In the fall of 2011, nearly three years after Barack Obama won the keys to the White House, the president’s job-approval rating had slipped below 50 percent for the first time. No one wondered why. The official unemployment rate stood at 9 percent; economic growth was stagnant; and survey after survey demonstrated that Americans, a normally optimistic bunch, had become increasingly pessimistic about the country’s future. One clear exception was black Americans, who of course had overwhelmingly supported Obama’s historic election. Polls showed that white support for the president fell by 25 percentage points between his inauguration in January 2009 and September 2011, when it rested at just 33 percent. Yet even as the country endured the worst economic downturn in generations, black fealty toward Obama remained largely undiminished.
This exception was notable because the downturn hit blacks especially hard. In September 2011 white unemployment was 8 percent, versus a black unemployment rate of 16 percent. For black men it was 18 percent, and for black teens the jobless rate topped 44 percent. Nor was employment the only area where blacks as a group had regressed economically under Obama. According to the Census Bureau, black homeownership rates in 2011 had fallen to a point where the black-white gap was the widest since 1960, wiping out more than four decades of black gains.
Traditionally, homeownership has been a measure of economic well-being, and home equity is a major source of collateral for people seeking bank loans to start a business. Aside from the financial benefits, studies have shown that the children of homeowners tend to perform better in school and have fewer behavioral problems—outcomes of particular relevance to the disproportionate number of black communities where school completion rates are low and crime rates are high.
Despite this grim economic picture, blacks backed Obama in the third year of his presidency almost as strongly as they had on Election Day. Historically speaking, it fit a pattern. Between 1980 and 2004 black support for the Democratic presidential candidate ranged between 83 and 90 percent. Yet Barack Obama managed to squeeze even more out of this voting bloc. He won 95 percent of the black vote in 2008, a year that also saw a record percentage of eligible black voters turn out to elect the nation’s first black president. The surge was driven mostly by black women and younger voters; white voter turnout in 2008 actually fell from what it had been four years earlier. And while black support for Obama had declined slightly by the fall of 2011, it seemed unlikely that black America would be abandoning the president in significant numbers anytime soon. According to Gallup, Obama’s approval rating among blacks had dipped from an average of 92 percent in 2009 to 86 percent in mid-2011. Separate polling by Pew showed that Obama’s support among blacks remained essentially unchanged at 90 percent over the same period.
If anything, these polls were underestimating black support for the president. In 2012, black turnout would increase from 2008 and 93 percent would pull the lever for Obama, notwithstanding clear evidence that blacks had lost ground on his watch. When Obama took office in January 2009, unemployment was 12.7 percent for blacks and 7.1 percent for whites. On Election Day in November 2012 it was 14.3 percent for blacks and 7 percent for whites, which meant that the black-white unemployment gap had not only persisted, but widened, during Obama’s first term.
It could be that blacks, like so many others who supported his reelection in 2012, were cutting the president slack because the economy was already in bad shape when Obama took office. As one black voter put it to a reporter in August 2011, “No president, not Bush, not Obama, could turn the mess that we are in around in four years.” But in the past, the black approval rating of a president had tended to correlate with the jobless rate. Yet black unemployment was lower under George W. Bush than it had been at any point during the Obama administration. In addition, the black-white income disparity that widened under Obama actually narrowed in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan, even though Reagan also inherited a weak economy from his predecessor. The Great Recession that began under George W. Bush in December 2007 had officially ended in June 2009, six months after Obama took office.
Economic historians, citing one hundred and fifty years of U.S. business cycles, generally agree that the deeper the recession, the stronger the recovery. Not so under Obama, and not so especially for blacks. A report released by two former Census Bureau officials in August 2013 found that since the end of the recession, median household incomes had fallen 3.6 percent for whites and 10.9 percent for blacks.1 Which means that even when controlling for the effects of the economic slowdown that Obama inherited, under his presidency blacks have been worse off both in absolute terms and relative to whites. When Fox News’s Sean Hannity asked black talk-show host Tavis Smiley in October of 2013 if black Americans were “better off five years into the Obama presidency,” Smiley responded: “Let me answer your question very forthrightly: No, they are not. The data is going to indicate, sadly, that when the Obama administration is over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic indicator category. On that regard, the president ought to be held responsible.”2 Blacks seemed to disagree. According to Gallup, Obama’s job-approval rating among blacks was 85 percent (versus just 43 percent among all groups) when Smiley made those remarks.
