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The Kerner Commission and the Irony of Antiracist Politics

2017; Duke University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/15476715-4209338

1558-1454

Adolph Reed,

Political and Economic history of UK and US

The explosions of “urban unrest” in the 1960s became almost immediately, and have remained, something like Rorschach tests or ventriloquist dummies for scholars, journalists, and advocates of political programs across the ideological spectrum. Our prompt notes that taxonomizing those events was and is a theater of ideological contestation. It could hardly have been otherwise. Especially the major riots—Harlem, Watts, Cleveland, Detroit, Newark, etc.—dominated national and local news coverage for days or weeks at a time, and the specter of the “long, hot summer,” a product of activists’ efforts to leverage the outbreaks to demand increased redistributive public spending, quickly became an everyday trope in the public lexicon.Classification of the civil disturbances lined up as political allegory in predictable ways among radicals, liberals or moderates, and conservatives. These interpretive tendencies have shaped discussion of racialized civil disturbances ever since, as witnessed in reactions to the 1980 outburst in the Overtown and Liberty City sections of Miami after the acquittal of police officers who killed black motorist Arthur McDuffie; the 1992 explosion after the verdict in the first trial of police officers who attacked and beat Rodney King; and even the much smaller and more contained outbursts in 2014 and 2015, respectively, after the police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Freddy Gray’s death in police custody in Baltimore.Across the ideological spectrum a common assumption undergirding discussion was that the eruptions in the 1960s were, or were equivalent to, intentional political activity. Ahistorical social science may be especially vulnerable to the temptation to read intentions naively into outcomes. For instance, in the first systematic study of the policy impacts of 1960s uprisings, Black Violence: Political Impact of the 1960s Riots,1 James Button shows that having experienced one or more riots increased cities’ likelihood of receipt of federal antipoverty or Model Cities funding, as well as the magnitude of funding received (cities that had more than one riot received more funding than similar cities that had had only one), and after the conservative, repressive turn, post-1968 Law Enforcement Assistance Administration funding. That Button took those findings as a basis for treating the riots as strategic political behavior under the rubric of “collective violence” sidestepped the question of political subjectivity. Button was hardly alone among political scientists and sociologists in attempting to simplify an understanding of the eruptions by imputing instrumental rationality to them. Many liberals treated them as symptoms of social problems and as, in effect, collective cris de coeur. Radicals, particularly Black Powerites and New Leftists, openly ventriloquized the uprisings as expressions of a revolutionary fervor that had been pent up among the black “masses,” and conservatives saw them as the product of nihilistic revolutionary and/or black separatist agitators.2What the riots meant themselves is less important for making sense of subsequent political developments than the fact that they occurred in an immediate context in which the limitations of the civil rights movement’s victories were becoming clear to many activists and observers within black American politics. Bayard Rustin’s well-known 1965 Commentary article3 is an eloquent statement of one current of that critique. The other principal current would be articulated in Black Power ideology, which Carmichael and Hamilton’s Black Power4 attempted to define as a political perspective and program. The uprisings figured significantly in Black Powerites’ arguments about ways forward and fed assertions of moral urgency that overwhelmed strategic discussion.Rustin’s argument, shared by A. Philip Randolph and others, was that, having defeated the Jim Crow social order in the South, the struggle to advance the circumstances of black Americans needed to shift to a different register. The movement needed to expand its vision “beyond race relations to economic relations,” and he questioned whether “civil rights movement” remained an accurate description. He argued that the challenges of the new moment could not be met “in the absence of radical programs for full employment, abolition of slums, the reconstruction of our educational system, new definitions of work and leisure. Adding up the cost of such programs, we can only conclude that we are talking about a refashioning of our political economy.”5 He did not see the riots as strategic action but as eruptions of frustration that illustrated the inadequacy of civil rights legislation and the War on Poverty for addressing structural unemployment, racial injustice, and concentrated inequality in inner cities.6 Rustin also took issue with the growing race-nationalist tendency