clinton, whom writer Toni Morrison famously described
as "Americas first Black president," to completeand make more acceptableattacks that Reagan
and Bush I launched. As one observer noted in 2000, a few months before the "New Democratic"
Clinton-Gore administration left office:
Abandoning any notion of government action to correct racial injustice has been central to
New Democrat politics from the start. In fact, the conservative Democrats who launched the
[Democratic Leadership Council, the faction that catapulted Clinton and Gore to the top of the
Democratic Party] saw it largely as a vehicle to counter Jesse Jacksons Rainbow Coalition. At
best, the Clinton-Gore administrationpromoted a "race-neutral" approach to social policy that
simply tried to avoid issues of racial discrimination. At worst, it pandered to racism by
scapegoating Black welfare recipients or Latino immigrants. On several occasions, it took actions
it knew to be discriminatory.44
While perfecting the symbolism of "inclusion" by promoting a "national dialogue" on race and
7
appointing a cabinet that "looked like America," the Clinton administration ordered the end to dozens
of affirmative action set-aside programs. It maintainedand actually defended against criticsthe
racist criminal sentencing guidelines that overwhelmingly discriminate against Black crack cocaine
users. It pressed the Congressional Black Caucus to drop provisions from the 1994 Crime Bill aimed
to safeguard against discriminatory application of the vastly expanded federal death penalty. The
Clinton administrations greatest social policy innovation was "welfare reform," the elimination of a
six-decade old guarantee of a minimum standard of assistance for poor people.
While a great number of white workers throughout this time bought into the racist scapegoating
of Blacks, this didnt actually make their lives bettermaterially, socially or psychologically. Instead,
it allowed the complete "looting" of the wages and income of all workersBlack and white. As Black
radical writer and activist Ron Daniels has put it:
The fact of the matter is, both Blacks and whites were being exploited by the big man. The
big white boss was exploiting Blacks and whites. The real deal is, these cats [bosses] were
getting off like bandits all the way to the bank with the loot they were expropriatingfrom the
labor of both Black and white. The point is that this wedge was driven. Racism was and is a
strategy of dividing and exploiting working people.45
In 1984, Manning Marable wrote against those who contend that white workers benefit from
racism:
[They are] basically idealist and not materialists. They say that the fundamental force that
drives the motor of Black oppressionis race alone. They argue that all whites benefit materially
and ideologically from racism which, in my view, looking at the data, looking at the facts and
experiences of white people, is a disastrous misinterpretation of American and Black social
history."46
Former Black slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass made the point most succinctly when he
wrote in the late 19th century, under conditions far more violent and racially polarized than today:
"The hostility between the whites and the Blacks of the South is easily explained...both are
plundered by the same plunderers...and it [hostility] was incited on both sides by the poor whites
and the Blacks by putting enmity between them. They divided both to conquer each."47
The ongoing debate over the true beneficiaries of racism is important for leftists and liberals. If
white workers benefit from racismthen what hope is there to ever build a majority fightback against
racism? It is doubtful that an entire group of the population would ever fight against something that
put more food on the table, more money in the paycheck and provided more health care. Also, given
the growing concentration of wealth in the hands of a fewand the austerity it means for the
majority on the bottomthe question for both Black and white workers becomes: How can we fight
back and take what is rightfully ours? Can white and Black workers unite on a class basis?
The issue is not whether white workers buy into racist ideasthat is a question of consciousness.
The issue is whether backward ideas can be broken down and ultimately changed. The evidence
shows overwhelmingly that through the course of struggle racistand other backward ideascan
shift. The statistics outlined earlier, detailing the change in attitudes and perceptions of most whites
since the 1960s, is a case in point. Whether or not those changes remain intact is a political question
tied to the level of struggle and resistance to racism in the society.
What happened to the movement?
A Black political convention, indeed all truly Black politics, must begin from this truth: The
American system does not work for the masses of our people, and it cannot be made to work
without radical, fundamental changes. The challenge is thrown to us here in Gary. It is the
challenge to consolidate and organize our own Black role as the vanguard in the struggle for a
new society. To accept the challenge is to move to independent Black politics. There can be no
equivocation on that issue. History leaves us no other choice. White politics has not and cannot
bring the changes we need.48
This statement comes from the Gary Declaration, a mission statement produced out of a political
conference on Black politics in 1972. Nearly 8,000 African American activists, professional politicians,
businessmen and revolutionaries met in Gary, Indiana to discuss the future of Black politics.