Broad racial solidarity is another possible explanation for why blacks have remained so bullish on Obama despite his economic record. A black member of Congress told political scientist Carol Swain that “one of the advantages, and disadvantages, of representing blacks is their shameless loyalty . . . You can almost get away with raping babies and be forgiven. You don’t have any vigilance about your performance.”3
The political left, which has long embraced identity politics, encourages racial and ethnic loyalty. It is manifest in liberal support for multiculturalism, hate-crime laws, racially gerrymandered voting districts, affirmative-action quotas, and other policies. “Stick together, black people,” says popular black radio host Tom Joyner, an Obama booster. “No matter what policies he pursues, the president’s racialized embodiment stands as a symbol of triumphant black achievement,” asserts MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry.4 Black politicians have long played off of the notion that blacks owe allegiance to “their own.” Some of the group’s most vicious insults—“Uncle Tom,” “Oreo,” “sellout”—are reserved for those deemed race traitors. Supporting Obama regardless of his job performance is therefore seen by many blacks as not only the right thing to do but the “black” thing to do.
The administration itself has stoked this sentiment in hopes of maintaining strong black support. It has pushed to loosen “racist” drug-sentencing laws. It has sued employers who use criminal background checks to screen job applicants. It has unleashed federal housing officials on white suburban residential communities that it considered insufficiently integrated. The goal is to sustain goodwill with the civil rights establishment and black voters, even if these measures are more symbolic than substantive. Black incarceration rates are not driven by drug laws; empirical research shows that employers who check criminal histories are more likely to hire blacks; and polls have long shown that most black people have no interest in living in mostly white neighborhoods. Yet these kinds of measures are used to foster an “us-versus-them” mentality among blacks and then exploit such thinking for partisan political gain.
Liberals like to complain that, the twice-elected President Obama notwithstanding, we are not a “post-racial” society. The reality is that they wouldn’t have it any other way. Race consciousness helps cohere the political left, and black liberalism’s main agenda is keeping race front and center in our national conversations. That’s why, for example, much more common black-on-black crimes take a back seat to much less common white-on-black crimes. The last thing that organizations like the NAACP want is for America to get “beyond” race. In their view, racial discrimination in one form or another remains a significant barrier to black progress, and government action is the best solution.
The White House and its allies played the race card in earnest after the president kicked off his reelection campaign in 2011. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, in speech after speech, claimed that photo-ID voting requirements hurt minorities, even though such requirements are favored by a large majority of all voters, regardless of race.5 “Are we willing to allow this era—our era—to be remembered as the age when our nation’s proud tradition of expanding the franchise was cut short?” said Holder. “Call on all political parties . . . to resist the temptation to suppress certain votes,” he added. “Keep urging policymakers at every level to reevaluate our election systems—and to reform them in ways that encourage, not limit, participation.”6
Ben Jealous, then head of the NAACP, pressured the Obama administration to oppose these voter ID laws. He told NPR that these requirements have nothing to do with ballot integrity, as proponents insist, and are akin to Reconstruction-era poll taxes. “You look historically, you look presently, and what you see is that when our democracy expands, somebody turns around and tries to contract it,” said Jealous. “You saw it after the Civil War. You see it now after the election of the first black president.”7
Voter ID laws preceded Barack Obama’s 2008 election, and in places like Georgia and Indiana minority turnout increased after the laws were passed. A 2007 study by the Heritage Foundation concluded that “in general, respondents in photo identification and non-photo identification states are just as likely to report voting compared to respondents from states that only required voters to state their name.”8 The findings applied to white, black, and Latino voters alike. The spectacle of a black president’s black attorney general pretending that the black franchise is in jeopardy in twenty-first-century America struck many people as intellectually dishonest political pandering. That included black lawmakers who have argued that voter ID laws are necessary to help ensure ballot integrity. “When I was a congressman, I took the path of least resistance on this subject for an African American politician,” wrote Artur Davis, a former member of the Congressional Black Caucus who left office in 2010. “Without any evidence to back it up, I lapsed into the rhetoric of various partisans and activists who contend that requiring photo identification to vote is a suppression tactic aimed at thwarting black voter participation. The truth is that the most aggressive contemporary voter suppression in the African American community, at least in Alabama, is the wholesale manufacture of ballots, at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt.”9
It so happens that black voter turnout surpassed white turnout for the first time on record in 2012, even while more and more states were implementing these supposedly racist voter ID laws. “About two in three eligible blacks (66.2 percent) voted in the 2012 presidential election, higher than the 64.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites who did so,” according to the Census Bureau. “Blacks were the only race or ethnic group to show a significant increase between the 2008 and 2012 elections in the likelihood of voting (from 64.7 percent to 66.2 percent).” Was this simply a case of more blacks turning out to support a black candidate? Perhaps, but as the Census Bureau notes, the trend predates the Obama presidency. “The 2012 increase in voting among blacks continues what has been a long-term trend: since 1996, turnout rates have risen 13 percentage points to the highest levels of any recent presidential election.”10 The trend was most pronounced in red states like Alabama, Kentucky, and Mississippi. Black voter turnout in 2012 surpassed white turnout by statistically significant margins in Florida, Virginia, and the Carolinas, as well as in states with the strictest voter ID laws, such as Tennessee, Georgia, and Indiana. Democrats claim such laws deny blacks the franchise, but where is the evidence?
