The Future of Black Politics
Michael C. Dawson
This article is part of The Future of Black Politics, a forum on the power and potential of black movements.
People who live at the bottom of the social order, especially at the bottom of more than one of its hierarchies,
are frequently condemned to a life of crippling disadvantage. The existence of such mutually reinforcing power
hierarchies calls the social order itself into question as a matter of justice. Political movements need to disrupt
these hierarchies to overcome injustice.
In the United States, a healthy black politics is indispensable to that task. Black politics—African Americans’
ability to mobilize, influence policy, demand accountability from government officials, participate in American
political discourse, and ultimately offer a democratic alternative to the status quo—have at times formed the
leading edge of American democratic and progressive movements; black visions were some of the more
robust, egalitarian, and expansive American democratic visions. This status has been lost.
The decline of progressive black politics is apparent in the Occupy actions that have swept the country to
protest economic injustice. There has been black participation, and in some areas, such as Chicago, black
efforts to mobilize communities have been aided by the presence of a local Occupy movement. But, for the
most part, Occupy has been divorced from black politics.
Yet both today’s black communities and black political traditions have much to offer Occupy and progressives
at large. Blacks are more supportive than any other group of Americans of state action to redistribute wealth
and bring about a more equal and just society. A National Journal poll released last October found that 84
percent of blacks support a surtax on people earning more than $1 million per year, compared to 68 percent
support overall. They are also the strongest opponents of U.S. military intervention: blacks opposed the 2003
intervention in Iraq at far higher rates than did any other group, including Democrats. Black progressive
traditions have long offered a more just and democratic vision than is usually found in American political
discourse. Ida B. Wells, Marcus Garvey, William Monroe Trotter, Hubert Harrison, A. Philip Randolph, Cyril
Briggs, and W. E. B. Du Bois are just a few of the many activist-theoreticians (they tended to be both) who led
movements dedicated to fighting for racial justice and in most cases offered a broad vision of social and
economic justice as well.
Today there is a disconnect between black organizing and other mobilizations on behalf of labor, suffrage, and
radical economic reform. Even worse, the black civil society that in the past supported flourishing black
activism is today weaker than it was for most of the twentieth century. Without a mobilized black politics,
American democracy is even more vulnerable to internal attacks by those who have been openly suspicious of
mass democratic movements for decades.
The lack of a black political movement also feeds into the view, popular among some Americans, that we live
in a post-racial society. But our apparent post-racial order, signified by President Obama’s election and
inauguration, is an illusion. The black poor, if anything, find themselves in conditions of greater deprivation now
than at any time in the recent past. Racial inequality remains a brute fact of life in this country. The interracial
political unity that is supposed to herald a truly post-racial society also does not exist. Blacks and whites
remain bitterly divided in their political beliefs. This political division has led to desperation and anger in many
black communities.
And that anger and throttling despair have replaced the insurgent forces of the civil rights era—insurgent
because the change these forces sought was nothing less than transformative.
Rebuilding black progressive movements requires recovering the spirit and politics of the militant Martin Luther
King Jr. of 1967–68, the King of Where Do We Go from Here. This King was anti-war and anti-imperialist, a
severe critic of both the totalitarian impulses of Leninism and the savage denigration of poor people inherent in
the logics of unregulated capitalism. This was the King who explained, “Black Power, in its broad and positive
meaning, is a call to black people to amass the political and economic strength to achieve their legitimate
goals.” Among the many still-relevant lessons of Where Do We Go From Here is that blacks need to fight both
for black power and against the ravages of capitalism on behalf of all who are disadvantaged.
We need to reconstruct black politics. We need not and should not copy the movements of earlier generations
but should instead follow their lead by building movements based on our own realities. However, we can learn
from earlier movements’ understanding that the quests for racial and economic justice for all are intertwined,
from their uncompromising spirit, and from their realization that building a better society means mobilizing an
entire community.
The State of Black America
Historically, black and progressive movements have begun with an account of the challenges that people face,
an understanding of their sources, and a keen grasp of how they are reproduced by the workings of power
both inside and outside disadvantaged communities.
