A NEW BLACK POLITICS

...His campaign literature exhorted African-Americans to vote for him because of "the color of my skin" and because the Lord wanted him to "make life better for you—my people...

...Black and left activists must revive the traditions and tactics of non-electoral political protest...

...rather, we should change the rules of the game...

...In the absence of principled or decisive action condemning Farrakhan's anti-Semitism and sexist and chauvinist statements, the impression lingers that Jackson tolerates bigotry...

...Since nonvoters are disproportionately nonwhite, poor, unemployed, and/or working-class women, any significant increase in turnout should shift the electoral results leftward...

...White upper-middle-class Americans consistently favor Republicans to reduce taxes on income and capital gains, expand opportunities for capital, and push back demands by minorities, workers, and the poor for redistribution of income...

...Traditionally liberal constituencies divided with blacks over a broad range of issues—Jewish-Americans, for example, over affirmative action, Israeli connections with South Africa, and Jesse Jackson...

...African-Americans have to recognize demographic trends and the new multiethnic realities...

...Part of the problem was the bitterly ironic relationship that developed unexpectedly between Jackson and such newly prominent post-black politicians as Wilder...

...One outstanding model for future work comes from the Center for Applied Public Affairs Studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo...

...Whites will have to be shown in concrete terms that they have a direct stake in the consequences of the urban crisis...

...Over time, a rough division of labor developed between the Republicans and the Democrats...

...Thus a stalemate exists in black politics: Rainbow activism has reached a dead end, while post-black, centrist politicians are beginning to take the decisive initiatives...

...Democratic Party leaders would rather lose a Presidential election, and cooperate with George Bush and Robert Dole in coordinating national policies, than permit the ranks of the poor and powerless, minorities and liberal feminists, to assume authority within their party...

...The votes could be clustered behind one candidate or shared in blocs with coalition partners...

...In recent months, Asian-black tensions have erupted in many urban areas...

...In 1984, Jackson entered the fray without any serious hope of winning the Presidential nomination...

...Black-owned insurance companies would sell policies to blacks...

...A few examples are Washington Mayor Marion Barry, Chicago Congressman Gus Savage, and Atlantic City Mayor James Usry...

...The reality behind the image of Asian-American affluence is that there is economic and social common ground with other people of color, and the foundations for coalitions exist...

...Usry won the endorsement of the Nation of Islam's local representative and the backing of activist Dick Gregory, who asserted that whites had "rigged" voting machines to steal the election...

...Integrationists consequently emphasized the construction of multiclass political coalitions and, after the New Deal, promoted a strategic long-term alliance with the Democratic Party...

...The result would be to give minorities a much greater chance of being represented even in city-wide races, yet the system would not discriminate against white majorities...

...Among the new elements of social inequality are such economic factors as the steady erosion of jobs, falling real incomes, and the swollen ranks of the poor, unemployed, and homeless in the ghetto...

...Any progressive urban policy agenda must emphasize the many economic, educational, and social problems shared by blacks and Hispanics...

...It is in the interests of both parties in our national-unity government to maintain the electoral status quo regardless of the destructive social and economic consequences for millions of Americans...

...Only one major figure in black political history, W.E.B...

...His approach was a search for synthesis...

...Barry himself is on trial for use of crack cocaine...

...The urban and working poor are second-class citizens, denied access to a quality of life which a minority of white, affluent Americans take for granted...

...A new community-based agenda will require detailed social-science research on the particular problems of dozens of cities, particularly the medium-sized ones—those that used to be manufacturing and industrial towns with significant minority populations...

...The changing forms thus require activists to shift ground, from a racial to a truly multi-ethnic focus...

...A quarter of a century later, we must answer King's question with new strategies and programs...

...Post-black political candidates generally favor the death penalty, oppose new taxes, and support corporate interests...

...Where in hell do we go...

...Jackson has known Farrakhan intimately for more than a quarter of a century...

...Both national parties now have a vested interest in maintaining this electoral partnership, which is the principal reason the Democrats have ceased to function as a loyal opposition in anything but name...

