4Merica, Dan. (2015, August 18). “Black Lives Matter Videos, Clinton Campaign Reveals Details of Meeting.” CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2015/08/18/politics/hillary-clinton-black-lives-matter-meeting/index.html.
5Ibid.
6Anderson, L. V. (2016, November 9). “White Women Sold Out the Sisterhood and the World by Voting for Trump.” Slate. http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2016/11/09/white_women_sold_out_the_sisterhood_and_the_world_by_voting_for_trump.html.
7Ibid.
8Chira, Susan. (2016, November 12). “The Myth of Female Solidarity.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/opinion/the-myth-of-female-solidarity.html.
9Featherstone, Liza. (2016, November 12). “Elite White Feminism Gave Us Trump. It Needs to Die.” Verso Books Blog. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2936-elite-white-feminism-gave-us-trump-it-needs-to-die.
10Chira, Susan. (2016, November 12). “The Myth of Female Solidarity.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/opinion/the-myth-of-female-solidarity.html.
11Yamahtta Taylor, Keeanga. (2017). How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective. Chicago: Haymarket.
12Desjardins, Lisa. (2017, August 22). “Every Moment in Trump’s Charged Relationship with Race.” PBS Newshour. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/every-moment-donald-trumps-long-complicated-history-race.
13Ibid.
14Rosenthal, Brian. (2017, July 29). “Police Criticize Trump for Telling Officers Not to Be ‘Too Nice’ with Suspects.” The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/29/nyregion/trump-police-too-nice.html.
15Morgan Steiner, Leslie. (Undated). “Michelle Obama: Powerful or Just Popular?” ModernMom. https://www.modernmom.com/47ebe4d2-3b36-11e3-be8a-bc764e04a41e.html.
16Holloway, S. T. (2018, January 19). “Why This Black Girl Will Not Be Returning to the Women’s March.” HuffPost. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-this-black-girl-will-not-be-returning-to-the-womens-march_us_5a3c1216e4b0b0e5a7a0bd4b.
17CNN. Exit Poll, November 23, 2016. https://www.cnn.com/election/2016/results/exit-polls.
18Kaczynski, Andrew. (2017, December 11). “Roy Moore in 2011: Getting Rid of Amendments After 10th Would ‘Eliminate Many Problems.’” CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/10/politics/kfile-roy-moore-aroostook-watchmen/index.html.
19Nilsen, Ella. (2017, December 13). “Doug Jones Is the First Democrat to Win an Alabama Senate Seat in 25 Years.” VOX. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/13/16770668/doug-jones-roy-moore-alabama-senate.
20Lindsey, Treva. (2017, December 18). “Just a Reminder: Black Women Saved Alabama, but Not for the Reasons You Think.” TheGrio. https://thegrio.com/2017/12/18/alabama-black-women-voters/.
21Ibid.
© The Author(s) 2019
Duchess HarrisBlack Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trumphttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95456-1_2
2. A History of Black American Feminism
Duchess Harris1
(1)Macalester College, Saint Paul, MN, USA
Duchess Harris
Email: [email protected]
Black power, the women’s movement, and feminist organizations like the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO ) and the Combahee River Collective all contributed to the emergence of a new voice for Black women in American politics and social life in the second half of the twentieth century. But the disintegration of the Combahee River Collective coincided with a conservative backlash, an era that saw the rise and fall of Vanessa Williams as Miss America and which set the stage for the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill hearings. The roots of the conservative backlash that had such a detrimental effect on Black women can be traced to the major ideological shift that occurred in social welfare discourse during the 1960s and the supposedly liberal, progressive Kennedy administration. The Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program had been driven ideologically by gender and class frameworks, but as a result of the social turbulence and political forces of the sixties, the discourse surrounding social welfare came to be dominated by race, with gender and class as supporting ideological frameworks.
The early part of the 1960s marked a renewed social consciousness of issues surrounding poverty. One prominent example of the heightened awareness of economic issues and class is embodied in the popularity of Michael Harrington’s book, The Other America , which described the plight of millions of poor Americans. Harrington’s book challenged a number of contemporary notions about American affluence, and though it was not an immediate bestseller, The Other America was read widely within academic and policy circles, attracting many favorable reviews and sparking strong interest in research about poverty. Harrington’s book attracted the attention of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. In fact, the actual use of the word “poverty” to describe socioeconomic conditions of the poor did not appear in the Congressional Record or the Public Papers of the President until 1964.
There was an explosion of Americans on public assistance during the 1960s and into the early 1970s.1 Payment to families on AFDC grew from less than $1 billion in 1960 to $6 billion by 1972. The majority of this growth occurred as a result of a massive influx of new enrollees into the AFDC program. In 1960, 3.1 million people were enrolled in AFDC; by 1969, this number had nearly doubled to 6.1 million. The annual increases between 1966 and 1969 are tallied in the following chart (Table 2.1):Table 2.1% increase in AFDC recipients
1966
1967
1968
1969
% increase in AFDC recipients
4.5
11.7
13.25
17.7
By 1974, AFDC rolls ballooned to 10.8 million recipients.