What are today’s challenges, and what are their sources? The scale of the problems confronting those
dedicated to social, economic, and political justice for blacks is immense. While persistent racial injustice
remains a core source of these problems, the changing material reality facing African Americans—due largely
to the economic transformations of neoliberalism—poses its own sets of hazards and obstacles to a vibrant
black politics.
In 2007 the median black income was only 59 percent of the median white income. At the bottom of the income
distribution, the racial disparities are even greater. Black poverty rates run twice that of whites. One of the
reasons behind continuing high levels of black poverty is unemployment. For most of the past twenty years,
blacks have suffered double-digit levels of unemployment. Since the 1950s black unemployment has generally
been at least twice that of white Americans. According to official government figures, which omit a large
number of people who are out of work, by October 2011, black unemployment had soared to 15 percent,
compared to a nearly as catastrophic 11 percent rate for Latinos and a still-devastating, but much lower, rate of
8 percent for whites.
In the past, black politics offered one of the most expansive, egalitarian visions of American democracy.
Changes, some of them politically motivated, in the American economy—the shrinking of government labor
forces at all levels, the decline of manufacturing—have played a large role in sustaining high rates of black
unemployment. However, old-fashioned racial discrimination is also involved, as demonstrated by a 2003
American Economic Review study, “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?” The
researchers found that employers were much less likely to call back job seekers who have “black-sounding”
names than those with “white-sounding” names, even though applicants had identical résumés. The
researchers show that this finding holds across occupational categories involving a range of skill and education
requirements.
With or without black-sounding names, being black simply makes it harder to get a job. As the sociologist
Devah Pager recounts in her book Marked, “Blacks are less than half as likely to receive consideration by
employers than equally qualified whites, and black nonoffenders fare no better than even those whites with
prior felony convictions.”
The black-white income gap was stable from 1986 to 2007, with the highest-earning quintile of black
households receiving about the same income as the second-highest-earning quintile of white households. The
gap reflects persistent inequality in the earning power of blacks and whites. However, within the black
community the divide has widened: the income of the top quintile of black households has risen significantly in
recent years, but not so the income of the lowest-earning black families, exacerbating class divisions among
blacks.
In addition to high unemployment, the mortgage crisis has been magnified in black communities due to a
combination of factors: the concentration of blacks in segregated areas, poverty, and discriminatory loan
practices. Blacks are only 13 percent of the population, but held half of the high-cost mortgages that have been
so burdensome during the economic downturn. At the height of the financial crisis, one-third of blacks seeking
conventional home loans were denied, compared to only 15 percent of white applicants.
The discrimination that poor and middle-class blacks face in housing, employment, loan, and financial markets
feeds future economic disadvantage by limiting blacks’ ability to generate wealth and transfer it to succeeding
generations. Black wealth remains a minuscule fraction of white wealth. The median net worth of blacks is
$5,446, while for whites it is $87,056, a less than 1:15 ratio. The plight of the black poor is particularly
devastating, leaving once-stable working-class black communities and families increasingly isolated and
disconnected from the mainstream economy. While the black middle class, particularly the upper middle class,
is doing better than ever—at least it was, until the latest financial crisis—poor blacks are arguably worse off
than they were a generation ago.
Compounding economic disadvantage, the extraordinary rate of incarceration of African Americans is a
disaster for political activists and the black community. In 2007 one out of a hundred Americans was
incarcerated. That is by far the highest rate in the world, and the figures are even worse for African Americans.
That year, one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34 was in jail or prison. In all, one out of fifteen
adult black men was behind bars, along with one in a hundred black women, as compared to one in 335 white
women. While these numbers are in themselves distressing, they also contribute significantly to weakening
economic prospects for African Americans and to widening class divisions.