8
 The convention in Gary eventually came undone under the weight of its own political
contradictions. On one side were cultural nationalists such as Amiri Baraka and the Democratic
mayor of Gary, Richard Hatcher, arguing to break with both the Democrat and Republican Parties.
On the other side of the debate were people like Jesse Jackson and officials from the NAACP arguing
to support the Democratic Party. The convention could not resolve or overcome these divisions, but
its significance is that it represented a real debate about the direction of the Black liberation
movement.49
This, unfortunately, is a long way from where Black politics are at the beginning of the 21st
century. Today, two African Americans hold powerful positions in the administration of a white, right-
wing, Republican administration. But these powerful African Americans do nothing to improve the
lives or lessen discrimination against the vast majority of Blacks in the U.S.on the contrary, they
uphold the policies of an administration that has increased the level of racism.
Today, the only formal debate within Black politics is which Democrat to support in the next
election. At its 2003 Congressional Black Caucus Week, the Caucus courted most of the Democratic
candidates running for president. Charles Rangel, who has been a Harlem representative in the
Caucus since 1970, has taken a particular liking to former NATO Supreme Commander, Gen. Wesley
Clark. Rangel left no question about who he was endorsing, "Our patriotism is on the line when we
see our great country in trouble and were silent. I decided as a former soldier we need a warrior
[in the White House]."50 It should be noted that this appears to be the sum total of Rangels support
for Clark. He offered his support without even knowingor seemingly caringabout where Clark
stood on issues important to Rangels Harlem constituents.
There is a huge political gap between the militancy of the debates of the Gary Conference and
the politics on offer today. This is the result of two main factors. The first is the opportunities both
economically and socially that opened up for the Black middle class after the civil rights and Black
power movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The second is the result of the absorption of Black
political operatives and organizations within the folds of the Democratic Party.
Before the civil rights movement there were few Black politicians, business owners and college
graduates who could make the most from their opportunities, due to racism and segregation. The
movement helped to break the legal fetters that limited Black upward mobility. The percentage of
Black families making more than $25,000 (in 1982 dollars) increased from 10 percent in 1960 to 25
percent in 1982. By the mid-1990s, before the full extent of the economic expansion had been
realized, fully one-seventh of Black families made more than $50,000 a year, more than at any other
period in history. The percentage of Blacks occupying managerial and professional positions went
from 13 percent in the early 1980s to 22 percent by 1999. A Bureau of Labor Statistics study on
African American progress in the professions indicates gains up to 470 percent from 1972 to 1991 in
areas such as accounting, engineering, computer programming, law, medicine, journalism and
management.51
These changes among Blacks were not just financial. They were political as well. As Black
commentator Henry Louis Gates wrote, "...we dont have to pretend any longer that 35 million
people can ever possibly be members of the same economic class.... Nor do they speak with one
single voice, united behind one single leader. As each of us knows, we have never been members of
one social or economic class and never will be."52 Sharon Smith explained this transformation in
1992:
Although middle-class Blacks experience racism in their daily lives, as a group they have
chosen to make a deal with the system rather than fight against it. So while the Black middle
class has been the main beneficiary of the civil rights movement, it has moved far to the right
since then. This includes even veterans of themovement. In part, the growing conservatism of
the Black middle class simply mirrors the trend of the entire U.S. middle classregardless of
raceduring the 1970s and 1980s. But it is also a reflection of the profound changes that have
taken place since the days of the civil rights movement. Prior to the 1960s, the small Black
middle class that did exist had an interest in joining the fight for civil rights. So while the vast
majority of participants in the civil rights and Black power movements were Black workers, its
leadership was middle classand the aims of the movement reflected this. The Black middle class
joined with Black workers to demand the right to vote and an end to legal segregation in the
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1960s, but they sought to remove the barriers to their advance within the system, not to
transform it.53
This dynamic was even clearer when it came to the transformation of electoral Black politics. The
number of Black elected officials has increased from fewer than 200 in 1964 to over 8,000 today.
Today, there more than 47 Black mayors in cities of 50,000 or moreincluding Houston, Dallas,
Detroit, Philadelphia and San Francisco.
The permanence of the Black political establishment within the Democratic Party today is a given.
