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The just concluded presidential election
was all about Iraq, with the state of the economy lagging in importance
while questions about poverty, economic inequality and racial justice
languished in the shadows. As always, the concerns of black people
were invisible to the parties and to white America. Black American
voters were again caught in a vise between the vengeful white nationalist
conservatism of the Republicans and an increasingly indifferent business
liberalism of the Democrats.

But one gets the sense that black America
is at a breaking point in matters of politics. The old alliance
between blacks and the Democrats is about to end while the war between
blacks and conservatives is going to get much worse. Most of all,
the unique solidarity between the black middle class and the black
poor will soon end as the pressure of economic survival turns former
allies into enemies. Poor black people are about to become the victims
of a great political betrayal that is as predictable as it is awful. This
betrayal is due to the unyielding logic of modern economic life,
which has slowly but inexorably destroyed the basis for black unity. A
brief assessment of our current economic predicament shows why the
old forms of black unity cannot endure.

The Republican Party, that peculiar union of fundamentalist capitalists
and fundamentalist Christians, is all about cutting the size of government
through low taxes and fewer regulations, including public action to
counter the outcomes of private racial discrimination in the economy
or other parts of the private sector. Republicans have done a
brilliant job of building an alliance between capitalists and racists
that does not rely on government power to promote racial segregation
or racial inequality. Instead, the leading sectors of conservative
America have relied on the typical mechanisms of economic inequality
and social class to sustain racial hierarchies in America, allowing
them to champion competition, choice and individual rights in the face
of persistent racial disparities in economic outcomes.

Modern America is, according to Republicans,
a place where the economic fortunes of different groups reflects
the cultural and intellectual capital that these groups bring to
an impartial competitive marketplace, which assigns value to people
on the basis of what they do rather than what they are. So, according
to this view of things, black people are poorer than other folks
because, well, they are just not as smart or as industrious as other
people. Poverty and racial inequality are not due to discrimination,
but rather mean that black people should imitate the culture of successful
groups if they want to get ahead. This hoary “culturalist” stance
on racial inequality is an electoral winner for free market advocates
who oppose most forms of redistribution as well as white nationalists
who are loathe to support blacks who they view as biologically and
morally inferior.

Can blacks appeal to American liberals and
progressives for support in their drive for real equal opportunity? Not
really. The Democratic Party has largely abandoned its concern with
the needs of poor and badly schooled Americans of all colors in the
modern, technology driven global economy in favor of a program of
business liberalism that is largely indifferent to black interests.

The harsh reality of American economic life
is that the blue collar road to the middle class has collapsed in
the face of a world economy dominated by trade and technology. A
large fraction of the American work force have been stranded in the
declining sectors of the American economy, even as their luckier
counterparts in the growing sector are experiencing a sustained economic
boom. The majority of black American workers have been stranded
on the wrong side of the economic divide between skilled and unskilled
labor, a far larger fraction than among the white majority. Even
skilled workers face job and employment threats from trade and technology,
so they are in no mood to help people in even greater need then themselves.

Black Americans need government help more
than whites in order to achieve a middle class standard of living
which, in America, means their claims fall on deaf or hostile ears. The
Republicans argue against Big Government help for anybody, thereby
ensuring that poor people stay poor forever. Every time that a conservative
claims that “people can spend their money better than government
can,” he or she is also saying that poor people are on their own
because right wing government is not about to offer them a bridge
from the broken blue collar economy to the growing part of the global
economy. Even educational reform is a fraud, since most dollars
for schools come from local districts which depend on local and state
tax monies that reflect yawning disparities across class and color
lines. Small government conservatism, as a practical matter, means
that poor people will be locked out of educational opportunity for
as long as the right is in power.

The Democrats are not much better. The
Democrats’ business liberalism promotes the well-being of the middle
class majority by increasing the competitiveness of the business
sector in a hyper-competitive world. For example, Democratic support
for cutting the cost of health care for families and businesses is
perfectly
sensible and should be applauded, especially when compared to the
Republicans’ limited initiatives that leave too many people without
insurance. The same is true of Democratic proposals to reduce the
burden of college tuition and housing on family budgets, which use
various tax incentives and subsidies to help people pay for the goods
that they need.