The black community also faces severe health challenges. Black children are at greater risk of death by both
“natural” and unnatural causes. Blacks are six times more likely than whites to be murdered. Forty percent of
black adults and one-third of Latino adults did not have health insurance in 2007, as opposed to 14 percent of
white adults. According to the Annual Review of Psychology report “Race, Race-Based Discrimination, and
Health Outcomes among African Americans,” black mortality rates in 2006 were the same as white rates 30
years earlier. Even after controlling for socioeconomic status, age, and insurance status, a major study,
Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care, found that doctors are less
aggressive in treating African American patients, give them fewer referrals, and generally provide them poorer
care.
Finally, blacks continue to be ravaged by HIV/AIDS. In 2005 the rate of diagnosis for black adults and
adolescents was ten times that for whites. This problem does not affect all segments of the black community
equally. As the political scientist Cathy Cohen has demonstrated, the black poor suffer secondary
marginalization within the black community. Cohen’s research shows that at the beginning of the AIDS crisis,
black organizations and leaders marginalized black gay and lesbian communities as well as intravenous drug
users.
The massive inter- and intra-racial disparities facing black Americans are stunning in their own right. They also
have political ramifications. Unifying African Americans around political causes has grown more challenging
because the existence of “the” black community can no longer be assumed. It must be articulated politically.
Nor can traditional allies in fighting economic injustice—labor unions, other people of color—be counted on.
Neoliberalism—the dismantling of the state, privileging of markets over all other institutions, and relentless
catering to corporate interests—has reshaped the economic and political terrain, sharpened class cleavages,
and pitted disadvantaged groups against each other, presenting new challenges for any emergent black
political movement.
The Nadir of Black Politics
Consider the experience of the black poor in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, in which all these factors
helped ensure the failure of black mobilization efforts. The disaster laid bare the savagery of class
disadvantage in this country. It also made clear that racial disadvantage in the United States cannot be
reduced to class disadvantage, as blacks across class divides suffered disproportionately with respect to their
white counterparts. We know that it was the black elderly who were most likely to die and the black poor who
were most likely to be trapped in the city and then dispersed throughout the nation. Yet blacks and their allies
failed to influence the response to the disaster and its victims.
In the weeks that followed the disaster, even the veneer of rationality and the language of sober
policymaking—which have long masked initiatives that hurt blacks and the poor, and disproportionately the
black poor—were thin or nonexistent. A month after the storm, Richard Baker, then the U.S. representative
from Louisiana’s Sixth District and dean of the state’s congressional delegation, said on national television,
“We finally cleared up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.”
When plans for the city started to emerge, black residents, given their recent experience and the resurgence of
open racism within the region, were understandably worried. They feared that a citywide vote on a master plan
would be used to prevent the rebuilding of their neighborhoods. So they mobilized.
The AFL-CIO and many other organizations and individuals attempted to intervene in the hope of rebuilding
poor black communities. The urban theorist Phillip Thompson argues that the wave of white (and other) young
people who went to the city to help rebuild was reminiscent of an earlier generation of youth who headed to the
South to participate heroically in the civil rights movement.
But the post-Katrina mobilization failed in the face of obstacles put in place by local, state, and national political
leaders. Thompson relates how the Bush administration ordered the demolition of several hundred relatively
undamaged public housing units shortly after the unions and Mayor Ray Nagin had announced plans to
refurbish them.
Katrina’s aftermath reveals the extent to which neoliberal justifications are used to reestablish the old racial
and class orders. For example, in the name of efficient land-use policy, there have been several proposals to
build a golf course on the former site of a poor neighborhood. It should be no surprise then that half of New
Orleans’s elderly and disabled could not return to the city. In 2007 Policy Link, a policy institute focused on the
poor and people of color, estimated that “barely two in five Louisiana families who relied on rental housing
before the storms will even have the option of returning to an affordable home.” The situation was dire enough
that the United Nations called for an immediate halt in the destruction of public housing.
The black poor, if anything, suffer greater deprivation now than at any time in the recent past.
In Mississippi, efforts to use the disaster to further a neoliberal corporate agenda were even more blatant.
