Paradoxes of Black American Leadership

...These two facts together make for a kind of double jeopardy for black pragmatic activists...

...Yet, though infuriated and embittered by these partners, pragmaticactivist black leaders (the NAACP, the National Urban League, the National Negro Congress [a Marxist-oriented organization], and much of the black church leadership) did nothing to fracture the political basis of the New Deal...

...After that was the Hispanic vote, 70 percent Democratic...

...The 20,000 Farrakhan followers have to be set against the 840,000 African-Americans who now practice standard or orthodox Islam...

...The Afrocentrist appeal is counterproductive in the context of a democratic politics...

...q 372 • DISSENT...

...This last group has exhibited what we might call a three-sided schizophrenia toward the democratic capitalist system...

...The pattern of black-Jewish voting in regard to the candidacy of Carl McCall for comptroller of New York provides a first indication...

...No contemporary representatives of this type, however stellar in their fields and professions, could draw twenty thousand everyday-black-folks out of "the 'hood" as Farrakhan can...

...Lthis business of reining in ethnocentric extremists, the African-American intelligentsia has a much better record than, say, the Irish-American intelligentsia, though the latter group has never been subjected to the same kind of broad brush criticism...

...The poll was conducted for Time by the Yankelovich Survey in February 1994, and it shows that along what might be called a political-cathartic trajectory, the xenophobic Afrocentrists exert a strong influence among black Americans, but along a political-substantive trajectory, their influence is more limited...

...And of the thousands who listen to Farrakhan or someone like him in a big city sports stadium, barely a hundred will sign on as members of the Nation of Islam as they exit...

...Boundaries are sharply drawn in this leadership contest...

...With Ben Chavis's self-destruction as executive secretary of the NAACP, the immediate issue is now moot...

...Not Toni Morrison, Marian Wright Edelman, Gwendolyn Brooks, Alice Walker, David L. Lewis, John Lewis, Ishmael Reed, Julian Bond, Cornel West, not even Jesse Jackson...

...The point requires emphasis, and then some specification...

...Why not...

...Such alliances are, after all, commonplace in a SUMMER • 1995 • 371 Black Leadership pluralistic and highly competitive democratic polity like ours, and the mainstream black leaders are not innocents in this matter...

...Terms such as black nationalists, black militants, Garveyites, Black Muslims, and Afrocentrists refer to this third category...

...But this challenge, although quite real, is not a function of the institutional success of Afrocentrism—not of the direct heirs of Malcolm, like Farrakhan's organization, or of the indirect heirs like the groups around, say, Ron Karenga and Molefi Asante...

...No combination of pragmatic activists is capable of competing today with the xenophobic Afrocentrists in gaining the attentive ears of ordinary black Americans...

...Blacks and Jews The antecedents of this discord go back at least to the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school district election in New York City 1968, but for my purposes here the viciously anti-Semitic speech by Khalid Muhammad at Kean College in New Jersey in November 1993 is a suitable starting point...

...But the triumph of a militant conservatism focused on policy issues like welfare and affirmative action has weakened this ability, and the high visibility ofAfrocentrism compounds the difficulty of maintaining or expanding the necessary ties...

...Why is this so...

...And if Michael Lind's New York Review article on the worldview of Pat Robertson is taken as seriously as it should be, then we have to add, subliminal anti-Jewish messages too...

...In general, cross-cutting ties involve minimal reciprocity for the sake of some larger interest that none of the groups alone can achieve...

...But London cynically sought to exploit black-Jewish discord, a tactic that backfired, especially among Jews...

...Exactly why the pattern has taken this shape, I don't quite know, and I prefer to leave this question to the philosophical, culture-probing analysis of writers like Cornel West and Anthony Appiah...

...But the deeper question of oddbedfellow alliances within a democratic polity remains relevant for discussion and evaluation...

...But, second, they are indifferent or hostile to democratic politics...

...If we take the official membership of the most promi368 • DISSENT Black Leadership nent ethno-radical organizatipn, the Nation of Islam, as a gauge, then some twenty thousand blacks have been hived off from the American cultural matrix—out of thirty million in the country as a whole...

...It is reasonable to conclude, then, that this leadership style has achieved a rather low penetration of African-American ranks...

