Last Sunday, at a Left Forum panel discussion on Black American Politics, "A guiding theme," according to John McWhorter, "was that black America must 'get behind' a certain 'black agenda' at its peril (the panel agreed at the closing that the alternative was fascism)."
McWhorter reports that the panelists dismissed Barack Obama, "albeit very politely, as not a 'genuine' black politician because he was--and perhaps will again be--elected mostly by whites, and thus will not be answerable to a black agenda."
The panel consisted of: Amiri Baraka; Manning Marable Curtis Muhammed; Cornell West; and Joseph Wilson.
According to McWhorter, "the idea . . . [of] a unitary black agenda . . . is rarely spelled out." To the extent it is, however, McWhorter maintains that:
it neglects the very policies that have improved black lives over the past ten years without transformations as seismic as the revolution leftists often assume black America needs. The reform of welfare in 1996 came up not once yesterday, even though black child poverty dipped significantly as soon as it was enacted (it had sagged some in 1993, but after 1996 there was a sharp downturn). In Florida and Ohio, public schools threatened with depopulation by voucher programs have improved. The panel deplored the elimination of racial preference policies at universities. But what about the University of California, San Diego, where the year before preferences were banned there was exactly one freshman honors student, but by 1999, when black students who would have been admitted to Berkeley or UCLA were now admitted to UCSD or UC Santa Cruz, one in five black freshmen made honors?
As for Obama, McWhorter writes:
Obama is hardly numb to black concerns. He did serious activist work in Chicago. He has mentioned the problem that too many black teens think studying is "acting white," hardly a racist canard, now confirmed by academic studies. In the Senate he has been behind the Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act, which would assist low-income fathers with job placement and getting tax credits. That bill, while not explicitly race-targeted, was not written with white men in mind.
On acting white, Obama told the 2004 Democratic Party convention:
Go into any inner-city neighborhood, and folks will tell you that government alone can’t teach kids to learn. They know that parents have to parent, that children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.
Following one comment to McWhorter's piece, had Martin Luther King, Jr., been elected president, he could not have been considered a "genuine" black politician because he would have been elected mostly by whites.
Meanwhile, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of Politics and African American Studies at Princeton University, argues:
It is time for black political leadership to throw their full support behind Barack Obama. No more public questioning of his racial identity. No more accusations that he is disingenuous. No more demanding perfection of him when we watched you stand with O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, and R. Kelley. No more petty jealousies when we are faced with social, international and ecological crises that threaten our survival. Time to mobilize, inspire and act on Barack's behalf.
Harris-Lacewell offers three reasons:
- Obama got it right in Selma
- An Obama surge among black voters is good for democracy and the Democratic Party.
- If you don't fall in line, you will find yourself leading no one at all.
She concludes:
We know he is not perfect, but leaders never are. We know that we will have to hold his feet to the fire of accountability, but that is what the very heart of democracy is and we are up to the challenge. We are going to support Barack and it is time for you to fall in line.
In it's way, I think her last point responds to Kos's concern about Obama's embrace of Lieberman.
Who is correct? McWhorter or the Left Forum panel? Is there, can there be, today a unitary black agenda? If so, what are its contents? And, to what extent does it matter whether Obama, or any other realistic black candidate, is answerable to a black agenda?
Original tags: John McWhorter, Melissa Harris-Lacewell, Left Forum, Black Agenda, Barack Obama