Do the Democrats have a program to create
genuine equal opportunity for education, health care and life chances
in America? No. Middle America is far more interested in shoring
up schools, medical care and life chances for themselves and their
children than they are in creating real fairness for all. In this
divided society where a sizeable group of poor and working class
people simply
cannot make it on their own, an insecure middle class is not about
to spend money on other people, particularly if they are black.

The Democrats have no reason to champion
real equal opportunity because it is expensive and would take at
least
a generation to achieve. The problem with the Democrats is that
they do not have a common program of economic reconstruction that
can unite the poor and the middle class. The fact that there are
millions of people who cannot make it on their own, no matter how
hard they try, will not convince Middle America to help out their
struggling countrymen unless they see something in it for themselves. This
sense of looking out for number one is not just selfishness or even
racism, but is also rooted in the politics of economic survival.

So why do black people stay with the Democrats,
even if the party has no real program for creating genuine equal
opportunity that can command enough support from Middle America to
counter opposition from free market conservatives and their racist
allies? A different politics of survival: the black middle class
needs the Democrats to protect them from white nationalist animus,
while the working class and poor black majority are just holding
on for dear life. Black America is in an existential bind between
a party that will tolerate their presence so long as they support
business liberals and the fierce white nationalist wing of the Republican
Party bent on pushing blacks back into society’s basement. White
nationalists in America are convinced that black people are an inferior
sub-race that could never rise above a lowly station without help
from misguided liberals. But the black middle class believes that
the only way it can resist the onslaught of white nationalism is
to make common cause with the Democrats by offering to deliver the
votes of the black poor to the ballot box.

Of course, black people are in a terrible
bargaining position vis-à-vis the parties. The Democrats can plausibly
insist that black people fold some of their interests under the party’s
general program – and shut up about whatever else they need – in
exchange for limited protection from racist bullies. Republican
entreaties for black support are cruel jokes since the right has
no intention of dealing with the economic sources of black distress,
nor do they intend to exchange their white nationalist coalition
partners for a smaller, poorer and darker group that does not command
the respect of a large portion of the white population. President
Bush’s appeals to blacks to vote Republican amount to a vicious mockery
of a people caught between an indifferent liberal protector and an
eager conservative assailant.

The Cosby Dilemma

There are two ways out of this trap: either
black people themselves must come up with a program of national economic
policy that creates equal opportunity under modern global capitalism
or else find a way to expand the size of the black middle class without
government help. There is rather little chance that black Americans
will be able to craft a program of opportunity and economic renewal
that will command the assent of enough white people to become the
agenda for the nation. A new program of growth with equality is
hard enough for the richest and most powerful segments of American
liberalism, much less a group pushed to the wall by the economy on
one side and malignant conservatism on the other. While the emergence
of Barack Obama suggests that a growing portion of non-black America
might be willing to listen to public policy proposals from an African
face, it will be some time before Senator Obama or someone else presents
a comprehensive program to the nation.

That leaves the road of self-reliance as
the sole road to black economic development in these times of economic
change and right wing assault. But the black community is no more
immune to internal class conflict than the larger American society,
particularly when economic survival is at stake.

When Bill Cosby lambasted what he described
as “a culture of victimhood” and the failure of black America to
take responsibility for its actions, he made national headlines and
spurred the usual round of pundit debates. The real story behind
the Cosby uproar is not what he said, but what it reflects about
black America, which is witnessing the fraying of a historic bond
between the black middle class and the black poor. His sentiments
reflect the breakdown of a bond between middle class and poor black
people being torn apart by the economic reality that the well-educated
are riding high while the poor black folks are battered by the US
economy’s turn against poorly educated workers.

The hard truth of our time is that the economic
needs of poor black people are much closer to those of other poor
Americans than they are to those of middle class blacks. Poor blacks,
like all poor people in America, need an immense array of social
goods and services that they cannot pay for – from health care and
education to safe streets and housing. Middle class blacks, like
all middle class Americans, want high quality public services balanced
against low taxes in a society of self-reliant individuals.

Middle class black people support greater
degrees of regulation and redistribution in economic life because
they are poorer than whites and are still subject to discrimination. But
the black middle class does not need or want government to the same
degree as poor blacks because they are no longer trapped in the basement
of the American job market. Many middle class black people are no
more interested in paying taxes to support poor people than their
white counterparts, not least because they see themselves as proof
that hard work and perseverance in the face of white nationalism
can pay off in still all-too-racist America.