Though the Mississippi Governor’s Commission acknowledged that Katrina had “a particularly devastating
impact on low-wealth residents who lacked an economic safety net,” Governor Haley Barbour redirected $600
million of recovery aid to enhance the port of Gulfport, which suffered only $50 million in damage. To do so,
Barbour required—and received from the Bush administration—a waiver of the federal requirement that 50
percent of recovery funds be used to “benefit low- and moderate-income people.”
Even more telling was the readiness of the Bush administration, at the behest of their corporate friends in the
Gulf, to roll back a slew of regulations protecting workers. These included OSHA health and safety regulations,
requirements that contractors pay prevailing wages to workers on federal contracts, and affirmative action
provisions. Officials were also allowed to issue no-bid contracts and authorized contractors to “lure”
undocumented workers from Mexico and Latin America—indeed, from as far away as India—without fear of
employer sanctions. As a 2008 Oxfam America report put it, “While these federal waivers were eventually
rescinded, they sent a powerful signal to the marketplace and set a low threshold for the future protection of
workers’ rights.”
Predictably, the waivers made the work of building alliances between black and Latino workers more difficult.
Black workers and communities resented an immigrant population that displaced them from good jobs by
working for substandard wages under bad conditions. Latino and other immigrants in turn adopted negative
views of the black population, their perceptions shaped by a globalized and Americanized media that
demonizes blacks.
At the same time, a public opinion study commissioned by Oxfam in Katrina’s aftermath highlights common
concerns and interests among black and Latino communities, which could be the basis for building a unified
movement. Potentially heartening is that both blacks and Latinos identified the same three critical problems:
affordable housing, access to health care, and “receiving fair treatment from the criminal justice system.” While
the study also reveals significant hurdles—especially a lack of trust—to building black-Latino alliances in the
Gulf, it notes that more than 80 percent of both groups believe those alliances are important.
Sign of Hope
While black political movements are not as effective on the national scene as they once were, there have been
encouraging experiences at the local level. Mobilization around racial and economic justice has blocked the
construction of big-box stores in poor urban neighborhoods, demonstrating that the kinds of appeals historically
associated with black politics can still move citizens to action.
Big-box corporations such as Walmart like to put their stores in poor neighborhoods because devastated local
economies offer little competition. Thanks to high unemployment, these neighborhoods also supply a pool of
employees who will work for very low wages. Such corporations also perceive these minority communities as
politically powerless.
Opposition to the stores has come from a variety of sources that suggest possible alliances for black activists.
According to the sociologist William Sites, anti-Walmart alliances have included labor, feminists, small
businesses and other preexisting commercial concerns, environmentalists, local residents, and civil and
immigrant rights organizations.
The relationships between “the” black community and movements opposing Walmart have differed depending
on the city; outcomes have differed too. Black and Latino communities successfully united to prevent the
construction of a Walmart in Inglewood, California, just outside Los Angeles. But in Chicago the mobilization
efforts failed.
In Inglewood and in Chicago, opposition was focused on many of the same concerns. Most important, African
Americans and their allies in both cities by and large rejected Walmart’s argument that it was contributing to
black economic empowerment. Not only did Walmart jobs pay far less than the manufacturing positions that
had moved out of the proposed Chicago site, but unionized grocery jobs that other retailers could have
provided there paid 50 percent more than jobs at Walmart.
In both cities Walmart sought to neutralize opposition by co-opting institutions and organizations within the
black community that often had been important forces for economic justice. Walmart poured money into black
civil society, funding church projects, community groups, and civil rights organizations.
But critical differences between Inglewood and Chicago helped produce the divergent results. One major
difference was the role of black leaders and elected officials. In Inglewood labor organizers, many of whom
were women of color, opposed the Walmart store, helping to create unity among community members. In
Chicago black elected officials, organizations and public figures associated with civil rights, and the black
ministerial community split down the middle. Some sided with unions and other anti-Walmart forces. Others,
including the local NAACP and civil rights leader Andrew Young, sided with Walmart.
