Cultural Shift in Black Politics
I have been dying to weigh in on the historic campaigns of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, but until now I have stayed out of the fray. But now that this Blog has changed direction, I feel as though the time is right to comment. No doubt both of these campaigns are historically important, but as a woman of color I find Barack Obama's campaign very intriguing not because of the historical significance of electing a black president. I find it interesting because of what it says about the political maturation of the black electorate.
My husband and I were having lunch in a local restaurant today and an older gentleman struck up a conversation with us. He started to tell us how the hospital where his mother worked for more than 30 years used to have a separate door for him and all other blacks marked "colored." That of course, is not shocking. This is Birmingham Alabama. What was intriguing to me was what he said after that. He said that if you had ever before told him that a black man who was not "from the hood" and not a member of the clergy would be a serious candidate for President of the United States who would never have believed it.
His words made me think that perhaps the reason he is a serious candidate is because he is not from the hood and not a member of the clergy. Simply put, Barack Obama is indicative of a new class of blacks who are redefining how they will interact with the larger society. Until now, the old guard of black leadership consisted largely of members of the clergy and some politicians who used the rhetoric of the church to dictate policy to the mass black electorate. As the civil rights era ended and blacks began to leave the vestiges of Jim Crow behind, this old paradigm began to shift and with it the role of the old guard is becoming less prominent.
In response to the shift many of the old guard took the position that those who did not come from that tradition were not black enough or had forgotten where they had come from. The old guard perpetuated the stereotype of black voters as a monolith who would tow the party line if a politician came to the black church and said that they felt the pain of the black masses because it perpetuated their power and access to the people who were really in power. But with Barack Obama, the old guard has been upended by their own failure to believe in his potential to shift the paradigm of racial politics.
As a result, now we are seeing a schism between the so-called leadership and the masses they purport to speak for. Who knows how it will all shake out but these are very interesting days indeed.