Obama typically has employed surrogates to make blunt racial appeals—recall Vice President Joe Biden telling a mostly black audience on the 2012 campaign trail that Republicans want to “put y’all back in chains”—but the nation’s first black president is not above personally using this sort of rhetoric, as he has sometimes done in response to the relatively few black critics of his presidency who have dared to go public. During Obama’s first term, Democratic Representative Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri told the Wall Street Journal that he was “frustrated with the president” over the stratospheric black unemployment rate. The congressman said that he understood Obama’s reluctance to be too closely associated with the black community and thus be seen as favoring blacks over other Americans. Nevertheless, “you would think that if any group in America had 20 percent to 25 percent unemployment, it would generate all kinds of attention,” he said. “The Labor Department would understandably and necessarily begin to concentrate on what can we do to reduce this level of unemployment. Congress would give great time on the floor for debate on what can be done.” After other prominent black liberals—including academic Cornel West, commentator Tavis Smiley, and Democratic Representative Maxine Waters of California—began griping about Obama’s lack of attention to the economic problems of the black underclass, the president responded in a sharply worded address to the Congressional Black Caucus. “I expect all of you to march with me and press on,” he said, evoking the language of Martin Luther King Jr. and other black preachers of the civil rights era. “Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. We are going to press on.”
But racial allegiance doesn’t entirely explain black attitudes toward Obama, according to David Bositis, a political scientist at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies who specializes in black issues. “You have to put the choice that African Americans are making in context,” he told the Huffington Post in 2011. “Certainly there may be some residual good feelings from that historic moment in 2008. But support for the president remains strong because there is no real menu of political options for African Americans.”11
Bositis is a liberal who holds conservatives in low regard, but he is correct in noting that GOP outreach to blacks in recent decades has ranged somewhere between inadequate and nonexistent. In the main, black voters don’t choose between Democratic and Republican candidates; they vote Democrat or they stay home. Many liberals are quick to assume that racial animus explains the lack of any serious GOP effort to woo blacks. But in his memoir, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas offered an alternative explanation: political pragmatism. Recounting his days as head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under President Reagan in the early 1980s, Thomas wrote that his “main quarrel” with the Reagan administration was that he thought it needed a positive civil rights agenda, instead of merely railing against racial preferences. “But I found it impossible to get the administration to pay attention to such matters,” he wrote.
Too many of the president’s political appointees seemed more interested in playing to the conservative bleachers—and I’d come to realize, as I told a reporter, that “conservatives don’t exactly break their necks to tell blacks that they’re welcome.”
Thomas next offered a theory as to why that was the case:
Was it because they were prejudiced? Perhaps some of them were, but the real reason, I suspected, was that blacks didn’t vote for Republicans, nor would Democrats work with President Reagan on civil-rights issues. As a result there was little interest within the administration in helping a constituency that wouldn’t do anything in return to help the president.
My suspicions were confirmed when I offered my assistance to President Reagan’s reelection campaign, only to be met with near-total indifference. One political consultant was honest enough to tell me straight out that since the president’s reelection strategy didn’t include the black vote, there was no role for me.12
Prior to Obama’s win in 2008, the GOP had won five out of seven presidential elections. Over that same stretch, fewer than 10 percent of blacks typically identified as Republicans. Black voters today remain nonessential to GOP electoral success, and time spent courting one group leaves less time to court others who are deemed key to winning. When this dynamic changes—when GOP candidates begin to think that they need black voters to prevail—perhaps we will see a more sustained effort to win over blacks. In recent years, the GOP has been having a spirited intraparty debate over whether it can continue to win elections without more Hispanic voters, given the rapid growth of the Latino population. Republicans haven’t been paying half as much attention to blacks. This reality obviously has allowed Democrats to take the black vote for granted, and Barack Obama is no exception. But it has also resulted in a state of affairs that is arguably even more pernicious. To wit: Many blacks, at the urging of civil rights leaders and the liberal intelligentsia who share the Democratic Party’s big-government agenda, place a premium on the political advancement of the race. Whether political power is in fact a necessary precondition for group advancement is rarely questioned. It’s simply assumed to be true.