...They perceived racial designations of any type as a stigma and hoped for the ultimate elimination of the ghetto...

...Like African-Americans, Asian-Americans have experienced racial discrimination and vigilante violence...

...Then, with the advantages of incumbency, most Democrats are able to win handily...

...By 1988, Jackson had shifted closer to the center, permitting black officials who had campaigned vigorously against him in 1984 to dominate municipal and statewide mobilizations...

...His most recent is a political biography of Malcolm X, to be published in 1991, and he is now at work on a major study of black political thought in the Twentieth Century...

...Well-worn political assumptions no longer are effective or meaningful...

...In multicandidate, citywide elections, in which minority constituencies represent one-third of the total vote or less, it becomes virtually impossible to elect candidates who represent their interests...

...Because Democrats still control most state legislatures, they have managed to gerrymander many Congressional districts to maximize their ability to compete elector-ally...

...But we cannot use old theoretical tools to build a new movement...

...Today, one in four Americans is nonwhite...

...Personally repelled by the crude anti-Semitism and authoritarian elements of the Nation of Islam's ideology, Jackson still believes he cannot denounce them for fear of turning this militant movement against him...

...But Hispanics, not African-Americans, will make up the dominant group...

...His campaigns opened the political space for local African-American officials to seek statewide and mayoral positions, although their challenges were ideologically to Jackson's right...

...Black politics must go beyond the notion of a Rainbow Coalition—essentially an electoral mobilization with sporadic and uneven connections between multiracial and multiclass constituencies—to a more advanced level of organization based on the struggles to improve the quality of urban life and labor and build a truly democratic, pluralistic society for the majority of Americans...

...The black nationalists' most important difference with the integrationists was over economics...

...Jackson's candidacy forced the Democratic Party to liberalize its posture toward women—witness the Vice Presidential nomination of Geraldine Ferraro in 1984—and toward blacks—witness the 1989 selection of Ronald Brown as head of the Democratic National Committee...

...As the majority of America's white electorate shifted from the cities to the suburbs, becoming better educated and reflecting entrepreneurial values, the social base for New Deal liberalism declined...

...This is no longer true...

...The well-publicized economic boycott by black activists of Korean merchants in Brooklyn's Flatbush neighborhood is projected superficially as a manifestation of "black racism...

...Asian professionals complain about the "glass ceiling" inside corporations and academic institutions, limiting their upward mobility...

...The crudest example of urban underdevelopment may be the Government's attitude toward public education and child development...

...DIANA CRAFT ity...

...In Milwaukee last February, alderman Michael McGee threatened to create an armed militia of street-gang members, trained for urban race war, unless the city government funneled $100 million for job programs into the ghetto...

...Farrakhan has developed an extremely loyal cadre which expounds a conservative version of racial separatism and entrepreneurialism...

...tried to challenge his followers to move beyond their traditional civil-rights agenda...

...The failure here is not simply tactical but strategic...

...Long known as the least effective member of the Congressional Black Caucus, Savage used anti-Semitic smears against a black challenger in the recent primary, deriding his opponent for accepting campaign contributions from Jews...

...For the first time in recent history, a majority of young black women and men have never had or expect to have meaningful, rewarding employment any time in their lives...

...Even Jesse Jackson's unprecedented electoral mobilizations of 1984 and 1988 seem slightly anachronistic when compared to the elections of Douglas Wilder as governor of Virginia and David Dinkins as mayor of New York City...

...In the aftermath of his great civil-rights achievements, and in the midst of his opposition to the Vietnam war, Martin Luther King Jr...

...In the past decade, many of Barry's chief advisers have been indicted, convicted, imprisoned, or forced to resign because of various improprieties...

...It was Jackson, not David Dinkins, who proved that a black candidate for high office could win a plurality of votes against more conservative white candidates in New York City...

...And we must discard the theory that the Democratic Party can be "humanized," or "reformed from within," or transformed into a labor party...

...Jackson's political perspective is still frozen in the lessons of the civil-rights era...