Frustrated anti-Walmart activists accused leaders of selling out while posturing about racial justice. But the
reasons for supporting Walmart weren’t necessarily venal. Some local leaders genuinely agreed with
Walmart’s claim that the store was beneficial for the community because it would provide jobs and goods. The
company was able to point to the large numbers of job applications it had received, up to 50 for each opening.
In two majority-black Chicago neighborhoods proposed as Walmart sites, the aldermen emphasized the
extreme economic deprivation of their wards as their primary grounds for supporting Walmart. To these black
leaders, the store was better than nothing.
Yet black Chicagoans overwhelmingly opposed city policies enticing Walmart and other big boxes to their
communities. They also sought to restrain Walmart’s rapacity. In June 2005, 91 percent of black registered
voters—and a majority of all voters—supported a citywide ordinance requiring big boxes to pay a living wage.
Walmart, other big-box firms, and their allies inside and outside of municipal government tried to prevent the
passage of the ordinance. Though it initially passed the city council with a “veto-proof” majority, Mayor Daley
vetoed the bill anyway, and pro–big box forces launched an intense media campaign that painted the
ordinance’s supporters as white outsiders unconcerned with the welfare of poor blacks in Chicago.
Even after the explicit racial framing of the debate by big-box supporters, 81 percent of black registered voters
remained firmly behind the measure. Yet Daley’s veto was sustained, as three aldermen who had previously
supported the bill switched their votes.
Martin Luther King warned of middle-class comfort smothering concern for justice.
Some scholars have viewed these conflicts in terms of black communities versus white labor. But the Chicago
experience shows that this is a mischaracterization. At the root of the failure was the black community’s
inability to hold their elected officials accountable. Black leaders in Chicago and elsewhere haven’t always
appreciated black progressive organizations, but in the past those organizations could still apply pressure. I
found the same pattern when I was an activist years ago in Northern California. Historically, secular and sacred
black organizations inside and outside of the electoral system mobilized to hold leaders, officials, and public
and private organizations accountable for their actions.
The lack of an independent black progressive movement and of independent black progressive political
organizations has deprived black citizens of the institutional forces needed to hold their leaders accountable.
This organizational weakness has made it harder to forge alliances outside the black community. It has also
created an opening for neoliberal forces to undermine black politics even as they finance some components of
black civil society.
As King, Du Bois, Malcolm X, and many other leading activists pointed out generations ago, the black elite,
particularly the middle-class black elite, is very prone to compromise and forging alliances with the powers that
be. King warned of the road where middle-class black comfort smothers concern for justice.
Today, segments of the black middle class and leadership provide shelter for neoliberal black elites who
repeatedly work against the interests of the majority of African Americans in any number of ways, such as by
supporting cuts in the social safety net, promoting big-box stores in poor communities, and backing corporate
media that oppose net neutrality, without which the digital divide will be further intensified.
The Way Forward
Political and social organizing efforts are underway in many communities, but there are obstacles preventing
their coalescence into a mass movement. One is the absence of coordination and information-sharing among
communities—particularly those in different regions but with a common heritage of black progressive
organizing.
Another is the lack of independence from immediate political concerns. We know that the grassroots can
generate significant mobilization around the campaigns of exceptional candidates, but that mobilization hasn’t
produced a progressive movement with the power to last beyond the electoral cycle. Further, an independent
movement is necessary for the inevitable times when one must criticize a candidate’s or office holder’s policy
positions.
Immigration also has massively transformed other communities of color, making alliance-building more
challenging.
Most of all, those engaged in rebuilding black politics have to rethink the structures and roles of political
organizations. They need to make new demands on the state; we need new visions that are worth fighting for.
Political discourse in the United States, and globally, naturalizes the current state of affairs—what Malcolm X
would call the “American nightmare”—as the best of all possible worlds. New black institutions and movements
must counter this dangerous myth with the belief that democracy, freedom, justice, egalitarianism, pleasure,
health, and human development should be, and will be, consistent with our economic and political
arrangements.
We must reject what the political theorist Robert Meister describes as the extreme narrowing of our aspirations,
the replacement of the twentieth-century quest for social equality with a limited human rights agenda that “is
generally more defensive than utopian, standing for the avoidance of evil rather than a vision of the good.”