“What began as a protest movement is being challenged to translate itself into a political movement,” wrote Bayard Rustin in a 1965 essay, “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement.” Rustin, chief organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, wrote that “More than voter registration is involved here. A conscious bid for political power is being made.”13 (Here and throughout this book, emphases in excerpted matter are from the original.) In his 1967 book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “How shall we make every house worker and every laborer a demonstrator, a voter, a canvasser and a student?” James Farmer, another prominent member of the civil rights old guard, also envisioned political power as the way forward for blacks. “We can no longer rely on pressuring and cajoling political units toward desired actions,” he wrote in 1965. “We must be in a position of power, a position to change these political units when they are not responsive. The only way to achieve political objectives is through power, political power.”14
By and large, black intellectuals today have not changed their thinking in this regard. “Black politics—African Americans’ ability to mobilize, influence policy, demand accountability from government officials, and contribute and influence American political discourse, all in the service of black interests—is still extremely weak,” wrote Michael Dawson, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. For the professor—and his view is quite typical on the left—black political progress is essential to black socioeconomic progress. “Racial inequality remains a brute fact of life in this country,” he wrote. “In order to transform America into a just democracy, it is necessary to rebuild black politics.”15
For more than a century black leaders have tangled with one another over whether to pursue economic independence or focus their energies on integrating political, corporate, and educational institutions. W. E. B. Du Bois, author of the groundbreaking 1903 treatise The Souls of Black Folk, argued for the latter, while his contemporary, Booker T. Washington, said “political activity alone” is not the answer. In addition, wrote Washington, “you must have property, industry, skill, economy, intelligence and character.” Where Washington wanted to focus on self-determination through independent black schools and businesses, Du Bois argued that civil rights are more important because political power is necessary to protect any economic gains. Much has been made of this rivalry—maybe too much. What matters most is that the two men differed mainly in emphasis, not objectives. Washington never renounced equal rights, and Du Bois acknowledged the need for vocational education as a means to self-improvement.
Washington inherited the mantle of black leadership from the abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who gained fame through his slave memoirs and oratory and ultimately helped persuade President Lincoln to sign the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1881 Washington founded Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute, which trained recently freed slaves to become teachers. He became a national figure in 1895 after giving a speech in Atlanta in which he called for racial conciliation and urged blacks to focus on economic self-advancement. For the next two decades Washington would be America’s preeminent black leader. He advised presidents, and wrote an autobiography that was translated into seven languages and became the best-selling book ever written by someone black. Andrew Carnegie called him the second father of the country. John D. Rockefeller and J. P. Morgan were major benefactors. Harvard and Dartmouth gave him honorary degrees. Mark Twain was an admirer.
After the NAACP was established in 1909, and as Du Bois’s prominence grew, Washington’s power base weakened. But even after his death in 1915, Washington remained widely appreciated within the black community and elsewhere. Schools and parks were named in his honor. His likeness appeared on a U.S. postage stamp. In 1942 a Liberty ship was christened the Booker T. Washington. And in 1956, marking the one-hundredth anniversary of Washington’s birth, President Dwight Eisenhower created a national monument to the former slave.
But Washington’s legacy would come under assault in the 1960s, when civil rights advocates turned in earnest to protest politics. Washington had stressed self-improvement, not immediate political rights through confrontation. The new black leaders dismissed such methods, along with the man best known for utilizing them. Du Bois’s vision, by way of the NAACP, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King Jr., had prevailed. By the 1960s, “blacks throughout the United States increasingly condemned [Washington] as having acquiesced in the racial discrimination that so many were now challenging in restaurants, waiting rooms, and courthouses,” wrote Washington biographer Robert Norrell.16 John Lewis, the 1960s civil rights activist who would later become a congressman, suggested that Washington deserved to be “ridiculed and vilified by his own people for working so closely with white America.”
The black left today continues to view Washington not as a pragmatist, but as someone who naively accommodated white racism. “This distortion of Washington contributed to a narrowing of the limits Americans have put on black aspirations and accomplishments,” wrote Norrell. “After the 1960s, any understanding of the role of black leaders was cast in the context of Martin Luther King Jr.’s leadership, with the implication that African Americans can rise in American life only through direct-action protests against the political order.”17 Not only has Washington’s legacy thus been maligned, but several generations of blacks have come to believe that the only legitimate means of group progress is political agitation of the NAACP-Jesse Jackson-Al Sharpton variety. If you are more interested in black self-development than in keeping whites on the defensive, you’re accommodating racism.
