Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump

by Duchess Harris

  While Colin Powell was able to transcend race in his public post, in which perceptions were foisted upon him and not projected by him, he did not make the effort to do so in his memoir. In My American Journey , Colin Powell asserts his Blackness, a side of Colin Powell that most white and Black Americans had not seen. In his memoir, General Powell does not just wear a uniform; he wears the proverbial mask that Paul Lawrence Dunbar mentions in his poetry. In the imagery of African folk literature, Powell can be understood as a trickster; here you have a Black man who spent 35 years manipulating the dominant culture’s inability to racialize competence, and now will sell them a book that actually supports affirmative action , denounces the Willie Horton campaign, celebrates the Buffalo soldiers, and tells of his initial concern that his son married a white woman. All of this, of course, is enveloped within a red, white, and blue jacket cover. To avoid these subjects in his public speaking, but to address them in writing is nothing short of brilliant; Powell is “banking” on the old adage that if you want to keep something secret, put it in a book.

  Similar to Martin Luther King, Jr. , Powell was held up by white America as an icon for the ability of all people to achieve the American Dream. Before King died, he denounced the Vietnam War and began to embrace self-defense in a manner not very different from Malcolm X . For some reason, however, even though these actions are recent enough for anyone 40 or older to remember, our nation suffers from social amnesia. Our country has successfully appropriated a resistant figure like Dr. King, whose views changed dramatically in the last four years of his life, as proof that Blacks would overcome. I have never attended an event where a white person quoted one of Dr. King’s speeches written after 1963. When Dr. King expressed his rage as a Black man in America, his popularity diminished quickly. The same will hold true for General Powell if anyone bothers to read all 613 pages of his book.

  Powell wrote, “My Blackness has been a source of pride, strength, and inspiration, and so has my being an American. I started out believing in an America where anyone, given equal opportunity, can succeed through hard work and faith. I still believe in that America.” Equal opportunity is the key phrase in this manifesto, and the four-star general never tried to claim that equality exists. Embedded within this hyper-patriotic text, a dialectic strategy in itself, are stories of resistance, stories that are largely predicated on aspects of racial identity. Powell recalled his pride when his daughter Linda performed a segment of Ntozake Shange’s controversial play, for colored girls who have considered suicide /when the rainbow is enuf, against the direct orders of her high school administration. Powell also acknowledged the fact that, as a Jamaican, he has a fundamentally different relationship to America than many African-Americans. Finally, Powell attempted to use race as a way to reaffirm his identity as a Black man and to establish a link and sense of identity with readers, quipping, “When Blacks go off in a corner for their kind of music or dancing, I’m tempted to say to my white friends, ‘Don’t panic, we’re just having fun.’” Powell stopped short, however, of articulating the most audacious ambition for a Black man, staying within bounds “appropriate” for his race. On the 609th page, he assures his reader that he would not run for the highest office in the land because he did not want to be seen as the “Great Black Hope,” providing a role model for African-Americans or a symbol to whites of racism overcome.

  Although Powell refused to be a pawn in America’s race game, his background in military conservatism created the conditions that influenced his somewhat tenuous relationship with the Black community. In direct conflict with the Congressional Black Caucus, Powell opposed lifting the ban on gays in the armed forces. The General also spoke out against the Million Man March on national television on the day of the event. Unlike some prominent Black men, like Johnnie Cochran , who boycotted the March because of its exclusion of Black women, Powell did not address the destructive issue of gender divisiveness. While many national leaders were able to separate the messenger from the message, Powell publicly drew an analogy between Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism and Mark Fuhrman’s racism. On a day that was set aside for Black economic empowerment, Powell empowered himself: He held a signing and sold his book. Powell’s book signing and promotion remind us that his economic allegiances tied him to the power elite, not to the historically downtrodden.

  Powell is a Black man, but in the tradition of H. Ross Perot he tried to convince us that he is a common man, and nothing could be further from the truth. As a self-proclaimed “fiscal conservative with a social conscience,” Powell articulated no vision for the 50% of Black children who grow up in poverty. While the responsibilities of his position did not require insight or involvement in such matters, Powell demonstrated a preoccupying lack of knowledge about broad-based issues affecting the community with which he would have liked his reader to believe he was aligned. During his September 15, 1995, interview with Barbara Walters , Powell admitted that he did not know very much about the welfare system . The former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had no insight into this problem, and why should he? Colin Powell had moved far from his humble South Bronx beginnings, and as he told The New Yorker, “…I just figured out what the white guys were doing,” and, presumably, appropriated and imitated their strategies. Powell’s message to Black America seems to be, “Give white America what they want and then get them to purchase it from you.” With his book, Powell produced a commodity. If the astute reader happens to catch on that Powell isn’t just like them but darker, Powell could choose not to notice that the consumer is white, just that their money is green. The General figured out what most Black people know but haven’t actualized: The true American journey is to the bank.