...Figures like Leon Sullivan, Jesse Jackson, Andrew Young, John Conyers, John Lewis, Leon Higginbotham, William Coleman, Julian Bond, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Marian Wright Edelman, and Cornel West, to name just a few, exerted steady pressure—intellectual, moral, organizational— against terrorist discourse among black Americans...

...Although the white media have virtually never recognized it, this vigilance has prevented or, at least, helped to prevent the export from the African-American community of demented extremists to crisis-ridden areas in Africa...

...One could just as easily add to the Irish-Americans, the Greeks, Armenians, Serbs, and Croats, among others...

...People in both of them, of course, accept the largerAmerican culture, which marks them off from the ethno-radicals...

...Pragmatic activists, whether they are politicians or intellectuals, have seldom sparked a comparable popular response among African-Americans (Martin Luther King is the sole exception...

...They insist that America must purge itself of white supremacy and of the social institutions and cultural identities in which it is reflected...

...During the dangerous and protracted period of intense black/white conflict in the Republic of South Africa, for example, not one Afrocentricinspired American crossed the Atlantic to advocate or practice terrorism in South Africa...

...Ethno-Radical Politics Operationally, black ethno-radicalism has been mainly ritualistic (emotive and cathartic) rather than rationalist (means-and-end focused, accountable, committed to modernity...

...It is still a question, however, what this success in catharsis and entertainment means in institutional and programmatic terms...

...a role model for black youth, 53 percent yes...

...To the question of who is the most important black leader today, respondents gave Jesse Jackson 34 percent to Farrakhan's 9 percent and Colin Powell's 4 percent...

...And, one must be candid about this, inasmuch as black Americans have been massively traumatized by this country's white supremacist structures and values, there inevitably has been and will be a demand for the catharsis, the flamboyance, and the good feeling...

...I want simply to describe the unanticipated outcomes and the internal contradictions of this leadership pattern...

...It is, then, important to take some steps, even small steps, toward a reduction of black-Jewish tensions...

...Their ideological inspiration has been largely Marxist, and in the 1930s and 1940s, they came together mostly in the American Communist party (CP): thus James W. Ford (a CP presidential candidate), Benjamin Davis, Paul Robeson, Richard Wright, even Ralph Ellison...

...Where have all the masses-trumpeting black nationalists gone...

...Quite the contrary...

...And except in the KennedyJohnson era, they have never had anything like significant help from American power structures for either of these tasks...

...Understandably, prominent Jewish intellectuals published major articles attacking Muhammad's speech...

...These patterns suggest that it is indeed possible for blacks and Jews to put the past twenty-five years of contention behind them...

...For one thing, the charge that the AfricanAmerican intelligentsia has been soft on black antiSemitism is just factually wrong...

...Because the reciprocal goals that sealed the alliance were, however minimal the returns for AfricanAmericans, beneficial enough to justify the ties to Klan supporters...

...What is its empirical track record...

...It has been the special burden of the pragmatic-activist leaders that they took on mainly the rationalist, problemsolving tasks of the black community, while also, always, having to show sensitivity to the ritual tasks as well...

...No one close to this intelligentsia can be unaware of its vigilance against extremism...

...So the success of the ethno-radicals cannot be a surprise to any honest and serious observer of American realities...

...For example, FDR's New Deal policy advances, which benefited broad sections of the American working class and poor, the middle class too, were the work of some very odd bedfellows...

...The first of these refers to what we commonly think of as the mainstream pattern, pioneered by W.E.B...

...But there is one crucial refusal...

...And without a strong biracial alliance, mainstream black leaders cannot fashion effective legislative programs or private sector initiatives that respond to the deep crises of joblessness and social disorganization among the one-third of African-American households that are submerged in poverty...

...Many thousands of everySUMMER • 1995 • 369 Black Leadership day-black-folks in urban areas (some suburbs too) turn out to hear the mean and twisted utterances of these men, crowding sports stadiums in Baltimore with twenty thousand people or in New York with twelve thousand...

...How deep is the penetration now...

...Some signs of movement down this path were apparent in the 1994 elections...

...The appeal of Afrocentrism is a matter of real concern to the mainstream, pragmatic-activist leadership, which is itself at a critical stage of its development within American politics...

...supporters" is too strong when we try to measure the seriousness or tenacity of the Afrocentrist appeal...