expressed in Black Power and presciently argued that its main effect would be to create “a new black establishment.”7 And he rejected as counterproductive, politically naïve, and historically inaccurate the call for a black ethnic politics on which Carmichael and Hamilton’s vision of Black Power rested.8Black Power’s performative radicalism posited an idealized “masses” as the source of critical political subjectivity and asserted populist racial authenticity as the basis for political legitimacy. Assessment of authenticity juxtaposed abstract, dichotomous principles—nationalism vs. integrationism; militancy vs. at least implicitly collaborationist moderation; openness to revolutionary violence vs. philosophical commitment to nonviolence; racial self-determination vs. interracial coalitional politics.9 A rhetoric of national liberation and domestic colonialism that projected affective association with Third World insurgencies encouraged characterizing riots as popular revolutionary uprisings. Contention that urban uprisings expressed the black masses’ authentic revolutionary aspirations for “black liberation” facilitated deflection of Rustin’s critique that Black Power was a class program.10 That rhetoric obscured the structural class dynamics working within Black Power politics in general, including most consequentially its ethnic pluralist foundation. Within that frame of reference, Rustin’s and Randolph’s insistence that ongoing pursuit of equality for black Americans should center on struggle for a national commitment to real full employment and associated redirections of public policy necessary to realize that goal became reduced to and stigmatized as commitment to interracial coalition politics. From the standpoint of “black liberation” their argument could be dismissed as conservative and racially inauthentic. So, for example, while Carmichael officially endorsed Randolph’s and Rustin’s 1966 “Freedom Budget” and other prominent Black Powerites supported its goals in principle, they rejected the strategy necessary for organizing to advance it.11The waves of unrest also presented a challenge for the framework of growth-driven racial liberalism that had taken shape as an orthodoxy in the postwar years because they exposed the objective limitations, particularly in metropolitan areas experiencing major economic and demographic transition, of politics centered on pursuit of inclusion on groupist terms and equality of opportunity without pursuit of substantial economic redistribution. In 1968 the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders that Lyndon Johnson had appointed the year before—known popularly as the Kerner Commission for its chair, Illinois governor Otto Kerner—issued its report that catalogued more than a score of civil disturbances classifiable as “racial disorders” that occurred in cities between 1963 and 1967.12 The Kerner Commission Report examined the discrete precipitants of the various disturbances and stressed their spontaneity and underlying sources in frustration at persisting inequality, concluding that the outbursts were not the products of strategic political agency. In focusing on the riots’ social, political, and economic sources, the report foreshadowed a subsequent scholarship, centered mainly in urban politics and political economy and urban history, that probes the contradictions of postwar growth liberalism and the differential racial impacts of its key mechanisms—for example, urban renewal and federal housing and transportation policies. Specifically, those policies intensified ghettoization and the critical shortage of affordable decent housing and exacerbated structural unemployment. Constant through nearly all eruptions was the backdrop of rampant police brutality in black and Latino inner cities.The report concluded with more than seventy pages of specific, mainly social-democratic recommendations for national policy action to prevent future disturbances. Those were by and large ignored, even in popular discussion. Instead, the report’s most meaningful and lasting impact on American politics resulted from its generic diagnosis that “white racism” was the ultimate source of the manifold inequalities and disparities the report catalogued and its prognosis that “the nation is rapidly moving toward two increasingly separate Americas . . . a white society principally located in suburbs, in smaller central cities, and in the peripheral parts of large central cities; and a Negro society largely concentrated within large central cities.”13 That assessment has had far-reaching entailments.The diagnosis fit a national political environment in which one of the last major pushes for establishing commitment to full employment as the central goal of national economic and social policy had just been defeated. Key flash points in the early to mid-1960s were debates over poverty and fair employment policies and related disagreement over the nature and implications of structural unemployment. Those debates pitted advocates of a full-employment approach—including Rustin, Randolph, Walter Reuther and others—against culturalists and the Kennedy/Johnson