  As the foreign policy advisor during the Bush campaign, Condoleezza Rice was a new face to voters. Powell and Rice were very significant figures during the Republican convention, as they and Oklahoma congressman J. C. Watts were given prime-time slots to address the delegates. As part of the strategy of appealing to African-American voters, Powell and Rice had very different roles, with Powell playing the conscience of the Republican Party and Rice playing its cheerleader. In his speech, Powell charged the party to remember those moments in history when it had injured Black Americans. Without making a direct statement about racism , per se, Powell addressed many of the political issues that have continually allied Black Americans with the Democrats, including affirmative action , welfare , universal health care, education, and criminal justice. Very early in his speech, Powell stated:The issue of race still casts a shadow over our society, despite the impressive progress we have made over the last 40 years to overcome the legacy of our troubled past. So, with all the success we have enjoyed and with all the wealth we have created, we have much more work to do and a long way to go to bring the promise of America to every American.1

  Powell went on to explain:The party must follow Governor Bush’s lead and reach out to minority communities and particularly the African-American community--and not just during an election year campaign. It must be a sustained effort. It must be every day. It must be for real. The party must listen to and speak with all leaders of the Black community, regardless of political affiliation or philosophy.

  We must understand the cynicism that exists in the Black community. The kind of cynicism that is created when, for example, some in our party miss no opportunity to loudly condemn affirmative action that helped a few thousand Black kids get an education, but hardly a whimper is heard from them over affirmative action for lobbyists who load our federal tax codes with preferences for special interests.2

  Taken out of context, this bit of rhetoric could be easily mistaken for a sound bite from the Democratic national convention , or even from a more progressive organization like the Black Radical Congress . Powell’s defense of affirmative action was unprecedented. His final statement about affirmative action for special interests could very easily be read as an attack on the types of tax incentives and federal aid offered to corporations: a f
orm of welfare that, as many liberals and leftists have pointed out, is far more expensive than AFDC ever was. In addition, by using the term “special interests” to characterize people, groups, and organizations who are not Black Americans, Powell moved away from lines of Republican discourse that cast African-Americans as another special interest group begging for special rights that are not granted to other Americans.

  As the conscience of the party, Powell’s speech was the sharpest critique that the Republicans were willing to receive during their own convention. It was a well-orchestrated finale to George W. Bush’s speech before the NAACP , incorporating Bush’s rhetoric about the Republican Party again assuming responsibility as the party of Lincoln. Powell’s speech was targeted to the Black working-class and poor, the people whom William Julius Wilson describes as “the truly disadvantaged.” Powell’s appeal to the Republican Party was meant to be overheard by those Black Americans whose economic status is still over determined by their racial identity and who may require federal assistance in order to sustain their lives and the lives of their families. More than anything else, Powell appealed to African-Americans’ sense of themselves as a heterogeneous social group in the USA that has suffered and continues to suffer from the material and psychological impact of racism . He called for Black Americans, en masse, to look to the Republican Party for leadership in the new century.

  Condoleezza Rice’s appointment to the important post of National Security Advisor was a significant part of the Bush administration’s strategy to provide the kind of leadership Black Americans were looking for. Angela D. Dillard’s work Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner Now? Multicultural Conservatism in America3 demonstrates that even though fewer than 10% of African-Americans voted for George W. Bush , the ones who did would wield power. Dillard wrote, “In pursuing the historical and contemporary expressions of Black conservatism, I began to find intriguing intersections and parallels among Latino, homosexual, and women conservatives….”4 Dillard added:Along with their mainstream allies, they [conservatives] have worked to repeal affirmative action and other race and gender conscious policies; to dismantle the welfare state for the sake of the poor; to discredit bilingual education; to stem the tide of special rights of homosexuals; and to counter such supposedly radical and therefore dangerous academic trends as queer theory, afrocentrism, Chicano studies, feminism and anything else judged to under gird identity politics: a politics engendered by conceiving of individuals as members of oppressed and victimized groups.5

  Although Dillard does not mention Condoleezza Rice anywhere in her 182-page book, the former Stanford provost fits Dillard’s categorization of the classic “multicultural conservative.”

  Rice, the second Black American to speak at the convention, had a different message from that of Powell, but one that was equally essential to the Republicans’ appeal to African-American voters. As foreign policy advisor, Rice’s primary purpose as a speaker was to underscore Bush’s ability to lead the USA in matters related to national and international security. But as The New York Times noted the day after Rice gave her speech, her presence at the podium only served to underscore Bush’s regularly stated commitment to place “minorities” in key administrative positions. The significance of Rice’s speech, however, was even more covert than the Times noted. Where Colin Powell played the conscience of the Republican Party and appealed to Black Americans’ sense of community and racial identity, Rice took a deliberately opposite approach. Instead of speaking to group identity, Rice spoke to her own particularity, to her individuality, by citing her personal reasons for being involved with the Republican Party. Unlike Powell’s speech, which was designed to appeal to the Black working-class and poor, attracting a broader base to support Bush and his party, Rice’s speech was designed to appeal to the new Black middle class by appealing to a sense of individual identity, apart from the so-called Black masses. A Democrat in her youth, Rice offered the following remarks about her decision to join the Republican Party:The first Republican I knew was my father, and he is still the Republican I most admire. He joined our party because the Democrats in Jim Crow Alabama of 1952 would not register him to vote. The Republicans did. My father has never forgotten that day, and neither have I.