This dramatic increase in social welfare spending reflected a paradox for a number of policy-makers, in that it occurred as the country was experiencing an extended period of economic prosperity. As one social services administrator noted, for the first time the expansion occurred in both good and bad years, seemingly unrelated to the state of the economy. Poverty had declined sharply throughout the 1960s. In 1959, 40 million people, almost a quarter of the American population, were living below the poverty level. By 1969, that number declined to 12.2% of the population, or 24 million individuals. Additionally, this decline was sharpest for non-white populations; in 1959, 56.2% of non-whites were in poverty, but by 1969, the number had dropped to 31.1%. Demographically , it should be noted that there was a significant change in the racial makeup of the new AFDC participants. The huge expansion of the welfare rolls disproportionately came from higher concentrations of minority groups (principally African-Americans) as the new enrollees. The Washington Post reported in 1970 that the AFDC rolls in the capital had grown 66%. Of that growth, over 95% of these new welfare applicants were Black. By 1970, about 48.1% of the AFDC recipients were white; 45.2% Black; and 6.7% from other races. However, it should be kept in mind that after the initial restrictions of the Social Security Act of 1935, non-white populations had enrolled in AFDC in significant numbers. Non-whites made up 32% of the welfare caseload in 1950; in 1960, that number grew to 41% and reached 46% by 1967. Thus, the face of the typical AFDC recipient was already changing quite rapidly as early as the 1950s, but the image of a single Black woman as the typical welfare recipient emerged only after the turbulent events of the 1960s: the Civil Rights movement, the Moynihan Report , and growing urban unrest.
By 1968, the sharp backlash against racial liberalism had produced its first major fruit with the election of Richard Nixon . In 1964, opinion polls showed virtually no difference on race-related issues between the two major parties. But shortly after 1964, with the turbulent events of the Civil
Rights movement, the development of the War on Poverty , and the explosion of the welfare rolls, the Democratic Party would be seen as the home of racial liberalism . The Republican Party, meanwhile, would come to be considered the home of racial conservatism. In an analysis of polling data from 1956 to 1968, Rutgers political scientist Gerald Pomper found:The most striking change has occurred on racial issues. In 1956, there was no consensus on parties’ stands on the issues of school integration and fair employment… and the Republicans were thought to favor Civil Rights as strongly as did the Democrats. By 1968, there was a startling reversal in this judgment. All partisan groups recognized the existence of different party positions on this issue, and all were convinced that the Democrats favor greater government action on civil rights than do Republicans.2
During this time, Democrats lost 47 Congressional seats, which effectively erased Johnson’s liberal majority. Additionally, eight governorships switched over to the Republican Party in 1966. Florida elected its first Republican governor since 1872, and California voters overwhelmingly sent former actor, and future President, Ronald Reagan into his first term as the state’s chief executive.3 The Democrats’ continued close association with liberal or “radical” causes, in conjunction with the growing sense of chaos and aimlessness that became the trademark of the late sixties, would prove even more disastrous in the 1968 presidential election .
The ’68 Election and the Nixon Phenomenon
The central element in Nixon’s rise to power was his successful employment of subtle, demagogic political appeals concerning race-related issues. Nixon’s victory and the popularity of Southerner George Wallace , a third-party candidate who had split from the Democratic Party principally on racial issues, established the framework for the successful conservative political dominance of presidential elections throughout the 1980s.4 From the late 1960s until the end of the 1980s, a key component of successful candidates’ electoral strategies was the exploitation of racial stereotypes in connection with liberalism and “big government.” As political analysts, Tom and Mary Edsall observed: Nixon … developed strategies essential to capitalizing on the issue of race, while avoiding the label of racism. Nixon in 1968 was among the first Republicans to understand how the changing civil rights agenda could be made to offer a politically safe middle ground to candidates seeking to construct a new conservative majority…. The Nixon strategy effectively straddled the conflict between growing public support for the abstract principle of racial equality and intensified public opposition to government-driven enforcement mechanisms.5
This was the crux of the messages used to court white/ethnic working-class groups in the backlash against liberalism and hence the Democratic Party . By shrewdly employing political rhetoric that was heavily racially coded , Nixon was able to cultivate the bitterness against liberalism that was emerging chiefly from the white ethnic and working-class groups, thereby developing a powerful and effective political coalition.