...Most middle- and upper-class whites employed in the financial and commercial districts of major cities flee to the suburbs after dark, seeking the safety of elaborate burglar-alarm systems and private security guards...

...Even with the increase in the minimum wage legislated earlier this year, the inflation-adjusted buying power for those earning minimum wage has declined by one-fourth since 1981...

...Wilder's success in Virginia was based on a Rainbow-style approach, controlling nearly all black votes plus about one-third of the state's white electorate...

...Yet another byproduct of urban decay and disruption is fear...

...Finally, we must rethink the concept of blackness itself, as a political category and as it relates to the construction of coalitions...

...Andrew Young's gubernatorial campaign in Georgia, in which he has endorsed the death penalty, faithfully follows Wilder's model, not Jackson's...

...And middle-income Asians frequently confront the same problems faced by middle-class blacks...

...The first and most important measure we must take to restructure and resurrect a viable black protest movement is to forge a new synthesis of an old feud...

...Its finest triumph, the dismantling of the system of legal segregation and the selective integration of minorities into the political mainstream of American society, has proved to be its last hurrah on the national stage...

...But it won't work...

...In the absence of significant change, the deterioration of black communities and family life will continue...

...Thomas Sowell, Charles Murray, Glen Loury simplistically attribute them, ad nauseam, to the welfare system, the black family, sexual promiscuity, and/or the lack of a work ethic among blacks...

...for Hispanics and blacks, the rates were 26.8 per cent and 31.6, respectively...

...Confronting the integrationists were their ideological rivals, the black nationalists, who bitterly rejected integration as a political and cultural hoax designed to deepen the levels of exploitation and economic oppression...

...In the Caribbean, radical scholar-activist Walter Rodney used the term "black power" to connote a strategic alliance among people who were racially and ethnically designated as black, East Indian, and Chinese to struggle against neo-colonial rule...

...The bill calls for automatic updating of voting rolls with information provided by drivers' license and renewal applications and reports of address changes given to motor-vehicle departments...

...they must develop new institutions of creative resistance...

...Instead of worrying about whether Jackson will contest the Democratic Party's Presidential nomination in 1992, progressives should refocus electoral efforts on other priorities...

...This would force the Democrats into a truly antagonistic relationship with the Republican Party and with virtually all elites in corporate America...

...Advances in progressive urban planning and policy must be based on empirical research, not rhetoric...

...many black elected officials are rooted in the bankruptcy of black political ideas and electoral organization...

...Nor do the basic conflicts occur primarily in the workplace, although struggles against job discrimination remain important...

...The ideological transformation of the party system is largely responsible for the small but growing cohort of "post-black politicians"—elected officials, recruited largely from the professional classes, who are racially and ethnically "black" but who favor programs with little kinship to the traditional agendas of the civil-rights movement...

...Even Jackson's notable overtures to the Latino community didn't go far beyond the expression of political platitudes, without subsequent programmatic cooperation among these urban ethnic constituencies after the Democratic primaries ended...

...Thousands of African-American young people who are seeking work are unable to find it at an income level that could support a family...

...Directed by Henry Louis Taylor Jr., its recent comprehensive study of the changing socioeconomic status of Buffalo's African-American community provides the foundation for a series of innovative economic, social, and educational proposals for progressive activity...

...These social problems are invoked by conservative intellectuals and politicians to undermine blacks' traditional demands for equality...

...This system is not only easily usurped by corporate interests, but also, by its nature, manipulates public preferences in time-worn outcomes...

...Cooperation between Hispanic and black caucuses in most state legislatures and city councils is, at best, inconsistent...

...A similar situation will exist across the United States within forty years: the existence of a retired leisure class over age sixty-five which will be largely white, subsidized by the growing wage deductions paid by an increasingly nonwhite labor force...

...More resources should be devoted to increasing the size of the electorate...

...The National Voter Registration Act, passed last February by the House of Representatives, should be a major legislative priority for civil-rights groups...