...Until 1994, few Irish-Americans were vigilantly or boldly engaged in criticizing and checking the many ties between IRA extremists and theirAmerican supporters...

...I want to argue that, while such alliances are potentially counterproductive to long-run democratic purposes, every instance of cross-cutting ties isn't necessarily counterproductive...

...Progressive, liberal, and moderate whites, even what might be called proactively conservative whites (conservatives, that is, who wish to solve, not ignore, the multilayered crisis confronting the African-American poor), must carry a special responsibility in this regard...

...and this most recent example should not jeopardize the quest for black-Jewish concord...

...Du Bois, too, formally joined the Communist party during his last years, which suggests that there is some movement between the first and second categories...

...Afrocentric elementary and middle schools in Baltimore, Detroit, Chicago, and Philadelphia draw their students from these same classes, and don't reach beyond them...

...The New Deal coalition included Ku Klux Klan-supported white politicians from the South...

...No doubt, the intrinsic illegitimacy of Farrakhan-type Afrocentrists in the eyes of Jewish leaders is valid, and black leaders are obligated to address sensitively this Jewish concern...

...On one side are the pragmatic activists, who are made up of the heads of the civil rights organizations and their followers among the black intelligentsia (clergy, professionals, and so on), the eight thousand elected black politicians, and the many thousands more black administrators and bureaucrats at all levels of the American polity...

...do not win many votes...

...The normal, racist-tinged resistance among white Americans is now provided with a rationale: one racist thrust begets another...

...they are concerned mainly with fashioning cultural theories and a new, assertive, problack historiography...

...How far...

...Their political discourse is riddled with subliminal anti-black or Negrophobic messages— also with antifeminist, anti-Hispanic, and homophobic messages...

...Data from an earlier period, when Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X rather than Louis Farrakhan were the leading ethno-radicals, suggest a following of about two hundred thousand...

...But, beyond that, they also attacked what they viewed as an overall softness toward antiSemitism among the mainstream black leadership...

...The systemic radicals, insofar as they still have a presence in the black political world, are allied with this first group...

...whether he is good for the black community, 63 percent yes...

...Members of this class accept the basic parameters of the democratic capitalist system, accept also the broader cultural matrix within which this system is embedded...

...The Reach of Malcolm X Malcolm X produced the first systematic challenge to the pragmatic-activist style of black leadership...

...Sill, the long-run legitimacy of the mainstream leaders depends, as I have said, upon the expansion of their alliances outside the black community...

...There is, then, a discrepant pattern here, with Afrocentrism showing more emotional than substantive political strength...

...It was also a mistake to pick a fight with mainstream black leaders because of their bid for ties between themselves and the Afrocentrists—ties aimed at a specific task of coping with the runaway drug crisis and criminal crisis in inner-city black communities...

...In today's climate of expanding militant and plutocratic conservativism, Republican party politicians, and the interest groups they represent, cannot be expected to facilitate this alliance expansion...

...I begin with a straightforward proposition that there have been three types of black political leadership in twentieth century America: (1) pragmaticactivist, (2) systemic-radical, and (3) ethno-radical...

...The second category refers to a minority but quite persistent strand of black leadership whose representatives reject the basic parameters of American capitalism...

...The dangerous and intellectually shameful coddling of ethnocentric extremists by mainstream leaders, for which some Jewish intellectuals have criticized the black community, is far more prominent among white ethnic groups...

...But there is something more too: Afrocentrism contains a massive entertainment component, sheer flamboyance, designed to make black people feel good...

...A recent poll of black attitudes provides data for an empirical analysis of the relationship between everyday-black-folks and theAfrocentrists...

...It is within this kind of democratic give-and-take that, I suggest, the ties between mainstream black leaders and Afrocentrists should be evaluated today...

...Evaluating Afrocentrism Given this dilemma, it is important to sharpen our understanding of the appeal of ethno-radical xenophobia...

...This is the kind of popular emotional response once given to another variant of ethno-radical leadership, the "sacred" ethnoradicals represented by black clergymen like Father Divine, Elder Michaux, Bishop "Sweet Daddy" Grace, and Prophet Jones, among many others...

...Noteworthy too is that after the 92 percent black voter support for Democratic party candidates in 1994, the second largest Democratic vote came from the Jews, at 79 percent...