Welfare abuse, particularly embodied in the stereotype of the welfare queen, was an extremely potent political tool to court white ethnic and working-class voters. This group was a crucial segment in the New Deal coalition that had allowed the Democratic Party to dominate the national political scene since the 1930s. As E. J. Dionne commented, “Repeated claims of liberal solicitude for the common people had been key to Democratic triumphs under Franklin Roosevelt. Thus, the New Deal slogan, ‘If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic.’”6 But with the seemingly “liberal” excesses over civil rights and the War on Poverty emanating in the late sixties, this crucial bloc of white working-class voters had become increasingly alienated within the Democratic Party. The Machiavellian brilliance of the welfare queen trope was that it immediately brought forth connotations of deeply embedded racial stereotypes without ever explicitly doing so, thereby evading claims of racism . Welfare and crime had become racial code words in a new political language that was developed in the late sixties and utilized by conservatives like Nixon .
The chaotic political climate of the late 1960s was perfect for exploitation based on racially coded words and symbols. With rising urban violence, crime in major cities, and burgeoning public assistance rolls, crime dependency and welfare dependency were permanently racialized and deemed “Black” within the mainstream political culture. A variable further complicating the increasingly racialized dynamics of American politics was the controversy that resulted from the 1965 Moynihan Report , which directly linked welfare dependency to pathological behavior of the “poor.” According to Senator Moynihan, there was a “ghetto” pathology among African-Americans in the depressed inner cities that was producing an alarming rise in single-mother households and dramatic increases in the rate of illegitimate births and, consequently, a rise in welfare dependency.7 The vitriolic response to the Moynihan Report and subsequent liberal acquiescence to critics’ claims, without addressing some of the substantive findings of the report, served to further alienate liberals from the mainstream. As Edsall and Edsall stated:The reluctance of liberalism and of the Democratic party to forthrightly acknowledge and address the interaction of crime, welfare dependency, joblessness, drug use, and illegitimacy with the larger questions of race and poverty reflected not only an aversion to grappling with deeply disturbing information, but compounded the political penalties the party would pay for its commitment to racial liberalism.8
These political penalties would appear in full force in the 1968 presidential contest and would hamper Democratic presidential candidates from Nixon onward. Democratic dominance in capturing the Oval Office would decline dramatically after 1964, with only one victory in the two decades prior to 1988.
A Black Feminist Response to the Conservative Majority
In 1975 feminist, scholar, and author Michelle Wallace tackled the issue of power relations between Black people and white people and described how, in a capitalist society where white people have power, Black people are left to fight each other for the leftovers. Wallace described the resulting dynamics in the following way. The Black man does not receive enough power to change the situation of the race, but he is made to believe that the Black woman is to blame. Black women, in turn, have learned that feminism is for white women, so they are left with no way of empowering themselves. Wallace pointed out that problems arise when white women choose to look at Black women as fellow victims; instead of critiquing the society that pits Black men against Black women, and where the remaining way to assert their manhood, is to oppress Black women. Wallace observed that white women stand against white men much more often than Black women are allowed to criticize Black men. With her 1975 essay, “A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood ,” published in the New York weekly, Village Voice, Wallace encouraged Black women to stand up for themselves and form an organization that dealt with their issues. Wallace, who was one of the founding members of the National Black Feminist Organization, warned against Black women copying white feminists and getting stuck on the same issues that had divided white feminists. Wondering if the time might be right for a Black feminist movement, she urged Black women to unite and find out.
Wallace’s essay in the Village Voice was a preview of ideas that she would go on to develop more fully in her later books, including Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman . The book contains two essays, “The Black Macho” and “The Myth of the Superwoman.” One of the most important parts of the book is Wallace’s critique of the 1965 Moynihan Report and, specifically, Senator Moynihan’s scapegoating of Black women for the plight of Black people. Moynihan wrote, “[I]n essence, the Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male.”9 Moynihan failed to point out the conditions that created this “matriarchy,” successfully projecting the problems in the Black community on Black women instead of white racism . The Moynihan Report was a thin
ly veiled political agenda, but it was still received with praise, influencing both the policies of government and the sentiment of the American public. Even Black men were affected. Wallace wrote, “[J]ust as Black men were busiest attacking Moynihan, they were equally busy attacking the Black woman for being a matriarch.”10 Wallace criticized the fact that even if Black men wanted to reject the notion of Black women being too domineering and loud, the Moynihan Report and its ripple effects in society prompted Black men to feel threatened by Black women and their social role. The Moynihan Report tried to provoke Black men to control their women in order to regain their “manhood.” Few Black men questioned what whites might gain from the report and its stereotyped assumptions. The Moynihan Report came at a crucial time in Black history. During the Civil Rights movement , Black women fought to gain the same rights as Black men. Black men who felt threatened by Black women’s assertion of equality felt safer with white women, and the Moynihan Report provided evidence that Black men had reason to feel this way. As Wallace concluded, “The Black man needed a rest. No wonder he wanted a white woman. The Black woman should be more submissive and above all keep her big Black mouth shut.”11
Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump Page 3