...The percentage of all after-tax income earned by the richest one-tenth of all American families increased from 29.5 per cent in 1980 to almost 35 per cent today...

...Black and Hispanic working-class families living next door to crack houses aren't as fortunate...

...His public antics have reversed and set back the progressive campaign for District of Columbia statehood for the next twenty years...

...The insight that segregation could provide the basis for the growth of a black entrepreneurial elite was the heart of Booker T. Washington's strategy of early Twentieth Century black capitalism and Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association...

...The re-election rate in the House of Representatives was 98 per cent in 1986 and 1988...

...The Democrats are now perceived as the party of "parochial interests," the politicians who are best at defending the local interests of various constituencies...

...A rapidly emerging educational underclass is unable to compete successfully for the new jobs requiring computer-related skills...

...Neither the traditional civil-rights groups nor the Congressional Black Caucus has continuing dialogues with parallel groups among Puerto Ricans or Mexican-Americans...

...But, as ethnic studies scholar Ronald Takaki observes, the "harmful myth of Asian superiority" is used to divide people of color with common interests...

...Challenged by city councilman Jim Whelan, a white Democrat with significant support among blacks, Usry resorted to crude racial slogans to polarize Atlantic City's electorate...

...In effect, we have been experiencing a coalition government of "national unity," a marriage operating more from consensus than from competition...

...These new forms of domination are not exclusively applied to blacks—they are used to hold down other minorities as well...

...The new, mutant version of inequality began to employ a race-neutral discourse while maintaining the objective of minority domination...

...People in Jackson's inner circle state candidly that he is intensely afraid of alienating Farrakhan personally or his black-nationalist constituency...

...Many Democrats recognize that they could probably win the Presidency by the route advocated by Jesse Jackson—expanding the electoral base to include millions of nonvoting blacks, Hispanics, poor, and working-class voters, and advancing an American version of leftist social democracy, attacking the power of corporations...

...The best research in this area is being done by Lani Guinier of the University of Pennsylvania Law School...

...Race was transformed into more complex structures of domination, and the influence or leverage on public policy of such integrationists as the NAACP was greatly reduced...

...Understanding the collapse of the old liberal coalition of minorities, organized labor, and the Democratic Party is critically important to understanding the new political environment—the period since the demise of "black power...

...Learning how to organize street demonstrations, selective buying campaigns, and civil disobedience, reading about the personalities and history of American protest—such activities would help revive the radical consciousness of this generation...

...Investments in economic development, public transportation, public housing, and health care which benefit people of color are absolutely necessary for the productivity of society as a whole...

...black-owned farms would provide fresh produce to black-owned inner-city grocery stores for black consumers...

...the nationalists used race as a technique for building group solidarity...

...Yet another likely post-black candidate is Philadelphia Congressman William Gray...

...Liberalism and appeals to moral suasion are no longer effective...

...The basic question for the early Twenty-first Century must be: What constitutes an economically productive, socially pluralistic, and democratic urban community...

...They perceived themselves first as Americans and only secondarily as members of a discriminated-against racial minority...

...In The Burden of Support, sociologist David Hayes-Bautista notes that more than one-half of all children in California will be Hispanic by the year 2030, but whites will total about 60 per cent of the elderly...

...Racial integrationists, beginning with Frederick Douglass and culminating with King, have consistently advocated the elimination of all restrictions that kept blacks from participating fully in the mainstream of society...

...Jackson's frenetic, larger-than-life personality and his chaotic organizational style, consisting largely of a coterie of loyalists who rarely disagree with the boss, work against genuinely democratic decision-making...

...It would also require the organizational restructuring of the party, an idea that party bureaucrats everywhere find abominable...

...A typical white male's statistical chance of becoming a murder victim is one in 186...

...To raise the question, and to answer it affirmatively, by no means denigrates the organization's outstanding contributions to the freedom struggle...

...Second, we must discard the idea that electoral activity is the only form of politics, or even that it is the most important arena for political conflict...

...Now, however, we must refocus...

...Chicago was the political base for both men...