In a January 2014 interview with the New Yorker magazine, Obama invoked Washington’s name unfavorably to push back at liberal black critics who accused the president of being insufficiently concerned with white racism. “There have been times where some thoughtful and sometimes not so thoughtful African-American commentators have gotten on both Michelle and me, suggesting that we are not addressing enough sort of institutional barriers and racism, and we’re engaging in sort of up-by-the-bootstraps, Booker T. Washington messages that let the larger society off the hook,” said Obama.18
“Washington’s style of interracial engagement has been all but forgotten, and when remembered, usually disparaged: he put a premium on finding consensus and empathizing with other groups, and by his example encouraged dominant groups to do the same,” wrote Norrell. “He cautioned that when people protest constantly about their mistreatment, they soon get a reputation as complainers, and others stop listening to their grievances. Blacks needed a reputation for being hard-working, intelligent, and patriotic, Washington taught, and not for being aggrieved.”19
Were Du Bois and King alive today, they would no doubt be glad to know that between 1970 and 2001 the number of black elected officials in the United States grew from fewer than fifteen hundred to more than nine thousand. But they would also have to acknowledge that this political success had not redounded to the black underclass. Between 1940 and 1960—that is, before the major civil rights victories, and at a time when black political power was nearly nonexistent—the black poverty rate fell from 87 percent to 47 percent. Yet between 1972 and 2011—that is, after major civil rights gains, as well as the implementation of Great Society programs—it barely declined, from 32 percent to 28 percent, and remained three times the white rate, which is about what it was in 1972.20 By 2013 Mississippi had more black elected officials than any other state, but it also continues to have one of the highest black poverty rates in the nation.
Other measures of black well-being also don’t seem to have improved along with black political progress over the decades. Impressive socioeconomic advancement has been made and the black middle class has grown, but wide black-white gaps remain, not only with regard to income but also respecting educational achievement, labor-force participation, incarceration rates, and other measures. While blacks were steadily increasing their numbers in Congress and among elected officials at the state and local levels in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, black welfare dependency rose, as did black teen unemployment, black crime, and black births to single mothers.
The economist Thomas Sowell has spent decades researching racial and ethnic groups in the United States and internationally. And his findings show that political activity generally has not been a factor in the rise of groups from poverty to prosperity. Many Germans came to the United States as indentured servants during colonial times, and while working to pay off the cost of the voyage they shunned politics. Only after they had risen economically did Germans begin seeking public office, culminating with the elections of Presidents Hoover and Eisenhower. Today Asian Americans are the nation’s best-educated and highest-earning racial group. A 2013 Pew study reported that 49 percent of Asians age 25 and older hold bachelor’s degrees, versus 31 percent of whites and 18 percent of blacks. The median household income for Asians is $66,000, which is $12,000 more than white households and double that of black households. Yet Asians have little political clout in the United States. There have been a handful of prominent Asian American politicians, like Governors Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Nikki Haley of South Carolina, but Asians have tended to avoid politics, compared with other groups. Between 1990 and 2000 the number of elected officials grew by 23 percent among blacks but only by 4 percent among Asians. Even Asian voter participation lags behind other groups; in 2008, Asians were significantly less likely than both blacks and whites to have voted. A similar pattern can be found among Chinese populations in southeast Asia and the Caribbean, the English in Argentina, Italians in the United States, and Jews in Britain. In each case, economic gains have generally preceded political gains. “Empirically, political activity and political success have been neither necessary nor sufficient for economic advancement,” wrote Sowell. “Nor has eager political participation or outstanding success in politics been translated into faster group achievement.”21
Moreover, in those instances where the political success of a minority group has come first, the result has often been slower socioeconomic progress. The Irish immigrants who came to the United States in the mid-nineteenth century arrived from a country where 80 percent of the population was rural. Yet they settled in industrial centers like New York, Philadelphia, and Boston and took low-skill jobs. Their rise from poverty was especially slow—as late as 1920, 80 percent of all Irish women working in America were domestic servants—despite the fact that Irish-run political organizations dominated local government in several big cities with large Irish populations. “To most Americans today, it is not immediately obvious that the black migrants who left the rural South for the industrial cities of the North starting in the 1940s resemble the Irish immigrants who left rural Ireland and crossed the ocean to the great cities of the Atlantic seaboard starting in the 1840s,” wrote political historian Michael Barone. “Yet the resemblances are many.”22 Among other things, explained Barone,
both groups looked to control of government as a means of advancement, and both excelled at politics. They built their own political organizations, modeled on their churches: the Irish, hierarchical political machines; blacks, ad hoc organizations assembled by charismatic local leaders. They were initially the object of competition between Democrats and Whigs or Republicans, but within about twenty years both became heavily, almost unanimously, Democratic. Both used politics to create large numbers of public sector jobs for their own people. In some cities where they were majorities—Boston and Jersey City for the Irish, Detroit and Washington for blacks—they created predatory politics, which overloaded the public payroll and neglected to enforce the law, ultimately damaging the cities’ private economies.23
Yet it was only after the decline of the famed Irish political machines that average Irish incomes began to rise. Irish patronage politics was not the deciding factor in group advancement, Barone noted.
