The co-publishers of The Black Commentator call school vouchers and faith-based initiatives the "strategic battering rams" the right is using to demolish the solidly progressive political consensus among African Americans. One of the more alarming aspects of this strategy relies on outreach to moderate black Democrats.
Glen Ford and Peter Gamble are co-publishers of The Black Commentator , a weekly journal of commentary, analysis and issues affecting African Americans. They are writing a book on the unfolding political crisis in black America.
It's enough to make a mainstream black activist's head swim.
Hordes of formerly apolitical preachers lead their flocks into the temporal world swearing fealty to Caesar in the person of George W. Bush. Republicanism melds with charismatic materialism and raw gay-baiting at African American mega-churches, their congregations sold to the GOP by their own pastors.
A multimillion dollar ad campaign starring the black Democratic mayor of the nation's capital markets school vouchers as the salvation of inner-city education—despite the fact that at no time in history have African Americans ever marched for or otherwise demanded vouchers to attend private schools.
Nearly 50 wealthy African Americans, most of them nominal Democrats and including many of the best-known names in the black communications industry, sign a petition to abolish the Estate Tax , or "Death Tax"—the bane of the troglodyte right.
A high-profile black Democratic congressman with national ambitions steps to the very edge of apostasy, endorsing private Social Security accounts in principle. Young black aspirants for elected office ritually distance themselves from their elders, hoping to be included among the corporate media-designated, independent-minded, more "conservative"—or "practical"—"New Black Leadership."
And the "old" black leadership has little inkling of what is happening.
Black politics is in crisis, reeling under the Republicans' mega-million-dollar assault against the core values of the historical Black Political Consensus—an evolved social democratic compact with an emphasis on justice that is subscribed to by overwhelming majorities of African Americans. The rising tempo of GOP activity among blacks—with no crescendo in sight—is the product of a sea change in right-wing thinking that occurred only about a decade ago, centered at the headquarters of the Bradley Foundation, in Milwaukee.
Under CEO and President (until 2001) Michael Joyce , Bradley invented both faith-based initiatives and the black wing of the voucher "movement." The voucher "movement," of course, was created out of whole cloth in collaboration with the Wal-Mart heirs' Walton Family Foundation. The Republican Party quickly adopted both strategies as tools to drive a wedge between blacks and teachers' unions and to lure opportunistic black clergy into the GOP orbit. Vouchers and faith-based bribery are the strategic battering rams the right hopes will demolish the Black Political Consensus. Gay-baiting, the "Death Tax" and longevity issues related to Social Security are tactical flourishes.
End Of An Era
In hindsight, we can now view the three decades that separated the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Bradley Foundation's decisive intervention in black politics in the mid-90s as a kind of respite for African Americans. The right's own virulent racism prevented them from deploying their greatest resource—capital—in ways that could effectively influence black political behavior. To put it bluntly, the arch-racists could not bring themselves to associate with more than a few blacks at a time. During this post-civil rights period of "malign neglect," right networks busied themselves cultivating selected black academic propagandists such as Thomas Sowell , Glenn Loury and Shelby Steele —tokenist enterprises which had no discernable impact on mass black opinion or political structures.
Similarly, the antics of mercenary black one-man-band outfits like Robert Woodson's National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise and Ward Connerly's American Civil Rights (sic) Institute delighted right-wing fat cats, but succeeded only in repulsing the black masses. The right could put Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court, but remained on the fringes of Black America.
Black Republicanism was clearly a dead end. No African-American Republican had been elected to a majority black congressional district since Oscar De Priest of Chicago, left the U.S. House in 1935.
Bradley's Michael Joyce broke the mold. He knew (or sensed) the truth about the black clergy—that only a minority had ever belonged to the progressive "social gospel" branch of the church, personified by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The unrelenting needs of the black community made it highly vulnerable to capital penetration and manipulation. Black Milwaukee became the foundation's political laboratory, confirming Joyce's theory that vouchers and faith-based initiatives could undermine a Black Political Consensus forged through generations of struggle. Most importantly, Joyce demonstrated locally that capital could recruit and train sufficient black voucher cadre, and entice enough preachers, to have a measurable effect on mass African-American political behavior. The perception, if not the reality, of a Black Political Consensus might be shattered.
Joyce convinced the GOP to take the strategy nationwide. The entire right network dove into the task of identifying and arranging funding for malleable black Democrats—because that's where the real action is. Bush began pushing faith-based funding and vouchers immediately upon taking office. Meanwhile, the Trojan Horse phase of the right's offensive against blacks exploded on the electoral politics scene in 2002. Right-funded black Democrats Artur Davis and Denise Majette defeated progressive U.S. Representatives Earl Hilliard, Ala., and Cynthia McKinney, Ga., respectively. On the local level, Bradley-associated voucher supporter Cory Booker nearly won City Hall in Newark, N.J.
Like A Hammer
The incumbents didn't know what hit them—and no wonder. Not since the days of Booker T. Washington's "Tuskegee Machine" had corporate America wielded anything approaching such direct influence on the nitty-gritty politics of Black America. Now the right could mobilize distinct columns of African-American allies: Old-school black Republican structures, corporate-connected black businesspersons, newly recruited voucher cadres and hirelings, armies of greedy-gut preachers salivating for faith-based funding, and black Democrats like Newark's Cory Booker, Washington Mayor Anthony Williams and Memphis Congressman Harold Ford Jr., who were positioned to undermine the Black Political Consensus from within.
The received wisdom from the corporate media is identical to the line run by rightists at the Manhattan and American Enterprise Institutes: African Americans are becoming more conservative as they join the middle class, especially younger blacks. However, black voting behavior proves differently. Georgia Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a flamboyant progressive, lost to right-backed Denise Majette in the 2002 open primary. But McKinney received 83 percent of the black vote in what is probably the second most affluent black majority district in the country— the very demographics that supposedly favor black conservatism. Majette's was a white victory. McKinney took back her seat in 2004.
Despite truckloads of cash lavished on or promised to black preachers—especially in the dollar-soaked "swing" states—George Bush's 2 percent increase in black support in 2004 was less than impressive. As BlackCommentator.com reported on November 18: "With 11 percent of a much larger black electorate, Bush picked up about a quarter million more black votes than he should have." A huge portion of those were new voters from the Pentecostal ranks, who are in such thrall of their ministers that there is nothing political to decipher in their actions.
The Black Political Consensus still stands. But for black internal politics, there is no doubt that the decades-long respite from the depredations of capital is over.