administrations’ “commercial Keynesians” who insisted that stimulation of aggregate demand combined with antidiscrimination efforts and special compensatory measures to address human-capital deficits among the poor and chronically unemployed would suffice.14 By the time President Johnson empaneled the Kerner Commission, the debate had been resolved against the advocates of full employment, and, even though the commission’s report called for social-democratic policy interventions on a large scale, its diagnosis that “white racism” was the ultimate cause of the unrest suggested at the same time that combating racism and its effects could be the necessary remedy.Especially when separated from its specific policy recommendations, the Kerner report’s assessment seemed to dovetail with the race-first sensibility that shaped Black Power in underwriting a baseline discourse of social justice that dissolved inequalities produced through structural economic relations into a moralistic language that identified racism as the fundamental source of objectionable inequality affecting blacks and eventually other nonwhites. Proliferation of Third Worldist ideology within the broader left in the late 1960s inclined in a similar direction. The “institutional racism” construct gained currency as a formulation that accounted for inequalities generated through structural economic dynamics but which appeared as racial disparities by fitting them to a race reductionist perspective.15Ideas seldom gain traction unless they connect in some way with significant material interests in the society. Karen Ferguson has shown how foundation funding nurtured tendencies in Black Power politics that reinforced consolidation of the new black establishment of officials and functionaries that Rustin noted.16 War on Poverty and Great Society interventions had similar effects, as did the combination of changing opportunity structures generated by the civil rights victories and simultaneous metropolitan demographic reorganization, all of which underwrote exponential increases in black and Latino public officialdom and strong incorporation into local and national governing coalitions.17 In 1967 Carl Stokes in Cleveland and Richard Hatcher in Gary became the first blacks elected to the mayoralty of large American cities, and thereafter the ranks of black functionaries and elected officials increased exponentially. Colonial analogy, the rhetoric of national liberation or self-determination, and racial populism in general laid a radical-seeming gloss onto mundane, very much class-skewed dynamics that have most significantly shaped black politics from the late 1960s forward.18The riots did not create those dynamics or set them in motion. As dramatic, but effectively mute events, however, they were readily available as props for conservatives bent on curtailing social spending and expanding punitive policy and as grist for Black Powerites’ projection of: 1) an expressive militancy as more revolutionary and racially authentic than demands for social-democratic redistribution; 2) the contention that racism is the irreducible source of unfavorable social and economic conditions affecting black Americans; 3) a de facto claim that descriptive representation is identical with substantive representation19 ; and 4) the assertion that a politics centered on racial redistribution that is sharply skewed to advance the material interests of black professional-managerial and investor class strata is the cornerstone of legitimate black political aspiration. A half-century later the dynamics at work in and on black politics have consolidated the programmatic and ideological hegemony of the professional-managerial class. That hegemony includes reduction of the scope of black politics to antiracism, as objection to racial disparities, which is an ideal of social justice that is entirely compatible with the neoliberal ideal of a world that is purely market-driven and unfettered by invidious discrimination on the basis of ascriptive difference.I have argued that antiracist politics has nothing in common with left-egalitarianism and is in fact the critical self-consciousness of triumphant neoliberalism. From that perspective, it is appropriate that the Black Power turn has become commonsensically romanticized as the birth of a new radical moment in black politics. That romantic common sense not only has had a corrosive impact on egalitarian politics; it has had deleterious effects on the study of black American political history and political thought. One recent illustration of the latter is that at a recent meeting of my grad seminar on black American political thought, a perceptive student remarked bemusedly, in discussing readings focused on debate among intellectuals and activists in the 1930s and 1940s, that none of the broad range of strategic arguments that we read discussed the need to attack racism. I pointed out that “racism” had not yet been invented as a blanket characterization of inequalities bearing on black Americans and noted that it was the Kerner Commission Report that consolidated that explanation more than two decades later.