This was not always the case. The absorption of key activists within the Democrats in some cases
was part of a conscious effort to draw activists into the party. In 1972, Democratic presidential
candidate George McGovern adopted a "Black Bill of Rights" into his platform. But more often than
not, African Americans had to kick in the door to the Democratic Party, often waging campaigns
against racist party machines in cities such as Philadelphia and Chicago.54 As Lee Sustar writes:
In reality, Black activists had to fight to get into the partynot just in challenging the
Dixiecrats in the South, but the racist big-city machines in the North. The huge shift of the Black
population to the Northern cities during and after the Second World War wasnt reflected in the
local officeholders. Electing Black officials could appear to be a radical step, especially in the face
of [white racist] opposition. "Black Power" could be used to justifyBlack elected officials.55
As the movements began to recede so did the pressure Black elected officials may have initially
felt to produce real change. Instead, Black political figures settled into their governing positions
managing austerity on a city, state and federal level. Throughout the 1980s, Black mayors were in
control of some of the largest cities in the U.S., yet did little or nothing to alleviate the hardship of
Black workers living in those cities.
Black Mayor David Dinkins, who was elected mayor of New York in 1989, oversaw backbreaking
austerity and a racist police force that made its reputation through terrorizing and then extorting the
Black and Latino population in the city. In his attempt to hold onto office when challenged by
Rudolph Giuliani in 1993, Dinkins led a crackdown on the citys homeless population. Black Mayor
Tom Bradley was at the reigns when his racist police force became the focal point of the riots that
swept Los Angeles in 1992.
The list of betrayals by African American mayors goes on and on: Washington, D.C. Mayor
Sharon Pratt Dixon, in 1993 suggested the National Guard take over patrolling the city streets to
stop drug dealing56; Wilson Goode, former mayor of Philadelphia, ordered the bombing of a street in
a Black neighborhood that housed the radical MOVE organization.57
The Congressional Black Caucus, with 13 Black congressmen when it formed in 1969, has
referred to itself ever since as the "conscience of the Congress." But it has dramatically moved away
from its grassroots- and movement-influenced origins. As one report put it:
The Congressional Black Caucus says that it has been "the conscience of the Congress since
1969." If that is the case, why then is the Caucus not taking a leadership role on major
progressive issues of the day? Because like the vast majority of members of Congress, the
caucus has been bought off by commercial corporate interestslike BP Amoco, Chevron, Exxon
Mobile, Shell Oil, Texaco, General Motors, Ford, Nissan and DaimlerChrysler, Anheuser Busch,
Heineken USA, Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds and Coca-Cola give big bucks to the CBC.58
Ahmed Shawki sums up the evolution of the relationship between the Black middle class and
Black workers:
in the 1970s and 1980s, it has been the Black mayors and the Black middle classes who
have opposed the aspirations of Black workers. But because of the relatively weak position of this
class of Blacks, they will also attempt to increase their influence within the system. The
integration of the Black middle class within the Democratic Party and capitalism itself is unlikely
to be reversed, despite the racism within the Democratic Party and society at large. This however
does not represent a victory for the mass of Blacks, but a retreat from the politics of the
1960s.59
Understanding Black politics today
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 Any strategy for confronting racism today has to start from an understanding of the nature of
racism and the role it plays in society. Equally, it is important to understand the crucial institutions
that help to shape the political environment in which challenges to racism unfold. This article has
attempted to outline some of these points:
Contrary to the assertions of conservatives and their New Democratic imitators, racism
continues to exist, blunting the life chances of African Americans and other racial minorities;
This reality coincides with the undeniable and positive liberalization of attitudes on racial issues
that has taken root throughout American society since the heyday of the civil rights movement;
Although all Blacks gained from the triumphs of 1960s and 1970s, the disproportionate
beneficiaries have been a section of the Black middle class, who have become well-integrated into
the economic and political system and its principle institutions, especially the Democratic Party;
Because a significant segment of the Black population has a stake in the existing arrangements
of society, struggles against racism characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s have receded. For this
reason, the Bush II and Clinton administrations attacks on the gains of the 1960s and 1970s have
met with little organized resistance;
The most significant gains for racial minorities have come from mass struggles that affected
society as a whole, including large sections of the white population.
Understanding the nature of racism in the 21st century is the first step to devising a strategy for
confrontingand building a movement that not only stops racist attacks, but that begins to win real
gains for the future.
Authors note:_This article focuses exclusively on the struggle against racism as it pertains to
African Americans. Clearly, there is a need to further discuss the conditions of Latinos in the U.S.
and given the ongoing "war on terror" and its impact on Arab and Muslims in the U.S., the scope of
the discussion as it relates to racism can and should be broader. However, the historical fetter on
the struggle of workers in this country has been anti-Black racism which began with slavery and
continues to this day, and thus is the focus of this article.

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