Bill Cosby’s complaint about poor black
people, unfair as it is, is nonetheless the view of many middle class
black people who see poverty as a trap made worse by self-destructive
behavior. Very few members of the black middle class suggest that
poor black people have only themselves to blame for their trouble:
the quiet daily war against discrimination prevents them from falling
into that mindset.

Some people will say that the black middle
class’s slow abandonment of the black poor is a sell out to white
America, the act of selfish Uncle Toms who have forgotten what it
is like to suffer as racial and class outcasts in this society. Nothing
could be further from the truth or more irrelevant. Black middle
class abandonment of the black poor is perfectly consistent with
a strong sense of racial pride that nonetheless blames poor black
people for making their bad situation worse. It is perfectly possible
for middle class blacks to be angry at conservative white people
and poor black people at the same time.

The Revenge of the Black Middle Class: The New Washington
Solution

Can the black middle class survive without
a political alliance with the black poor? Can they survive without
the Democratic Party? Perhaps. Middle class black Americans could,
if they choose, create a culture of academic and commercial achievement
and success based on a shared understanding of the black American
experience that thrives in the face of white nationalist assault. Indeed,
the marriage of conservatism and racism that is the modern Republican
Party might recommend just such a strategy provided that the concept
of racial solidarity undergoes a subtle shift along lines suggested
by Cosby’s complaint.

Suppose that black American middle class
families begin an aggressive intellectual and cultural movement that
sees learning, savings, competition and development as the primary
weapons in the war against white nationalism. Imagine a situation
where black Americans not only accept the marriage of free market
conservatism and white nationalism as a fact of American life, but
as an assault that must be resisted through independent development
rather than relying on American liberals. Suppose that the number
and density of middle class blacks has reached critical mass so that
they are able to sustain independent institutions – schools, media,
publishing, churches, businesses – that can support a vibrant, diverse,
but defiantly black intellectual and cultural universe capable of
sturdy interaction with the wider world. This black world would
be able to insulate black children from the noxious influence of
white nationalism over schooling, media and character formation – perhaps
by insisting on a high degree of racial segregation in housing, schooling
and inter-personal association, perhaps by the evolution of communities
that are racially diverse but which share a common and positive view
of black intellect and ability.

These communities would also develop mechanisms
for controlling children – particularly young men – whose unruly
behavior threatens to disrupt the teaching and learning process. The
creation of middle class communities of color that believe in black
achievement, and that deliberately set themselves against the larger
white nationalist project of American conservatism as well as the
fecklessness of liberalism, would allow for the emergence of strong
norms of individual responsibility to self and community that make
it easier for these mini-societies to promote character formation. This
world would, in time, be able to build up black social capital so
that succeeding generations of black children would acquire the tools
for success in academic and economic competition, including access
to pools of financial and cultural capital that permit them to succeed
in broadly multicultural environments.

This new, assertive black America would
be a relatively small population of ten to twelve million were it
to magically congeal instantaneously, but would be a political force
in regions with large black populations to the extent that its interests
in economic growth, competition, knowledge and public policy converged
with those of other groups. For example, a diverse but cohesive,
assertive, achievement oriented and self-reliant black community
of 300,000 in New York City could tip the balance of power in that
kaleidoscopic city of warring tribes, using its growing financial,
cultural and political influence to shape public discourse on everything
from tax policy to the arts.

The key point here is that a middle class
black community intent on establishing and expanding its place in
the world would be in a position to translate its current advantages,
meager though these may be when compared to whites, into an engine
for growth if it redefines its mission from one of defending its
poorer cousins to one of aggressive accumulation and competition. A
community whose ethos is founded on achievement and competition will,
like the nation as a whole, see failure as an individual matter linked
to particular choices if it has the means to prepare its children
to compete in the wider world. Persons who fail in school, or who
make bad choices that result in material poverty, would no longer
be able to “blame the white man” for their troubles, but would instead
have to accept responsibility for their mistakes. One hopes that
this black middle class community is sufficiently fair-minded to
give people who fail another chance, though a harsh rugged individualism
is not inconceivable. In any case, once the community is able to
establish a common culture of success, failure would be seen as the
exception rather than as the norm.