Society addressed the ills of the Irish through private charities, the settlement house movement, temperance societies, and police forces, all of which tried to improve individuals’ conduct and to help people conform to the standards of the larger society. The Irish rose to average levels of income and education by the 1950s, and in 1960 an Irish Catholic was elected president of the United States.24
Sowell and Barone are conservatives, but some liberal scholars have made the same point. In their 1991 case study of Atlanta, political scientist Gary Orfield and coauthor Carole Ashkinaze described the city as “a center of black power” that at the time had been run by “two nationally prominent black mayors” for more than a decade. “Atlanta has been celebrated as a black Mecca, where the doors are open and a critical mass of black leadership already exists,” they wrote. “Atlanta’s first black mayor, Maynard Jackson”—elected to the first of his three terms in 1973—“expressed this in his frequent public promises to give minorities ‘a piece of the pie.’” Jackson and his successor, Andrew Young, implemented racial preference programs for hiring city workers and contractors, and the number of successful black firms increased rapidly. But according to Orfield and Ashkinaze, average blacks in Atlanta were left behind, and the black underclass lost ground.
“If economic growth and black political leadership were sufficient to resolve racial differences in the 1980s, tremendous mobility for the region’s poor blacks should have taken place,” they wrote. “Indeed, some blacks made it. On average, however, the situation of the black population relative to whites became significantly worse in very important respects.” The authors went on to make a broader point about intentions versus results. “The late 1960s’ prophecies of dangerous racial separation have given way to a vague hope that racial inequalities are being resolved, perhaps through the election of black officials,” wrote Orfield and Ashkinaze. “Many blacks have reached positions of local power, such as mayor, county commission chairman or superintendent of schools, positions undreamed of 30 years ago. But these achievements do not necessarily produce success for blacks as a whole. In fact, they may contribute to our lack of knowledge about low-income blacks. Black officials, like their white predecessors, tend to publicize successes, not problems.”25 History, in other words, provides little indication, let alone assurance, that political success is a prerequisite of upward mobility.
The 1965 Voting Rights Act was passed to ensure black access to the ballot, particularly in the states of the Old Confederacy where blacks risked life and limb to exercise their basic rights. Vernon Jordan, a former head of the National Urban League, called it “probably the most significant accomplishment” of the civil rights movement. The right to vote is a cornerstone of our democracy, but it was routinely denied to blacks in the states where most of them lived. “Prior to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, blacks were roughly one-tenth of the Deep South’s registered voters,” explained J. Harvie Wilkinson in his civil rights history, From Brown to Bakke. “By 1970 they comprised approximately 30 percent of the Mississippi electorate, a quarter of that in South Carolina, a fifth in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana.”26 In 1964, black voter registration in Mississippi was under 7 percent, the lowest in the region. A year after the act passed, black voter registration in Mississippi had climbed to about 60 percent, the highest in the South. The law was a success.
“Nothing short of radical federal intervention would have enfranchised southern blacks,” wrote voting-rights scholar Abigail Thernstrom. “Sometimes good legislation works precisely as initially intended.”27 But like so much civil rights legislation, the law’s justification soon shifted from equal opportunity to equal results. Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requires states with a history of racially motivated voter intimidation to have any changes in voting procedures cleared by a federal court or the Justice Department. This so-called preclearance provision, always intended to be temporary, was slated to sunset after five years, but Congress renewed the provision repeatedly well after it became obvious that ballot access was no longer a problem for blacks. In 1982 a permanent part of the law, Section 2, was amended to allow for racial gerrymandering, or the drawing of voting districts to ensure that a candidate of a particular race is elected. The measure of success was no longer whether blacks had ballot access. Instead, it was whether enough black officials were being elected to office, and liberals became hell-bent on using Sections 2 and 5 to achieve proportional racial representation. “In 1965, the Voting Rights Act had been simple, transparent and elegant. Its aim was to secure basic Fifteenth Amendment rights in a region where they had been egregiously denied,” wrote Thernstrom. “But the cumulative effect of these amendments was to turn the law into a constitutionally problematic, unprecedented attempt to impose what voting rights activists, along with their allies in Congress, the Justice Department, and the judiciary, viewed as a racially fair distribution of political power.”28 In 2006, Congress renewed Section 5 for another twenty-five years.