...Her soon-to-be-published manuscript, "Black Electoral Success Theory and the Triumph of Tokenism," provides a blueprint for innovative challenges to the concept of democratic representation...

...Yet for months, he held the city hostage to his own blind ambition, rallying his supporters by emotional appeals to racial unity...

...Despite the perception among some blacks that the majority of Hispanics are middle class or relatively privileged, statistics show a different realLiberalism and appeals to moral suasion are no longer effective...

...But the grand realignment of the Democratic Party is a grand illusion...

...We must rethink our current organizational forms and our approach to building coalitions...

...The AFL-CIO's influence on national Democratic Party politics fell sharply...

...Struggles over housing, health care, day care, schools, jobs, and public transportation all revolve around this question of the future of the postindustrial city...

...Until the middle of the Twentieth Century, "race relations" in America meant black-white relations...

...Jackson's continuing flirtation with Presidential politics, and his refusal to run against Marion Barry in the District of Columbia's mayoral race, is attributable, at least in part, to his legitimate fear that Wilder or Gray is being groomed to eclipse him on the national stage...

...The black middle-class leaders' inability to address this issue indicates the limitations of their theoretical and programmatic perspective...

...There were important differences of opinion within the ranks, but they all could agree that a color-blind society was their immediate goal...

...Jackson fears a split with the nationalists that would repeat the hostilities that separated Martin Luther King from Malcolm X a generation ago...

...The "affluent, hardworking" Korean shopkeepers, according to Takaki, have household incomes of between $17,000 and $35,000 annually, hardly ranking them with the idle rich...

...Three decades from now, the nonwhite population will have doubled, to 115 million, while the white population will remain the same...

...Perhaps the term "people of color" could be the basis of a new strategic unity of Chicanos, Puerto Ricans, African-Americans, West Indians, Native Americans, Asian/Pacific-Americans, the unemployed and poor of any race who experience second-class citizenship because of corporate greed and a nonresponsive Government...

...Civil-rights attorneys in several states have pushed for changes in local elections that give each voter several votes in each multicandidate race...

...Both reform-minded integrationists and separatist-oriented nationalists presume a form of race-based politics that does not recognize the subtle ways in which political, economic, and social institutions are assuming a nonracialist form, but nevertheless perpetuate the prerogatives of domination...

...King asked...

...But Du Bois's approach was never accepted or fully understood...

...This generates a tremendous amount of bitterness and frustration among young people...

...African-Americans make few gestures to learn Spanish or to appreciate the unique perspectives and problems articulated by progressive Latino groups...

...Many Asians are working-class or poor...

...Has the NAACP, created during the nadir of Jim Crow segregation, outlived its political utility...

...The black movement's disarray and apparent fragmentation stem from the convergence of three great crises which it has failed to address comprehensively—the crisis of ideology, the crisis of politics, and the crisis of consciousness or historical imagination...

...The development of constructive relations between African-Americans and Hispanics, Native Americans, Asian/Pacific-Americans, and other ethnic minorities is foremost...

...he sensed correctly that a dialectical approach for black activism must include two components: the nationalists' reaffirmation of black identity, culture, and values, and the integrationists' demand for full rights within a democratic political system...

...Both essentially followed a race-based strategy for societal change...

...A better idea would be to restructure voting procedures to permit minority interests to be expressed democratically...

...Black legal scholar Kimberle Crenshaw accurately characterizes the political environment since the demise of Black Power as the "post-reform period...

...The greatest manifestations of oppression now occur in what can be termed the living place, or the urban, postindustrial community...

...Fear paralyzes a segment of the black middle class living in the suburbs, which wants to engage in socially constructive projects inside the ghetto but also wants to avoid crime...

...In 1984, especially in the early days of the primary season, Jackson relied heavily on the Nation of Islam for security...

...It soon became difficult for civil-rights veterans to distinguish allies from antagonists, since nearly all adhered to the language of equality...

...Open, multiracial academies, held during late afternoons and on weekends for secondary-school and college students, could offer a public protest curriculum...