...Before trying to answer that question, I want to note one curious paradox of black ethno-radicalism: though it is directed toward the "black masses"—the poor and the underclass— its actual followers are mainly upper-working class and lower-middle class in background...

...But even a merely cathartic politics, xenophobic in character, which scapegoats whites in general and Jews in particular (and Catholics, gays, and feminists too), though it has little substantive or institutional strength, nonetheless poses a major political dilemma for the mainstream AfricanAmerican leadership...

...Indeed, until the Hebron massacre of 1994, most Jewish-American leaders and intellectuals virtually ignored extremists like those of the Kach movement, largely recruited and financed here...

...Mainly because there is a deep need for catharsis in the black community, for the release of emotion...

...Already resistant to biracial alliances, white Americans now have a new rationale for their resistance— while at the same time Afrocentrism resonates among ordinary blacks...

...In the short run, at least, there are many thousands of "attentive ears" straining toward Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammad...

...But its influence, and the sympathy it has won, extend far beyond the membership of its organizations...

...Du Bois from the Niagara Movement and the founding the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People(NAACP), in the years 1905 to 1910 and onward...

...The expanding neoracist and neonativist militancy in the Republican party demands that this be done...

...I use the term "attentive ears" advisedly...

...What has happened to the ethno-radical commitment to fashioning a sense of efficacy among poor blacks in the inner city, reeling from social disarray and macho-male youth fratricide...

...And, third, they do not accept the underlying cultural matrix...

...Groups such as blacks, Hispanics, and women, who struggle for social standing and mobility, depend upon electoral and leg370 • DISSENT Black Leadership islative alliances, while Afrocentrist xenophobia generates negative feelings among the necessary allies...

...It provides a certain salve for deep wounds, but its candidates in city council elections in Chicago, Detroit, and Washington, D.C...

...depending on personality and organizational style, leaders adopt different postures of rebellion...

...When asked whether Farrakhan speaks the truth, 63 percent say yes...

...McCall ran against a Jewish candidate, Herbert London, who started with major support among Jewish voters...

...It isn't their institutions but their personal flamboyance and the ritual catharsis that they make possible that accounts for the success they have had...

...Its expanding public policy role depends increasingly on its ability to forge biracial legislative and electoral alliances...

...A critical shift of Jewish suburban voters away from London, toward McCall, resulted in the election of the first African-American to an executive office in New York state...

...The legacy of Malcolm X" makes the same reference...

...The escape from this dangerous dynamic is complicated by the special circumstances associated with black-Jewish discord over the past twenty-five years...

...Pragmatic activism has produced, in our era, a full-fledged, electoralbased black political class...

...This criticism was sharpened as a result of another event in the fall of 1993: the creation of a crosscutting alliance involving ethno-radicals and pragmatic activists in the black community...

...This cultural antipathy is manifest in various ways...

...Or they aim deeper, countering and seeking to displace basic cultural patterns in religion, family, gender, and historical identity...

...They seek some specific black-ethno replacement for standard features of the culture, in diet, consumption, personal adornment, and so on...

...And how can we gauge its political significance...

...They indulge in aggressive verbal and symbolic challenges to mainstream culture...

...First, its representatives endorse the capitalist mechanisms for producing and distributing wealth...

...For example, when asked whether Farrakhan says things the country should hear, some 70 percent of blacks say yes...

...Again, ritualism, not rationalism, has been overwhelmingly prominent in this challenge to the mainstream black leadership...

...What gives this ethno-radicalism its radical edge is the rejection of theAmerican cultural mainstream and the demand for a black replacement...

...B. when asked to compare an ethno-radical organization like the Nation of Islam with a pragmaticactivist organization like the NAACP, the latter was favored by 74 percent to 31 percent...

...and second, there is a more intellectual type, focused on a kind of Afrocatechism, represented by people like Asante or Ivan Van Sertima, who do not usually indulge in rhetoric demonizing whiteAmericans or denouncing Jews...

...From my perspective on African-American leadership dynamics, criticism of this latter effort was off the mark, unbalanced, and analytically shallow...

...On the other side are the ethnoradicals, now popularly called Afrocentrists, who are themselves divided: first, there is a xenophobic type ofAfrocentrism, represented by Farrakhan and Khalid Muhammad...