Alain Badiou warns, “If we accept the inevitability of the unbridled capitalist economy and the parliamentary
politics that supports it, then we quite simply cannot see the other possibilities that are inherent in the situation
in which we find ourselves.”
How do we find the way forward? Slavoj Žižek argues that we need utopias, imaginative visions of what a
society based on promoting human flourishing could be, and, like Badiou, he highlights the potency of a
prevailing neoliberal ideology that both thwarts analysis of our current dilemmas and promotes false ideas of
the good society:
Thirty, forty years ago we were still debating about what the future would be, communist, fascist, capitalist,
whatever. Today nobody even debates this issue. We all silently accept, global capitalism is here to stay. On
the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophe, the whole life on earth disintegrating because of
some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on. So the paradox is that it is much easier to
imagine the end of all life on earth than a much more modest radical change in capitalism. Which means that
we should reinvent utopia—but in what sense? . . . [True] utopia is a matter of innermost urgency. You are
forced to imagine it as the only way out. And this is what we need today.
The great service Obama did black people and Americans more generally was to help us all once again think
about the impossible. In 2008 the impossible was the election of an African American in a society that had
been shaped by white supremacy. Unfortunately, President Obama has not contributed to our understanding of
the possible when it comes to more just and equitable social and political institutions, or a more just, less
imperialist foreign policy. Yet if a relatively small dream can come true, maybe we can dream larger dreams of
a just and democratic reordering in which society and state meet their obligations to all of their emancipated
and flourishing citizens.
We must “tell no lies, claim no easy victories,” Amílcar Cabral, the Guinea-Bissauan nationalist leader, said of
the process of imagining new worlds. We need to understand the conditions from which we must build. So we
need a pragmatic utopianism, which starts where we are and imagines where we want to be.
Pragmatic utopianism is not new to black radicalism. King and the civil rights movement combined a utopian
image of a very different America, one they were repeatedly told was impossible to obtain, with hardheaded
political realism and goal-oriented strategies. Indeed, King’s Memphis campaign to support black sanitation
workers, and, even more so, the Poor People’s Campaign that he was about to launch at the time of his death,
were designed explicitly to take on what Walter Mosley has called the “voracious maw of capitalism,” achieve
economic justice for all, and in the process build the interracial unity that had been, and remains, so elusive.
What should our utopian vision look like, and what strategies will help us achieve it? I do not know everything
about how the world should be. I can only start the discussion by offering a few suggestions about what I see
as necessary. These suggestions are not listed in order of priority, and, even more emphatically, they are not
exhaustive. As Mosley argues, we must all develop and share our own lists, and argue in public about them.
1) Address racial resentment. Barbara Ehrenreich and Dedrick Muhammad’s work on the racial realities of the
economic crisis and white racial resentment reinforces the need for a conversation about race that presents
the facts of race in America and gives Americans a context for listening to each other, so that they begin to
understand their real interests. The white working and middle classes need to see that forming alliances with
non-white Americans is in their own interests. We also have to counter Fox News and its allies. We still have
Glenn Beck shouting to a very large and receptive audience that welfare programs such as universal health
care are “stealth reparations” because they disproportionately benefit people of color. Dialogue and eventual
reconciliation would be steps along the road to victory, not victory itself.
2) Rebuild the black public sphere, what I have called the black “counterpublic,” quickly and from the bottom
up. The “mainstream,” predominantly white public sphere largely excludes and often demonizes the political
viewpoints of the majority of African Americans on topics ranging from war in the Middle East to Katrina. The
black counterpublic opposes the exclusionary tendencies of mainstream publics. To help rebuild the black
counterpublic, we need to learn from the more innovative forces within the progressive movement. We can use
technology to help people in neighborhoods meet and talk face-to-face and to link these smaller groups to
each other. A successful black political movement will be at least as effective as the Obama campaign in using
the Web to give people at the local level the tools to help them organize themselves.