...Changing the rules requires innovations in the electoral process itself...

...They were suspicious of alliances with whites and preferred the development of political linkages to nationalists in Africa and the Caribbean...

...Conversely, another group of black politicians has also emerged lately, largely based in the ghetto...

...In the United Kingdom in the 1970s, the antiracist mobilization of Asians, Africans, West Indians, and even radical whites was fought under the rubric of "black power...

...One-fourth of New York's Chinatown population in 1980 was below the poverty level...

...They opportunistically manipulate racial symbols and language to enlist constituencies among the poorest blacks...

...The leftist version of the Democratic Party's realignment finds its origins in both Stalinism and unorthodox Trotskyism...

...But after two notable Presidential campaigns, the idealism that inspired thousands of progressives has disintegrated...

...Conversely, the Business-Higher Education Forum reported in June that the median wealth of black households is only 9 per cent of that of white households...

...Complicating matters is Jackson's tense and ambiguous relationship with Louis Farrakhan...

...The organizational structures of black protest movements from abolitionism to the present have been based on two fundamental racial ideologies that guided nearly all strategies and tactics: integration and black nationalism...

...Culturally, they wanted to believe in the myth of the melting pot...

...Once elected, Wilder lost little time endorsing centrist policy positions and repudiating liberal activism...

...Their primary strategic weapons were legal challenges in the courts and activism in the political system to elect politicians favorable to liberal goals...

...A second element of the new political economy of domination is the set of intractable social problems proliferating inside urban black neighborhoods: high infant mortality rates and declining health standards, the growing numbers of juvenile pregnancies and female single-parent households, the increase in crime, street-gang activity, and use of hard drugs...

...Their election can be viewed as a psychological triumph for African-Americans, but they represent no qualitative resolution to the crises of black poverty, educational inequality, crime, and unemployment...

...These charlatans rely on the old nationalist rhetoric of racial solidarity, but lack any progressive content because they are detached from any social protest movement for empowerment or resistance...

...I am not suggesting a hasty updating of Saul Alinsky's community-organizing strategy...

...Integrationists sensed that the rules of the game had changed but did little to modify their tactics...

...But his political program was substantially more conservative than Jackson's...

...The current socioeconomic crisis experienced by millions of Hispanics, African-Americans, and working-class whites in our cities no longer takes shape in the context of old-style Jim Crow segregation...

...Fear means that elderly black people and young single mothers with children are reluctant to leave their homes at night to attend civic meetings...

...They are presented to working-class and poor blacks as their symbolic victories, direct proof that racism has declined in significance...

...In 1988, the Census Bureau reported a poverty rate for whites of 10.1 per cent...

...Du Bois, tried to bridge the chasm of racial ideologies...

...None of his lieutenants, not even Manning Marable, professor of political science and sociology at the University of Colorado, Boulder, is the author of many books...

...Where do we go from here...

...Jackson's Rainbow had been responsible for elevating black politics to the national arena, illustrating that a black candidate could compete successfully, winning Presidential caucuses and primary elections in states without sizable minority groups...

...We should not play cards with a stacked deck...

...The integrationists used race as a means of organizing liberal constituencies toward the goal of abolishing race...

...Two results are predictable: Either the turnout rate of blacks gradually declines in national elections, which has occurred for the past fifteen years, or candidates emerge who are more conservative and thus politically palatable to the white upper middle class and corporate interests...

...According to the Economic Policy Institute, the share of the nation's wealth owned by the highest one-tenth of all households increased from 67.5 per cent in 1979 to 73.1 per cent in 1988...

...His basic instincts are to pressure the Democratic Party to the left, not to map a strategy for effective counter-hegemonic power...

...it is driven by the systematic exploitation of black people in the economic system, and through their political and social domination within society...

...Jesse Jackson, was willing to go where he was prepared to take the movement...

...Despite their differences, a subterranean unity existed between both ideological paradigms...

...The nationalists were unper-suaded that desegregation of the business establishment and trade-union movement would actually translate into black economic empowerment...

