Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Trump

by Duchess Harris

  The President proved Dowd’s point when he commented on Sherrod’s forced resignation in a speech he gave at the National Urban League Centennial Conference on July 29, 2010. He agreed that people should have frank discussions about “…the divides that still exist—the discrimination that’s still out there, the prejudices that still hold us back….”,49 but he says these discussions should happen “…not on cable TV, not just through a bunch of academic symposia or fancy commissions or panels, not through political posturing, but around kitchen tables, and water coolers, and church basements, and in our schools, and with our kids all across the country.” At water coolers and kitchen tables? So apparently Americans should talk about race, and the President may do so as well, but not on TV or any other public forum. And when it comes to healing the 400 + -year racial divide, and addressing the increasingly racist fever demonstrated by the extreme right, leadership, particularly by this country’s first African-American President, was not required.

  The White House may not have wanted Obama to be seen as favoring African-Americans, but he neglected them at his political peril, because it was African-Americans, and especially African-American women, who helped to elect Obama to the White House. There was no doubt that we wanted him to succeed. Even after the unfair treatment Sherrod received from the administration, she said, “We love him. We want him to be successful because we feel he thinks in some ways like we do.”50 Black leaders trod softly in their criticism of Obama, fearing condemnation from their supporters and the White House, said Martin, but with Kagan’s appointment and then Sherrod’s dismissal, the feelings of love and the hesitation to criticize the President were felt to be subsiding. The Black Women’s Roundtable voiced their disappointment with Obama for once again overlooking qualified Black women in his Supreme Court nomination choice. Sherrod, while professing her wish for the President’s success, voiced her opinion on his lack of understanding of the experience of Black women (“people like me”).51 If Obama is not ready to address his “Black Woman problem,”52 as freelance journalist Jeff Winbush called it, by showing them some of the love they’ve given him, the least he could do is acknowledge the racism that clearly still exists in America, even under a Black President, and demonstrate leadership on the issue of racism at the national level.

  Presidential Accountability Commission and Looking Ahead

  In 2008, at its State of the Black World Conference in New Orleans, the Institute of the Black World twenty-first Century (IBW) announced a new initiative: the Shirley Chisholm Presidential Accountability Commission (SCPAC), named in honor of the first black woman elected to Congress and the first black woman to seek the Democratic nomination for president. The Commission’s members were charged with the task of grading presidential administrations on how their practices and policies affect African-Americans. The Commission was comprised of 11 members, including Syracuse University professor Dr. Boyce Watkins and Dr. Julianne Malveaux , president of Bennett College for Women. Said Richard Adams, Chairman of the Board of IBW and convener of the Commission:The Shirley Chisholm Accountability Commission was not organized to react to President Barack Obama. As we indicated when the idea of the Commission was announced at the State of the Black World Conference, we need a mechanism that can monitor progress on the Black Agenda, no matter who occupies the White House. We finally have a structure that can fulfill that function in Black America.53

  Of course, because of timing, the Obama administration was the first to receive a grade from the Commission. In October 2009, talking to Essence.com, Dr. Malveaux shared a story of Franklin D. Roosevelt telling civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph and other black leaders concerned about jobs for African-Americans to “raise enough hell” so that Roosevelt had no choice but to address their needs.54 She related the anecdote to the Commission and Obama: “He’s our brother, and he gets it, but we’re not his only constituency. He’s not the President of Black America. We have to make him do right. He’s not going to do right just ‘cause. We’ve got to make him.”55

  In full disclosure, I was also a member of the Commission. It was our hope that the work of the Commission and letters like that of the Black Women’s Roundtable would begin the hell-raising that needed to be done in order to get President Obama’s attention, force him to address race, and compel him to create policies that clearly assist African-Americans. On June 18, 2010, the inaugural meeting of the Commission was held, featuring a discussion titled “Black America: The Economic State of Emergency,” in which the problem of joblessness and unemployment in African-American communities was addressed. It was an issue that, sadly, had not been covered by any major media outlet, or championed by any presidential appointee, or even mentioned by the President himself.

  Who Are the “We” in “We Are the Ones We’ve Been Waiting for”?

