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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 9 -15 November 2000 Issue No.507 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 9 -15 November 2000 Issue No.507
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Books Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Blackening America's image
By Gamal Nkrumah
The politics of racial tokenism runs deep in the United States. The country is awash with black mayors and even a governor or two. But the US will not have an African American president in any foreseeable future. Likewise, a black vice presidential candidate is still considered a political liability and no presidential nominee in his right mind will risk overturning the racial bar to the vice presidency.
The idea of stamping black America's mark on the country's political future flickered uncertainly for generations in the collective psyche of African Americans, sometimes flaring up in gusts of pride and hope, as happened most spectacularly with the emergence of the black civil rights movement in the 1960s and its powerful figurehead, Reverend Martin Luther King. Disappointment, however, is fast giving way to dark suspicion among African Americans that they have failed to reap the windfalls they expected from the civil rights movement's advances some four decades ago.
The blackening and browning of the US electorate is accelerating at galloping speed and this growing constituency has rejected the notion that African Americans must be counted among the traditional Democratic Party constituencies. They warn against the increasing power of the Democratic Leadership Council, widely regarded as a reactionary anti-black force within the party. While white America still overwhelmingly rejects the idea of a black president or vice president, there are other streams of opinion, other outlooks, among African Americans.
New forces are coming to the fore, like the black politico-religious group The Nation of Islam and its controversial leader Louis Farrakhan -- widely regarded as something of a dark horse. The Black Left, spearheaded by scholar-activists who shun both Republicans and Democrats, has become vehemently anti-establishment, and most eloquently so. Once regarded as a formidable menace to the white establishment, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) -- the country's largest and best-organised black organisation -- is now widely viewed as an appendage of the Democratic Party. The NAACP cannot be dismissed as irrelevant -- it still wields a great deal of political clout -- but its overt association with the Democratic Party has tarnished its image among many progressive African American circles.
Mainstream African American leadership reluctantly acknowledges that siding with the Democrats is the lesser of two evils. "The only option is Al Gore," declared Reverend Jesse Jackson, urging his supporters to vote for the US vice president. But he conceded weakly, "If there were another campaign that was speaking to our issues that had the possibility and plausibility of winning, we should support that campaign."
Black Republicans are simply seen as an unfortunate anomaly. Traditionally, Republicans have enacted legislation that has seriously damaged the vital interests of African Americans. But in recent years Republicans have been toying with racial tokenism. If elected, Bush promises to appoint Colin Powell as secretary of state and Condoleeza Rice as national security adviser. But peppering the US government with the odd black face doesn't resolve Black America's numerous and intractable problems.
African Americans' worries are understandable. The US economy might be booming, but poverty is rising at an alarming rate among blacks and the housing crisis is worsening among the poor. African Americans earn far less than their white compatriots; they are far less likely to be employed full time and are over-represented in the lowest-paying jobs. The humiliating subjugation of black job applicants to drug tests and criminal record checks is still widely and routinely practiced in the US.
The unexpected acquittal of four white New York police officers of all charges in the cold-blooded murder of African immigrant Amadou Diallo outraged African Americans. "How do we deal with the police killing of Amadou Diallo, whose wallet was putatively misapprehended as a gun?" demanded veteran activist-scholar Angela Davis. "Or Tanya Haggerty in Chicago, whose cell phone was the potential weapon that allowed police to justify her killing? There are no easy answers ... But what is clear is that we need to come together to work toward a far more nuanced framework and strategy than the anti-violence movement has ever yet been able to elaborate."
Extensive, and perhaps excessive, publicity about racial issues in the US only serve to heighten racial tensions and polarise public opinion. In the US, the media portrays crime as culture-specific -- race-specific, to be precise. Facts and figures then corroborate racial stereotypes and myths creating a vicious cycle from which minorities cannot escape. While 40 per cent of African Americans live in abject poverty, the comparable figure for white children is only 15 per cent. The incarceration rate for African American males is eight times that of white men in the US.
Black children in America are increasingly spending their formative years locked up in jail. Juvenile jails are packed with young black "criminals" and African Americans under 18 comprise 58 per cent of all juveniles behind bars, even though they constitute only 15 per cent of the country's population. What is even more worrying is that the juvenile justice system, like the country's Justice Department, clearly discriminates against people of colour. Three-quarters of all youngsters placed in adult prisons last year were African American.
In his biting The Debt: What America Owes Blacks, Randall Robinson writes, "When a government kills its own people or facilitates their involuntary servitude and generalised victimisation based on group membership, then that government or its successor has a moral obligation to materially compensate that group in a way that would make it whole." Voices calling for reparations are getting louder: the US government, they argue, has a moral obligation to compensate African Americans for slavery.
The racialisation of images of welfare and poverty have become a staple of the mainstream media. Former US president Ronald Reagan popularised the misogynist and racial slur "welfare queens". Gary Delgado, writing in ColorLines -- currently the leading African American publication, spoke of "triple whammy of race, gender and welfare-recipient status" and "gender ghettos of service, sales and secretarial work."
Clinton collaborated with the Republicans to pass a welfare reform and crime bill that has been extremely detrimental to the interests of African Americans. Clinton's 1996 Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TAMF) aggravated matters and the bitter consequences of such "reform" are already clear. Whites are leaving the welfare rolls in droves. By 1998 less than a third of welfare recipients were white. Over 500,000 legal immigrants, overwhelmingly black and brown, remain ineligible for food stamps due to the 1996 welfare law. Martin Gilens, in his Why Americans Hate Welfare, noted that, "the belief that blacks are lazy is the strongest prediction of the perception that welfare recipients are undeserving."
None of this should discourage African Americans in their quest for greater and more meaningful participation US politics. True, they are no longer the largest ethnic minority in the US -- the Hispanics now constitute the most numerous minority -- but the US is more than ever obliged to listen to the voice of its 40 million blacks.
Related stories:
A voice, at last
The Nader factor
Can you see a difference? 2 - 8 November 2000
Ralph Nader by George Bahgory, 2 - 8 November 2000
A voice crying in the wilderness 24 - 30 August 2000
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