...Jackson's political perspective is frozen...

...The Republicans projected themselves as the party of "national management," capable of running the Executive Branch and making decisions in foreign policy...

...But the Rainbow Coalition failed to develop a coherent national apparatus, with a national newspaper, regional political organizers, and trained cadre on campuses and in communities...

...These three great crises have not been addressed by black politicians, civil-rights officials, and other leaders of black society because this elite is a prisoner of its own historical successes...

...Most poor and working-class blacks sense this, which explains the recent popularity of those who advocate extreme, militant solutions...

...Instead, they favored the use of legal segregation as a catalyst for the mobilization of land, labor, and capital...

...McGee was widely denounced as "irresponsible" by more moderate blacks...

...The social crisis of the inner city is far more likely caused by the deindustriali-zation of urban areas, the flight of capital to the suburbs and overseas, and the absence of a comprehensive Federal policy for families and neighborhood development which could include expansion of public transportation systems, free child care, well-staffed public health clinics, adequate and affordable housing, and job-training programs...

...Particularly shameful was the rhetoric of Usry, the Republican incumbent who had been endorsed by New Jersey Governor Thomas H. Kean in 1986...

...Both political parties ignore their demands, and their material conditions continue to deteriorate...

...Today, it is the central economic plank of the nationalist platform of Louis Farrakhan...

...Instead of emphasizing electoral politics above all other activities or pursuing purely separatist objectives, we must turn to the practical problems experienced by the majority of African-American people in the central cities...

...The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 marked not the end of institutional racism but its transformation...

...There is an awareness that the system of institutional racism has changed in the past two decades, but civil-rights leaders have failed to alter their general strategy or tactics...

...The traditional plurality system in American elections gives the victory to the candidate with the most votes...

...This refocus on practical problems is, once again, the first and foremost measure we must take...

...The opportunism and poverty of so Rainbow activism has reached a dead end...

...Blacks have long been the chief victims of violent crime...

...The only viable alternative generated within black politics since the end of the civil-rights movement has been Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition...

...Local activists drawn into the Jackson campaigns weren't encouraged to develop autonomous coalitions independent of the national electoral effort...

...The recent electoral behavior of the white middle and upper classes is largely dictated by perceptions of narrow, material self-interest...

...His campaign was essentially a social-protest movement that used the Democratic primaries to increase black voter turnout and reinforce the liberal-left wing of the Democratic Party...

...It's easy to envision a political revolt against Social Security and other Federal programs for the elderly, by racial and ethnic minorities...

...The strategy was echoed by the late Michael Harrington, Bayard Rustin, and many leftists who worked hard for Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988...

...We must recognize that black oppression is not biologically or genetically derived...

...Both sides, for different reasons, minimized the growing class divisions among blacks...

...We must refocus our tactical approach toward the majority of white Americans as well...

...One prominent example is Virginia Governor Douglas Wilder, who is already being touted as a possible candidate for Vice President in 1992 or 1996...

...a black man's odds are one in twenty-nine...

...The relative political and social weight of both national parties declined, as candidates became more independent of partisan affiliations...

...They advocated black community-controlled schools and viewed busing for school integration as a liberal racist plot to fragment their neighborhoods...

...Yet even the head of the local NAACP chapter, Felmer Cheney, admitted, "McGee is probably as frustrated as everybody else...

...Freedom schools, for example...

...Black women are nearly twice as likely to be rape victims than are white women...

...As the white electorate became more conservative and elitist, candidates for public office increasingly reflected these trends...

...Leftists who were members of the national leadership of the Rainbow recognized these problems but were reluctant to voice even mild criticisms of Jackson, who offered them a path out of their own sectarian political ghetto...

...Black-Hispanic political relations in many cities have become more fractious than fraternal...

...The tragic 1982 case of Chinese-American Vincent Chin, who was killed by Detroit auto workers who thought he was Japanese, is only one example of a disturbing trend...

...The habits and reflexes of five consecutive generations socialized by traditional segregation were too deeply ingrained to be questioned...