  I joined for different reasons. I found a party that sees me as an individual, not as part of a group. I found a party that puts family first. I found a party that has love of liberty at its core. And I found a party that believes that peace begins with strength.6

  Rice’s speech was peppered with frequent references to individuality, as well as references to her own family’s history—a history that was deliberately decontextualized and vague, so as to cast the achievements of her family members as individual successes, removed from history or community. The story of Rice’s family was woven throughout the speech in a remarkably skillful manner, also playing upon a gendered narrative in which the woman was located within the context of her family history. While Rice bolstered George W. Bush’s limited expertise in matters related to foreign policy, she was simultaneously painting her own American dream: the dream where hard work, determination, and patriotism pay off in the end. In Rice’s own words:In America, with education and hard work, it really does not matter where you came from — it matters where you are going. But that truth cannot be sustained if it is not renewed in each generation as it was with my grandfather.7

  Rice went on in her speech to offer her “Granddaddy Rice” as a shining example of a good new Republican. Granddaddy Rice was a poor farmer in rural Alabama, and in 1918 he decided he wanted to go to college. Seventy-two years later, his granddaughter offered these thoughts on the matter:After the first year, he ran out of cotton and needed a way to pay for college. Praise be — God gave him one. Grandfather asked how the other boys were staying in school. “They have what’s called a scholarship,” he was told, “and if you wanted to be a Presbyterian minister, then you could have one, too.” Granddaddy Rice said, “That’s just what I had in mind.” And my family has been Presbyterian and college-educated ever since. This is not just my grandfather’s story — it is an American story.

  Rice’s presence on the dais of the convention was used to reflect back upon her family’s history, as a silent testimony to the power of the American dream. Her grandfather was a sharecropper who went to Stillman College. His granddaughter was the provost at Stanford. Granddaddy Rice found his true calling as a Presbyterian minister. Condoleezza Rice may have found her true calling preaching for George W. Bush . In reflecting on this history, however, the aim is to illustrate the “individual” achievements that brought Granddaddy Rice and his family from rural Alabama to Capitol Hill. With its “anyone can make it in America” giddiness, Rice’s story simultaneously moved the Black middle class further away from the Black working class and poor by tying “hard working, determined Blacks” into the immigration narrative of white America, and silently pathologizing working-class and impoverished Blacks.

  It remains to be seen whether these types of tactics will begin to change the voting patterns within Black America. Some analysts have argued that a turn to conservatism could provide a whole new set of options for Black Americans. For myself, I stand with the late great Judge A. Leon Higginbotham , the noted Black American jurist. In an open letter to Clarence Thomas after his controversial Supreme Court appointment, Higginbotham addressed Thomas’s “Black conservatism” by remarking, “[O]ther than their own self-advancement, I am at a loss to understand what it is that the so-called Black conservatives are so anxious to conserve.” Higginbotham’s observations have no less relevance today than they did after Thomas’s confirmation. In the year 2000, Black Americans did not have anything more to conserve than they did in 1992, and there was nothing that Colin Powell , Condoleezza Rice, or George W. Bush did to provide compelling evidence that they would change their trajectory.

  Staying Out of the Bushes: Barbara Lee and Cynthia McKinney

  On November 7, 2000, Al Gore thought that he had l
ost the presidency, but he wasn’t sure. After originally conceding the election, he retracted his concession and demanded a recount in what became the closest presidential election in American history. Vice President Al Gore led the popular vote by a narrow margin. In the 2000 election , the NAACP launched the biggest voter drive in its 91-year history, spending more than $10 million to encourage what civil rights leaders believe was the biggest Black voter turnout in decades. Voting records confirmed that Black voters in Florida and around the country turned out in record numbers. Yet after the election, many complained that Florida election officials removed large numbers of minorities from state voting rolls, wrongly classifying them as convicted felons. Florida electoral officials were also accused of using police to intimidate voters in some areas. The Reverend Jesse Jackson cited the reports of students from historically Black colleges in Florida, who said they went to the polls carrying voter identification cards and were told that they were not on the voter rolls. After the Florida recount (overseen by Governor Jeb Bush , the Republican candidate’s brother), the Supreme Court’s 7-2 opinion concluded that the recounts would violate the Constitutional guarantees of equal protection under the law, since the counts were being conducted under different standards in different counties. Reverend Jesse Jackson compared the decision to the infamous nineteenth- century rulings upholding slavery and later, segregation. Pennsylvania Representative Chakah Fattah called the decision “out of step with a century of American progress” toward voting rights. Under the direction of Dr. Mary Frances Berry , the US Commission on Civil Rights undertook an investigation into allegations by Floridians of voting irregularities, but this did not change the outcome: Bush’s accession to the presidency.