Who Speaks For Black People?
A brief disclaimer. I want to emphasize that we are dealing in this piece with fairly complicated and fraught questions where there are probably dozens of other valid perspectives. I focused this piece on black people because I am most familiar with these issues in a black context, both because I am black and because I have written a lot about issues of race affecting black people in particular over the last decade or so. But I would imagine that there are versions of this article centered on women or Latinos or younger people. Those are not this piece.
There is a lot of debate right now over who Joe Biden is picking for top jobs in the government, namely is he picking enough black people, particularly black women; enough Latino people, particularly Latinas; and if he is picking enough people with more left-wing/progressive/leftish views, regardless of their gender, race or ethnicity. But I think that there are complicated issues underlying these debates that are where the real tensions are. This is not just a debate about whether Biden’s cabinet is 13 percent black (like the U.S. overall) or 20 percent black (like the Democratic Party.) There are deeper issues at play here.
Let me go through three of them:
Representation
I find terms like oreo or token, when referring to black people, so charged that I try not to use them, ever. But there is a reason that these terms exist -- they are attempts to capture differences among black people in terms of how their blackness plays out in life. So let me start with this premise: Al Sharpton, Clarence Thomas, Daniel Cameron, Tim Scott, Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, James Clyburn, Attica Scott, Gerald Neal, Charles Booker, Keith Ellison, Ayanna Pressley and everyone else that identifies as black with some reasonable justification (so not Rachel Dolezal) is black and I don’t spend much time debating who is more black or less black.
But some of those people represent black people, in a political and electoral sense, more so than others. Some political science scholars use the terms descriptive and substantive representation. I won’t do justice to that whole school of scholarship here. But take Cameron and Thomas. They are black (so descriptive representatives) and are illustrations of how black people can ascend to some of the most powerful jobs in America. But since the overwhelming majority of black people vote for Democrats, neither Cameron nor Thomas nor most other Republican officials, black or not black, really represent black people in a substantive sense, in terms of black political views.
It’s likely that way more black people in Louisville voted for congressman John Yarmuth, who is white, than Cameron, and that Yarmuth’s policy goals are closer to those of black people in Louisville than Cameron’s. Clyburn is black, a Democrat, represents a majority-black House district in South Carolina and just won 68 percent of the vote in his 2020 reelection. I am sure that there are some black people in South Carolina who don’t like him, but I view him as speaking for a broader black constituency in South Carolina to some extent.
To be sure, Cameron doesn’t present himself as speaking for or on behalf of black people. But I think we often have the implied assumption that a black person in a high-profile role is a kind of substantive representative of black people and in many cases, that is not correct.
But even among people who are Democrats and therefore aligned with the majority of black voters, this substantive representation is complicated because black people are fairly diverse politically, other than mostly being Democrats. There are black Democratic voters and officials more tied to institutions like the Democratic Party and black churches, and those who are less connected to such institutions. There are more progressive black people and more centrist and even conservative black people. Younger black people seem to be more liberal than older black people. In his appointment process, Biden is generally choosing older, more establishment-oriented and more centrist black people. (He is also picking non-black people on the same criteria.) Biden and his team seem particularly interested in the views of Clyburn, the Congressional Black Caucus and civil rights leaders who are over age 50.
So younger, more progressive and less establishment black people in particular are kind of wary of some of his picks for jobs, even if some of the people are black. This tension is not surprising and is in some ways natural --- it would be hard to choose even a dozen black people for top jobs and represent the entire range of black political opinion. More progressive, younger and less establishment black people tried to defeat Biden in the primary ---they knew he might be more hostile to their goals than a person like Elizabeth Warren. But Biden won, and he is rewarding people like Clyburn who were with him during the primary.
“I'm not interested in a lot of Black prosecutors being appointed to the federal bench. It's got to be infused with transformation, which is why I don't particularly enjoy the line, ‘I'm going to have a cabinet that looks like America.” I call that cosmetic diversity. I'm not interested in cosmetic diversity. I'm interested in substantive diversity,” NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund President Sherrilyn Ifill said in a recent interview with The Ink.
Constituencies
This is related to representation but also a bit distinct from it. I’ll start with myself. I think I can honestly say and without downplaying my own skills, hard work and credentials that some of the jobs that I have had came in part because news media organizations were looking to have more “diverse” staffs. That is an important goal and one I generally agree with. But I worry sometimes that when I am the only black person on a tv panel of five guests and we are discussing a racial issue, it seems like I am representing black people.
I am black, I have a black perspective, my perspectives are often fairly representative of those of other black people.
