Review, Manning Marable, The Crisis of Color and Democracy (Common Courage Press, 1991)

Columbia Missourian, August 2, 1992

“Democracy is not a thing,” Manning Marable writes, “it is a process of expanding opportunities for all citizens, and the ability to control decision-making from the bottom up. . . The challenge for all democracies is not to make the rich richer, but for all of us to exercise greater economic and political rights.” In The Crisis of Color and Democracy, Marable focuses on the interrelationship between race, poverty, and the current American political and economic system to show the paucity of democracy, which for most people consists largely of periodically voting in elections, choosing between two virtually indistinguishable candidates. Marable rejects this system as inherently racist and elitist; he calls instead for a democratic, multicultural socialism.

Marable is a professor of political science and history at the University of Colorado, but he is not content to write for a purely academic audience. One of the most visible African-American scholars in the country today, Marable takes seriously his position as a public intellectual, patterning himself after such exemplars of radical black thought as W.E.B. DuBois.

The book’s central theme is the need to find a new language and set of issues around which to build a mass democratic movement. Marable looks back to the civil rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, paying tribute to the leaders of that movement and their successes. He says the problems have changed since then, yet the leaders of the black community continue to speak in the rhetoric of the civil rights period. Meanwhile, white leaders have infused politics and the economy with a new style of racism—what Marable terms “non-racist racism”--which avoids overtly prejudiced rhetoric or behavior but allows society’s political and economic structures to exacerbate the polarization of the races.

Ironically, the changing nature of American racism results largely from the successes of the civil rights movement in ending legalized segregation, which has fractured the black community. “A central factor which always kept different social classes and income groups together in the black community was the commonality of our oppression,” Marable writes. “Jim Crow segregation was in essence ‘non-discriminatory discrimination.’ Segregation equally affected the black middle class, blue-collar workers and the unemployed. Blacks on welfare and Ph.D.s alike were ordered to the back of the bus, or were denied positions solely based on race.” As the entire community was segregated, blacks developed their own economic institutions. The black middle class—doctors, lawyers, educators, businesspeople—depended on a black clientele. In this way, the black middle class saw its own advancement as directly tied to the black community as a whole.

In breaking down Jim Crow barriers, the civil rights movement largely succeeded in integrating this black middle class into the American middle class as a whole. Thus the movement was extremely beneficial for a minority of blacks. But in the process, it cut the ties between the black middle class and the black working and lower classes. No longer did middle-class blacks see their own advancement and that of their race as inextricably tied. The result has been the economic decline and continued, even intensified, segregation of the black majority.

The best essays in the book discuss the ways racism permeates our social structures and has gown worse in the nearly four decades since the rise of the civil rights movements. “Our cities,” Marable writes, “have become more racially segregated than ever before; public schools in urban areas have deteriorated with declining tax bases and the flight of the middle classes to the suburbs. The signs reading ‘white’ and ‘colored’ are no longer present in the doorways of the schools, but the segregation of income, poverty and the ghetto has, in effect, reversed the Brown decision (outlawing school segregation).”

The decline of inner-city schools has fostered what Marable calls an “educational underclass.” In many states, the high school dropout rate for minority students exceeds 50 percent. But even for those who graduate, many don’t receive serious training in mathematics, science and computers, the fields necessary for them to fit into the increasingly high-tech job market. “It won’t be long before a new form of ‘segregation’ will exist to threaten the prospects of millions of black youth. . . . [T]he new segregation of the twenty-first century could be the division between the educated ‘haves’ and the uneducated have nots.’”

Marable argues that race affects several issues not commonly seen as being racial. For instance, he says the decline of the American auto industry has had an especially severe impact on black Americans. U.S. car manufacturers employ a relatively high percentage of African Americans, and as these companies increasingly move their factories overseas or use cybernation, the resultant unemployment hits black workers especially hard. Meanwhile, many of the new Japanese auto factories are being located in areas with significantly lower black populations. The result has often been devastating to Northern cities with large black populations. After General Motors’ pullout from Flint, Michigan, Marable says, “sections of Flint look like they’ve been blasted with neutron bombs. Black youth unemployment is over 50 percent. Teenagers complain that they have only four real options: working at minimum wage; becoming pregnant and existing on welfare; joining the armed services; or selling drugs. The economic crisis has generated black-on-black crime, alcoholism, drug abuse and the disruption of many institutions such as the black church.”

