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 incom
e 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
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