But in most of the jobs I have had, I had a very weak claim to being a representative of black people. Why? Because in most cases, I was chosen for the role in a process that included very few black people, with the real decision-makers in the hiring process usually being white. A lot of black people in public-facing jobs at companies that emphasize racial diversity aren’t selected in a process controlled by black people or include a lot of black people. Often, they are chosen in processes that probably reward proximity/closeness/familiarity with non-black people. And some of these organizations, intentionally or not, probably have a hiring process that is akin to hiring the black person who is most palatable and acceptable to upper-middle class white people.
So while I may have seemed like a kind of black representative when I was on tv, my real constituency, to keep my job, was the mostly non-black people who put me in the job. Let me expand that idea to other people. Again, this is not to dispute their blackness but to understand their roles. The Kentucky Democratic Party just elected Colmon Elridge as the party’s chair. He is the first black ever person in that role. I know Colmon, he is smart, kind and at least in my conversations with him, has a fairly good sense of the strengths and shortcomings of Democrats in Kentucky But how much Elridge represents Kentucky’s black Democrats is complicated. He was chosen for that post by the state’s party executive committee, which I assume is majority if not heavily white. (I don’t have time to check all of these names, but if you do, I would love a gender/race breakdown.) Elridge may really have a constituency of one: a white man named Andy Beshear who is a dominant figure in the official Kentucky Democratic Party. Similarly, Louisville police chief Yvette Gentry is black, but her real constituency may also be one white man: Mayor Greg Fischer.
Who has a black constituency or was chosen in a process that was controlled by black people? Well, state legislators and members of Congress in heavily-black areas (so Clyburn for example.) Also, national organizations like the NAACP and black churches are often controlled by boards that have a lot of black members. So if Marc Morial, the head of the National Urban League, takes a stand on a racial issue that might annoy black people, that could get in trouble in his job. For someone like Gentry, the real question is whether she takes a stand that annoys Fischer.
But even people in ostensibly black-controlled/dominated roles may have another other powerful constituency: the rich, who usually aren’t black. What you need to keep getting elected to Congress or run a big church or organization is money to fund your campaign or your church or organization. The Congressional Black Caucus faces regular criticism that it opposes policies that would help black people because it wants to raise money from major corporations who oppose those policies.
This is the subtext of a lot of left-wing criticism of Barack Obama from black figures like Cornel West. Was/is Obama wary of some more liberal stands on some racial issues because 1. He is personally somewhat centrist 2. America’s financial elite, a fairly white group, helped him win the presidency because they knew he is more centrist 3. He is/was more left but bent to the will of the financial elite to advance politically 4. His centrism was more to appease the electorate than the financial elite 5. Some combination of 1-4. Or 6. He is pretty left.
Accountability
The post-election criticism of Black Lives Matters activists by Democratic Party elites isn’t too convincing to me. It’s not clear that the protests or the phrase “defund the police” really affected the election results. And it’s not clear to me that powerful politicians should be attacking activists with much less power or telling them how to do their activism. I am not sure that politicians should be holding activists accountable.
But rank and file people perhaps should be able to hold activists accountable. We have now had a nationally-recognized movement called Black Lives Matter for more than six years. That movement has created a lot of mini-celebrities, people who link themselves to BLM as they write books, appear on television and gain fame. A lot of public intellectuals and writers have become famous in this period where America is really focused on racial inequality and its treatment of black people.
But the Black Lives Matter approach, in which the movement is not leaderless but “leaderful” according to the activists, has the potential to create racial justice celebrities and leaders who aren’t accountable to the broader black community for which they ostensibly speak for. Let’s assume you are a black person who wants police departments to have less funding. It is not entirely clear to me which organization you donate money to, how that organization will go about pushing for police departments to have less funding and if you can help vote out that organization's leadership if in five years no police department in America has had its funding cut. The late, great John Lewis was actually replaced as the leader of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the 1960’s. SNCC had something of a leadership structure and wanted to go in a different direction than Lewis did.
There are some people with real claims to be the leaders of BLM and the Movement for Black Lives. There is a real concern that people who are publicly identified as leaders might face violence from those opposed to the movement’s goals. So these are complicated questions.
These questions also apply to other high-profile figures. Obama’s comments are often covered as if he speaks for black people in some ways. But it’s not surprising that Obama bluntly criticizes the defund slogan in public while Biden only does that in private - -Biden at this point is more accountable to black activists and voters than Obama, who is retired from politics. I am not totally sure what the National Action Network is separate from Sharpton.
To conclude, we are in a time of very complicated black politics. Maybe that has always been true --and people in the media like me just didn’t see it. But these issues are very fraught and hard to resolve and they are about much more than simply diversity.
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