We are in the second decade of the twenty-first century, and a black man has twice been elected president in a country where blacks are only 13 percent of the population. Yet liberals continue to pretend that it’s still 1965, and that voters must be segregated in order for blacks to win office. Never mind that in 1982 five black candidates from majority-white districts won seats in the North Carolina State House of Representatives. Or that from 1983 to 1995 a majority-white district in Missouri was represented in Congress by Alan Wheat, a black Democrat. Or that between 1991 and 1997 Gary Franks, a black Republican from Connecticut, represented a congressional district that was 88 percent white. Or that in 1996 Sanford Bishop, a black Democrat from Georgia, easily won reelection to Congress in a district that was only 35 percent black. Or that in 2010 Tim Scott of South Carolina and Allen West of Florida, both black Republicans, were elected to Congress from districts that are overwhelmingly white. Or that Representatives Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri and Keith Ellison of Minnesota are black Democrats who represent districts that are more than 60 percent white.
In 2008 Obama not only won the presidency of a majority-white country; he did better among white voters in Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia than John Kerry in 2004 and Al Gore in 2000. Yet after the Supreme Court, in its 2013 decision Shelby County v. Holder, effectively nullified Section 5’s “preclearance” provisions by ruling that Congress was using an outdated formula to determine which states must have federal oversight of their voting laws, Obama said he was “deeply disappointed,” and complained that the ruling “upsets decades of well-established practices that help make sure voting is fair, especially in places where voting discrimination has been historically prevalent.” The president and others on the left wanted the court to ignore the fact that, as Chief Justice John Roberts phrased it in his majority opinion, “history did not end in 1965.” Roberts took Congress to task for pretending that nothing had changed in nearly half a century, writing:
By the time the [Voting Rights Act of 1965] was reauthorized in 2006, there had been 40 more years of it. In assessing the “current need” for a preclearance system that treats States differently from one another today, that history cannot be ignored. During that time, largely because of the Voting Rights Act, voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased, and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers. And yet the coverage formula that Congress reauthorized in 2006 ignores these developments, keeping the focus on decades-old data relevant to decades-old problems, rather than current data reflecting current needs.
What do the current data show? Among other things, the statistics reveal that black voter registration is higher in the South than it is in other regions of the country. They show that the racial gap in voter registration and turnout is lower in the states originally covered under Section 5 than it is nationwide. Finally, they show that black turnout now exceeds white turnout in five of those six states, and that in the sixth state the disparity is less than one-half of one percent. In other words, it shows tremendous voting-rights progress.
The political left, led by Obama, played down this racial progress and expressed disappointment with the outcome of the case, but their dismay had nothing to do with any fear that black access to balloting was in jeopardy. After all, most of the Voting Rights Act is permanent, and those who feel that a voting procedure is racially discriminatory still have legal recourse. What really concerns liberals is that the ruling could make it more difficult for them to use the Voting Rights Act to guarantee certain election results. As Roger Clegg and Joshua Thompson, who filed an amicus brief in Shelby County v. Holder, explained, “the principal use that federal civil-rights officials now make of Section 5 is to require racially gerrymandered and racially segregated voting districts.” The argument is that racial minorities are entitled to a proportionate number of voting districts in which they are the majority. “Think about how far from the ideals of the civil-rights movement the Left’s definition of civil rights has led us,” wrote Clegg and Thompson. “Universities must be able to discriminate against students on the basis of skin color, and voters must be required to vote only among those of their own kind.”29
The irony is that these efforts to go beyond the original intent of the Voting Rights Act in the name of helping blacks politically have almost certainly hampered blacks politically by limiting their appeal to nonblack voters. By creating “safe” black districts, racial gerrymandering has facilitated racial polarization and hyperpartisanship. Minority candidates have less incentive to make appeals to people outside of their racial or ethnic voting base, so winning statewide becomes more difficult. Members of the Congressional Black Caucus typically have voting records that are more liberal than the average white Democrat. “Black political progress might be greater today had the race-based districting been viewed as a temporarily needed remedy for unmistakably racist voting in the region that was only reluctantly accepting blacks as American citizens,” wrote Thernstrom. Instead, as a consequence of racial gerrymandering, “elections nationwide have become more or less permanently structured to discourage politically adventuresome African American candidates who aspire to win political office in majority-white settings.”30
One reason that returns on black political investment have been so meager is that black politicians often act in ways that benefit themselves but don’t represent the concerns of most blacks. So in addition to being overly reliant on politicians, blacks typically have poor political representation. “Pollsters have long known of the remarkable gap between the leaders and the led in black America,” wrote Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.