  In his 2008 inaugural speech, Obama said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek.” But ironically for African-Americans, and Black women in particular, the administration was not as inclusive of the “we” that we had assumed it would be. Instead, in America’s first black President, we had someone who was paralyzed at the very mention of race, someone who was more concerned about appearing impartial than providing leadership to a still racially divided nation, and someone who was unable to even defend himself in the face of egregious racist slurs, preferring to be “above it all” while letting his political opponents slay his popularity by tapping into the latent xenophobic and racist fears that have long plagued this country. His appointment of Sonia Sotomayor suggested a serious effort at diversifying the government, and immediately following his election, Obama’s appointment of numerous Black women to staff and cabinet positions within his administration seemed like the first rewards for the support African-American women gave him. Eleanor Holmes Norton , in speaking of Valerie Jarrett’s authority, euphorically stated, “I’m not sure there’s ever been a black woman who has enjoyed as much of the president’s confidence as Valerie Jarrett. She has not been compartmentalized and is used in a variety of ways that I think is a first. The Obama women are a sign of how far we’ve come.”56 But Obama’s lukewarm and slow responses to the resignation of his press secretary and Sherrod’s firing, and the exclusion of Black female candidates for Supreme Court consideration, suggested the importance of those early appointments was quickly forgotten.

  Perhaps Teresa Wilz’s idea of trickle-down improvement was shared by Obama. She suggested that the mere sight of these successful Black women in Obama’s cabinet would make the notion of an educated, African-American woman less unusual, more mainstream. Based on Obama’s aversion to talking about race, it seemed that he was also hoping for the trickle-down effect, but Malveaux was right—we needed to force the conversation then. Shirley Sherrod, Desiree Rogers, Leah Ward Sears, and all the other Black women who supported Obama in his campaign were ignored at the peril of his political future.

  But What About Loretta Lynch?

  There was one other Black woman who held a high Cabinet post in the Obama administration, and that came toward the end of his presidency. Loretta Lynch, a Harvard-educated attorney, was familiar to Obama and came to the appointment with a curried pedigree. Having served as US Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, a highly visible position in the judiciary, from 1999 to 2001 (during the Clinton era) and again from 2010 to 2015, as well as the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Lynch was highly skilled, well-respected, and well-connected.

  Obama nominated Lynch for position of US Attorney General in early November 2014, a bid to fill the seat that was being left vacant by outgoing Attorney General, Eric Holder, who was also African-American. Lynch was confirmed by the House and Senate and was sworn into the position of Attorney General in late April 2015. She became the first Black woman to ever fulfill the role and only the second Black person and second woman to fulfill the position. When he forwarded her name for the nomination, President Obama praised her effusively, summ
ing up her experience and qualifications, both professional and personal, as follows:It’s pretty hard to be more qualified for this job than Loretta. Throughout her 30-year career, she has distinguished herself as tough, as fair, an independent lawyer who has twice headed one of the most prominent U.S. Attorney’s offices in the country. She has spent years in the trenches as a prosecutor, aggressively fighting terrorism, financial fraud, cybercrime, all while vigorously defending civil rights.

  A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Loretta rose from Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of New York to Chief of the Long Island Office, Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney, and U.S. Attorney. She successfully prosecuted the terrorists who plotted the bomb – plotted to bomb the Federal Reserve Bank and the New York City subway. She has boldly gone after public corruption, bringing charges against public officials in both parties. She’s helped secure billions in settlements from some of the world’s biggest banks accused of fraud, and jailed some of New York’s most violent and notorious mobsters and gang members.

  One of her proudest achievements was the civil rights prosecution of the officers involved in the brutal assault of the Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. Loretta might be the only lawyer in America who battles mobsters and drug lords and terrorists, and still has the reputation for being a charming “people person.”

  That’s probably because Loretta doesn’t look to make headlines, she looks to make a difference. She’s not about splash, she is about substance. I could not be more confident that Loretta will bring her signature intelligence and passion and commitment to our key priorities, including important reforms in our criminal justice system.57

  After her swearing in, Lynch was immediately confronted with a series of high-profile matters in which race played a significant, central role. There was the 2015 shooting at the Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a white supremacist’s gun rampage left nine Black church members dead. Lynch moved to charge shooter Dylann Roof with a hate crime, later announcing that the Department of Justice would pursue the death penalty for Roof.58 Other race-related cases that she would address during her relatively brief tenure as Attorney General were the police-related deaths of Laquan McDonald and Eric Garner.

  Together, Obama and Lynch were criticized by the right for championing what they viewed as overly liberal views and policies—even before Lynch took office. Unsurprisingly, these criticisms themselves were largely framed through the lens of race. The National Review, in an editorial calling upon Republicans to vote against Lynch’s nomination as a “rebuke” to Obama, epitomized such arguments by contending that Lynch had “been the beneficiary of a glut of identity politics” at the dangerous intersection of gender and race. “[S]upporters [of Lynch] have hardly finished attacking opponents as racist before labeling them sexist as well,” the magazine’s editorial board wrote.59 In a separate editorial on the same subject, the editors continued, “As an African-American woman, Lynch represents a gloriously double-barrelled opportunity to accuse Republicans of sub-rosa hatreds.”60

  Lynch did not meet a similar fate as those confronted by other Black women in the Obama administration, and that may be due in large part to the fact that she served a short term, one that was ended by the fact that Obama’s own term as president was ending. At the same time, however, Lynch’s tenure was not unmarked by scandal. Former FBI director James Comey cast doubt on Lynch’s independence and impartiality with respect to her investigation and handling of her department’s investigations into the Hillary Clinton email debacle (which, readers will recall, was itself largely promulgated by Comey). The doubt cast on Lynch by Comey persisted even after she and President Obama left office, particularly in the lead-up to the 2018 release of Comey’s memoir, A Higher Loyalty.61 For his part, in the face of such criticisms, Obama was largely silent, allowing Lynch to defend herself, alone.