3) Hit the streets in larger numbers than African Americans do now and fight for unity with the forces that are
organizing for progressive, if still largely undefined, change. Franklin Roosevelt told progressive members of
Congress that he agreed with them, and they needed to force him to do what they all wanted. We need a real
grassroots movement, not the ersatz one foisted on us by the Obama of 2008, but one that transforms, not just
“tweaks,” the system.
4) Renew our commitment to the value of meaningful work for a living wage and to an educational system that
not only makes acquiring meaningful and rewarding work possible, but also allows each person to discover
what it means to flourish while contributing to society.
5) Innovate and experiment. One area that desperately needs the type of innovation and experimentation
generated by pragmatic-utopian thinking is the institutional arrangements that govern the functioning of modern
civil society, the state, and the relationship between the two. In his book Democracy Realized, Roberto Unger
argues that to achieve truly democratic societies we must concentrate on institutional changes that put into
place a robust and humane democracy. Phillip Thompson and his colleagues have advocated this sort of
institutional change through the “emerald cities” project. The aim is to create a large-scale partnership among
labor, business, government, community organizations, and others to transform urban areas including
Oakland, Cleveland, Atlanta, New York, and San Francisco. The idea, as the name indicates, is to make cities
sustainable through the application of green building standards to new and existing structures. But not just that.
Green projects will also create high-road, well-paid jobs and ensure work for disadvantaged populations.
Moreover, with the right financing mechanisms, the gains in energy efficiency will enable the projects to pay for
themselves. The principal challenge to achieving these ambitious goals is not technical or financial; it’s
political. And the principal way to meet that challenge is to rebuild democratic publics—publics that are not
exclusionary, that do not demonize, that serve as a democratic check on the state.
Unger argues that in order to design and implement such innovations, we must “speak in the two languages of
interest calculation and political prophecy”—pragmatic utopianism. He correctly points out that institutions
shape our perceptions of interests as well as our ideological predispositions, and that when designing
institutions we cannot allow them to become rigid and inflexible, no longer able to serve the needs of citizens.
Institutions must be able to adapt to new situations, adopt good ideas from elsewhere, and correct mistakes.
Given the influence of institutions in our lives, economics, and politics, we must be willing constantly to
innovate, tinker, and experiment.
6) Finally, blacks need to reclaim the proud, radical, anti-imperialist tradition of black politics. African
Americans generally continue to be against the use of the American military abroad. During the first half of the
2000s, blacks, unlike most whites, believed that protesting what one thought was an unjust war was perfectly
patriotic.
But since then black elites have been silent on U.S. involvement in foreign wars. And black intellectuals have
not put forward anti-imperialist analyses of the mass protests in the Middle East or growing leftism in Latin
America. Black movements and leaders should condemn the hypocrisy in U.S. foreign policy, whereby some
despots, such as Syria’s Assad, are criticized, while others, such as the leaders of Saudi Arabia, are left
relatively unscathed. There also needs to be more outrage about drone attacks that routinely kill innocent
civilians and over which there is little supervision. As the political scientist Lisa Wedeen argues, we should find
non-interventionist paths to oppose despotism and support democratic insurgencies. We should learn from the
moral and analytical failures of the first two periods of black leftist insurgency and eschew blind faith in foreign
models whether derived from China, African revolutionary movements, or the Soviet Union. But we need to try
to understand the democratic currents at work globally and embrace those that are most promising for
increasing democracy and well-being, even if in opposition to American foreign policy.
If a group aims to be truly emancipatory, if it is to transcend narrow self-interest and inspire others to join its
cause, then its mission must be universal. Black politics must rededicate itself to overturning white
supremacy—not only state-sanctioned white supremacy, but also the variety that permeates civil society in the
United States. To win a better life not only for the black poor but for humanity more generally, black politics
must rededicate itself to fighting the rogue capitalism that today dominates all aspects of our lives. Then black
politics will once again entail nothing less than the thorough transformation of the American society, economy,
and state. Once again black politics will compel the support of progressives who desire the emancipation of all
humanity.