A 1985 survey found that most blacks favored the death penalty and prayer in public schools while most black leaders opposed these things. Most blacks opposed school busing, while most black leaders favored it. Three times as many blacks opposed abortion rights as their leaders did. Indeed, on many key social issues, blacks are more conservative than whites.31
As more blacks have joined the American mainstream over the past half century, this disconnect between the black politicians and civil rights leadership and the people they supposedly represent has only grown. Black America “isn’t just as fissured as white America; it is more so,” wrote Gates.
And the mounting intraracial disparities mean that the realities of race no longer affect all blacks in the same way. There have been perverse consequences: in part to assuage our sense of survivor’s guilt, we often cloak these differences in a romantic black nationalism—something that has become the veritable socialism of the black bourgeoisie.32
For years, black political leaders in New York City aligned themselves with labor unions to block the construction of a Walmart in a low-income community with persistently high unemployment. According to a Marist poll taken in 2011, 69 percent of blacks in New York would welcome a Walmart in their neighborhood. Yet these black leaders put the interests of Big Labor, which doesn’t like the retailer’s stance toward unions, ahead of the interests of struggling black people who could use the jobs and low-priced goods. School choice is another area where black politicians continue to oppose policies overwhelmingly supported by black voters in general and the black underclass in particular. In 2012 voters in Georgia approved Amendment 1, a ballot initiative to expand school choice in the form of charter schools in a state where one-third of high-school freshmen failed to graduate in four years. Black voters were the strongest backers of the initiative, which passed 59 percent to 41 percent. “One of the most striking results of the vote on Amendment 1,” wrote journalist Douglas Blackmon, “is the absolutely extraordinary level of support received from African-American voters.” The measure was supported by 61 percent of voters in the twenty Georgia counties where blacks are half of the population. And in the thirteen counties that comprise more than half of the state’s black population, support was an even higher 62 percent. “The bottom line: Georgia’s black counties overwhelmingly desire dramatic new alternatives to the conventional school systems that have failed them for more than a century,” wrote Blackmon.
That level of support flatly contradicts one of the flimsiest canards used to criticize Amendment 1—and charter schools in general. That is: the idea that somehow charter schools end up hurting minority or poorer students while disproportionately helping white and middle class children. The actual performance of charter schools in Georgia has always defied such claims. African-American students and all children living in urban areas with failed conventional public schools, like Atlanta, have benefited far more from charters than any other groups.33
Yet within a week of the amendment’s passage, the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus joined a lawsuit to block expansion of charter schools in the state.34
Whatever else the election of Barack Obama represented—some have called it redemption, others have called it the triumph of style over substance—it was the ultimate victory for people who believe that black political gains are of utmost importance to black progress in America. C. T. Vivian, a close associate of Martin Luther King Jr., told Obama biographer David Remnick that “Martin Luther King was our prophet—in biblical terms, the prophet of our age. The politician of our age, who comes along to follow that prophet, is Barack Obama. Martin laid the moral and spiritual base for the political reality to follow.” Since the assassinations of King and Robert Kennedy, wrote Remnick,
the liberal constituencies of America had been waiting for a savior figure. Barack Obama proposed himself. In the eyes of his supporters, he was a promise in a bleak landscape; he possessed an inspirational intelligence and an evident competence . . . he was an embodiment of multi-ethnic inclusion when the country was becoming no longer white in its majority. This was the promise of his campaign, its reality or vain romance, depending on your view.35
We’ll call it vain romance. The sober truth is that the most important civil rights battles were fought and won four decades before the Obama presidency. The black underclass continues to face many challenges, but they have to do with values and habits, not oppression from a manifestly unjust society. Blacks have become their own worst enemy, and liberal leaders do not help matters by blaming self-inflicted wounds on whites or “society.” The notion that racism is holding back blacks as a group, or that better black outcomes cannot be expected until racism has been vanquished, is a dodge. And encouraging blacks to look to politicians to solve their problems does them a disservice. As the next chapter explains, one lesson of the Obama presidency—maybe the most important one for blacks—is that having a black man in the Oval Office is less important than having one in the home.