Note that this sort of community does not
rely on affirmative action to achieve wealth and power. American
white nationalists, for all their hostility, are not about to reinstate
literal apartheid, which is extremely expensive and economically
inefficient. The free market partners of white nationalists within
the Republican Party go along with obsessive racism because they
want the votes of racists in order to keep taxes down. There is
no way that a business oriented white capitalist class is going to
use government policy to reinstate affirmative action for incompetent
whites over competent blacks in a global economy that severely punishes
inefficiency with bankruptcy and unemployment. Blacks who succeed,
and who are able to establish a common culture of success in regions
of the country, will be in a position to compete with whites, and,
more importantly, just might be able to break up the agreement between
free market capitalists and racists regarding the political utility
of racism. If affirmative action disappeared, and blacks were excluded
from elite universities and from high paying jobs by virtue of “color
blind” admissions and hiring criteria, one can still imagine a situation
where the temporary fall off in black representation would be followed
by a resurgence powered by very skilled, very elegant and very angry
people.

It is important to emphasize that what we
will call the "New Washington" solution of black middle class development
(in honor of, and irony about, the legacy of Booker T. Washington)
is, by its nature, a program of economic and cultural development
that is in stark opposition to the marriage of conservatives and
racists that defines the Republican Party. The whole point of the
New Washington solution is to gather together the economic and cultural
resources of black people of moderate means to build a self-sustaining
culture of achievement motivated by a profound historical sense of
grievance against white conservatism as well as black failure.

The emergence of an assertive black middle
class in response to the victory of the right in American politics
will bring a very heavy price in terms of national unity. The New
Washington solution is, by its very nature, based on the perception
that the United States is so tainted by race hatred that black self-sufficiency
is the only way for people of African descent to survive. The New
Washington solution would not be a liberal program – in large part
because it is would grow out of the failure of liberal politics to
create a genuine post-racial society. Instead, the New Washington
movement would be a sophisticated, multi-generational, non and even
anti-governmental movement aimed at creating a secure place for black
Americans, and those who would band together with them, to live,
work and grow.

If all this sounds a bit of paranoid, it
should: the program outlined here is a riff on that of the Nation
of Islam, stripped of its cultish nonsense, its racism, its sexism
and homophobia. It retains two things from the outlook of the Nation
of Islam: first, a deep belief that politics is a dead end for black
development in America precisely because blacks will never be accepted
as genuine equals, and second, a permanent antagonism to the dominant
political and cultural discourse of the United States so long as
these are organized around commitments to white supremacy in daily
life. Needless to say, this stance will lead to even greater fragmentation
of American life by reducing the possibility of a shared sense of
American nationalism. The New Washington solution, born out of the
victory of white conservatism and the weakness of egalitarianism,
represents the emergence of intransigent, post-liberal black nationalism
at the heart of the republic that ultimately turns its back on Martin
Luther King’s dream of a “beloved community”.

The Wretched of the Nation

What would become of poor black people who
were abandoned by their former middle class partners? They would
slip further into the shadows of American life, suffering ever greater
poverty, sickness and early death like their white, brown and yellow
counterparts. If they struck out at middle class blacks in the usual
way that poor people strike at society – through crime – they would
find themselves assailed by a rainbow coalition of middle class folks
insisting on “law and order.” Indeed, one can imagine a situation
where the New Washington solution would lead to ever more punitive
approaches to crime and punishment once the black middle class stopped
tying the fate of the black poor to the nation’s history of slavery
and apartheid. Sympathy would shrivel still more for the poor and
social outcasts, with no segment of the middle class coming to the
defense of those in society’s basement. The United States would
become an even meaner place than it is now.

An ascendant, angry, confident and successful black population in
a cold war with conservative America; the abandonment of the black
poor by the black middle class; a permanent war of words and images,
and maybe worse, between successful blacks and whites who waited too
long to jettison their racist partners or who treated blacks like permanent
junior partners. This is the bitter legacy that two decades of conservative
victory and liberal dithering has in store for America. The racist
right and the feckless left are not remotely ready to reap the harvest
of what they have sown.

Marcellus Andrews is an economist and senior research fellow at
the New America Foundation. Dr. Andrews writes on economic
policy and economic justice for academic and popular audiences, including The
Political Economy of Hope and Fear: Capitalism and the Black Condition
in America (1999, NYU Press) and Taking Back Capitalism:
A Capitalist Road to Economic Justice (forthcoming, NYU Press). Dr.
Andrews received a PhD in economics from Yale University and has
taught economics at Wellesley College as well as the City University
of New York.