But Marable’s focus is not exclusively racial. Poverty is not only the problem of blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities. More than 60 percent of Americans living in poverty and nearly two-thirds of people living in public housing projects are white. Marable encourages blacks to keep this reality in mind in seeking to build a mass movement, pointing out that in the last years of his life Martin Luther King Jr. moved beyond solely seeking to end segregation to try building an interracial coalition of the poor.

Marable is extremely critical of the current state of black leadership, claiming most black leaders lack sufficient vision. For example, he says of Marion Barry that his “greatest tragedy was his failure of vision. The great strength of the black freedom struggle’s political tradition, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr., was the linkage between politics and ethics. What was morally correct was also politically correct. Barry’s contempt for the ethics of the black struggle, his contempt for his wife, children and constituents, could never be justified.”

The leadership of black conservatives, who urge blacks to quit emphasizing the harm done by racism and concentrate on solidifying their economic position, especially draws Marable’s fire. For instance, he labels Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas “the black ideological twin of [Justice] David Souter,” both chosen for their mediocrity, not their “legal vision or moral compassion.” But Marable’s criticism of black conservatives misses a fundamental point. He portrays people such as Thomas, educator Joe Clark, and intellectuals Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele solely as sycophantic products of the white power structure. In fact, such people are indigenous products of the black community, part of a tradition of black leaders preaching self-help, running back at least as far as Booker T. Washington at the beginning of the century. Certainly Uncle Tomming has sometimes been a part of this tradition, but the ethic of economic self-help was also instrumental in the formation during the Jim Crow era of the black middle class Marable praises. When Marable says these leaders lack vision, what he really means is that they don’t share his vision.

Marable himself has trouble conveying a vision of how the mass movement he advocates will be created. He is much more convincing in pointing out the problems than in charting a path toward solving them. For instance, in his essay “Do blacks deserve reparations?” he states, “One central principle of international law is that people who have been the victims of systematic oppression . . . have the right to demand material compensation to redress their grievances.” A valid point perhaps, but he never makes clear who exactly owes these reparations and in what form they should be paid.

Even more disturbing, Marable frequently reflects the pernicious double standard all too common on the political left. For example, in his discussion of censorship, Marable says “the real meaning of tolerance is supporting ideas and values which enhance life and promote cultural and political pluralism.” By this standard, Marable rationalizes denying any right of free speech to the Ku Klux Klan because it promotes hatred and intolerance, but sees no problem with protecting the free speech of the rap group 2 Live Crew and those who burn the American flag. By Marable’s own logic, however, it could be argued that 2 Live Crew’s misogynistic lyrics promote hatred and intolerance against women, and it is difficult to see how flag-burning enhances life or promotes pluralism. The only consistent standard would be to extend the same rights of free speech (though not necessarily of action) to even objectionable groups like the KKK as to everyone else.

In his coverage of Jesse Jackson, Marable points out Jackson’s flaws but is much more willing to forgive them than he is those of other black leaders. Marable concedes, for instance, that the structure of Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition is counterproductive to the kind of grass-roots mass movement he advocates. “Jackson’s frenetic, larger-than-life personality and his chaotic organizational style, consisting of a coterie of loyalists who rarely disagree with the boss, works against genuinely democratic decision-making.” Jackson’s stature as a national black leader is further complicated by his relationship with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. According to Marable, Jackson “is personally repulsed by the anti-Semitism and authoritarian elements of the Nation of Islam’s ideology, yet feels constrained from denouncing this movement for fear of turning this militant sect against him.” If Jackson is so afraid of alienating an anti-Semitic and authoritarian group, one wonders, then where is the linkage between politics and ethics Marable says is so essential to effective black leadership?