  Black Lives Matter and the Price of the Ticket

  You could fill the wing of a library with all of the books written about President Barack Obama. In Frederick C. Harris’ The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics, he argues that the election of Obama exacted a heavy cost on Black politics. Published in 2012—the same year that Trayvon Martin was killed—Harris’ book contends that Obama’s race-neutral approach to governing and policy-making, along with the Black elites’ refusal to pressure the president to address community interests, incurred a political price for Black Americans. Melanie Y. Price’s The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race, is the response to Frederick C. Harris’ call in The Price of the Ticket.

  Price’s work was lucid and compelling. She contextualized Barack Obama as uniquely situated to tap into multiple racial appeals. He was able to make authentic and politically useful connections to multiple groups, including whiteness, without actually being white. She explained that a significant portion of this ability stemmed from his capacity to tailor his biography to establish powerful connections with many groups. His multiracial background, his experiences living abroad, his Ivy League education, and his organizing skills all provided source material for bold and genuine claims to membership across and among identities and categories. In this way, he was able to tap into narratives of Blackness, whiteness, migration, and other identities with a good amount of credibility. Price’s book examined how he was able to do this, and the resulting implications for our understanding of Barack Obama’s racial legacy and the future of Black politics.

  I rely on Harris and Price because I don’t think you can address the policy agenda of Black Lives Matter without considering the fact that the most resistant Black activist movement since the Panther Party came on the scene during the second term of our first Black President. Price reminded us that there had been Black presidential candidates before—Chisholm in ’72, Jackson in ’84 and ’88, and Sharpton in ’04. As a young adult in the ’80s, I can’t imagine why my generation didn’t organize Black Lives Matter during the Reagan administration. We should have, but we didn’t.

  The policy agenda for Black Lives Matter has been relevant for as long as we have had Black lives. I did not expect the election of Barack Obama, either time, to give Black people political power. But the fact that we must still “demand” that all people have the right to vote, despite it being the twenty-first century, is ironic at best. Black Lives Matter is needed now more than ever because of backlash against Obama and the war against us. Knowing America the way that I do, some people will be afraid of the Black Lives Matter platform. As an academic, I know that we have seen this platform before. In 1963, the NAACP , Urban League, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and the Congress on Racial Equality came together with a set of goals:Passage of meaningful civil rights legislation;

  Immediate elimination of school segregation;

  A program of public works, including job training, for the unemployed;

  A Federal law prohibiting discrimination in public or private hiring;

  A $2-an-hour minimum wage nationwide;

  Withholding Federal funds from programs that tolerate discrimination;

  Enforcement of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution by reducing congressional representation from States that disenfranchise citizens;

  A broadened Fair Labor Standards Act to currently excluded employment areas;

  Authority for the Attorney General to institute injunctive suits when constitutional rights are violated.

  This was the platform for the March on Washington, one of the most celebrated events in our nation’s history. So why are we so afraid of Black Lives Matter and their six-point platform today?

  I would argue that many Americans, of many racial backgrounds, saw the election of a Black President as an opportunity for Black satisfaction, or rather, complacency. Since a Black man had reached the highest office in the nation, it obviously meant that racism was over. Nothing could be further from the truth.Price wr
ote,

  …[a]s America’s first Black president prepares to leave the White House, we have learned many lessons about race and politics. If Black politics remains a group-based endeavor that is led, in part, by Black elected officials, then Black elected officials have to talk about the way certain public policies continue have a disproportionate impact on Black communities. That is an explicit racial discussion that threatens to upset dominant perceptions and norms and potentially spurns white voters. Understanding how to simultaneously support Black candidates who run for office at the state and national level and a Black political agenda that ameliorates racial inequality is the most important challenge to emerge in the Obama era. (p. 156)

  That challenge has only become more urgent in the post-Obama era. I propose that the ticket that could save us is, in fact, the platform of Black Lives Matter. It’s a ticket we can’t afford not to buy. Otherwise, the price that we’ll continue to pay is the war on Black people; lack of reparations; lack of investment in Black communities, unaddressed economic injustice; continued political disenfranchisement; and lack of community control. Black Lives Matter in the post-Obama age just might be the fire this time.