Advanced Search

This is a watershed moment in African American politics. The idea that there is an African American who has garnered the Democratic presidential nomination is something that couldn't have been imagined 20, or even 10 years ago. What's interesting about this is that there are contradictions for African Americans: the possibility of a black man being elected president and having the political issues that directly affect African American lives being marginalized during the election.

As a result of civil-rights legislation, particularly the 1965 Voting Rights Act, we saw blacks elected to public office for the first time and being incorporated into mainstream political institutions. Now, decades later, the process has moved toward the normalization of black politics. In many ways, Barack Obama is using a deracialized political strategy, where his campaign is emphasizing racial unity—bringing together people of different racial backgrounds—but deemphasizing the persistence of racial inequality in American society. Of course, no candidate—black, white or Latino—who forcefully discusses the role of racism in American life could win a presidential election.

Yet there are concerns about whether issues important to African Americans have been displaced by the Obama campaign's deracialized strategy. These issues include gentrification, the role of race in the criminal justice system and issues of persistent poverty in black communities, among other issues that affect the poor and minorities.

I don't think people appreciate the forces that led to Obama's rise as the Democratic Party's nominee. This has been a long process that goes back to the 1964 convention in Atlantic City, when political activist Fannie Lou Hamer challenged the all-white Mississippi delegation, which wouldn't seat African Americans as part of its official delegation. Her group also refused a proposed compromise that would have provided only two seats for African Americans. That fight was about delegates, but it was really about inclusion for African Americans in the party. After the 1968 convention, the Democratic Party developed an affirmative-action plan that changed the rules of delegate selection to include greater representation for blacks, women and youth.

It is those hard-fought gains, and later Jesse Jackson's campaigns of 1984 and 1988, that have allowed a person like Obama to be the nominee. Jackson not only put issues facing poor and minorities on the party's agenda, he also pushed for reforming the primary process to make it more fair for candidates.

Obama's candidacy raises the question of whether the United States is becoming a post-racial society, in which race matters less in society than it has in the recent past. Given the persistence of racial inequality, a society that sees itself getting beyond race risks ignoring and reinforcing existing inequalities.

We have seen the decline of black civic life in recent years. Civilrights organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League have seen a crisis of leadership and are trying to figure out what their issues will be in a post-civil-rights—or post racial—era when civil rights is one among many issues that African Americans are confronting.

A new type of black leadership—or political leaders who happen to be black—is becoming part of the American political scene. Though journalists and political pundits talk about the generational change in black leadership, what's really happening is also a widening of class divisions among blacks, a trend in American society in general but occurring at a faster rate among black Americans. This new generation of black leaders, who feel that racism is less a potent force and who appear to be less committed to government policies targeted toward the poor and minorities, might not necessarily represent the views of black people in poor and working-class communities. As a result, we're seeing a shift in the political landscape that black politicians inhabit.

 

Harris is a professor of political science and director for the Center on African American Politics and Society.

Top   |    E-mail this story