Broadening the Contours in the Study of Black Politics

Citizenship and Popular Culture

Michael Mitchell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351530613
• Subtopic: Political Campaigns & Elections
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Broadening the Contours in the Study of Black Politics, volume 17 of the National Political Science Review (NPSR), is divided thematically into two books, available separately or as a set. The first concentrates on the institutional aspects of Black politics. The second book addresses various dimensions of social capital that constitute the fundamental building blocks of Black politics. Each contains peer-reviewed articles, a symposium section, and book reviews, as well as other featured sections.Together, these books build on the previous NPSR volume, Black Women in Politics. The symposium in Volume 17:1 examines the struggle of Black women, both in the political science discipline and in getting their work published. In the symposium section of Volume 17:2, members of the National Conference of Black Political Scientists carry on a revealing conversation about the dilemmas of professional life for Black women in political science.The set also contains a section called "Trends," which offers data to use as starting points for discussions in teaching, on professional panels, or in the mass media, regarding the new versions of the Voting Rights Act after the Shelby County v. Holder decision of 2013. Both volumes 17:1 and 17:2 contain rigorously vetted articles on significant themes in the study of Black politics. This set represents the most recent offering in the distinguished National Political Science Review series.

Research Articles

“Who Will Survive in America?”: Gil Scott-Heron, the Black Radical Tradition, and the Critique of Neoliberalism

Daniel Robert McClure¹
California State University, Fullerton

Which brings me back to my convictions

and being convicted for my beliefs

’cause I believe these smiles

in three piece suits

with gracious, liberal demeanor

took our movement off the streets

and took us to the cleaners.

In other words, we let up the pressure

and that was all part of their plan

and every day we allow to slip through our fingers

is playing right into their hands.

—Gil Scott-Heron, “The New Deal” (1978)

Introduction

Over a year before his untimely death in May 2011, sixty-year-old musician/poet Gil Scott-Heron released his anticipated comeback album, I’m New Here: Gil Scott-Heron, after a decade of struggle with substance abuse and repeated incarceration.² The first official video for his release featured the song “Me and the Devil Blues,” with “Your Soul and Mine” added as a spoken word epilogue. The lyrics for “Me and the Devil Blues” derive from pre–World War II country bluesman Robert Johnson’s 1937 saga portraying a “Faustian bargain” with the Devil.³ In Scott Heron’s video, the Faustian bargain unfolds as a set of images depicting a vibrant Manhattan night, with folks hurriedly walking past prosperous businesses. The pedestrians’ sense of purpose and apparent status contrasts sharply with shots of poverty and homelessness, making the latter appear as misplaced specters from a bygone era. Another set of ghostly characters traverse the streets as well, navigating their way through twenty-first century wealth: young skateboarders, painted up as skeletons—or figures of death—skating energetically through the concrete and steel paradox of wealth and homeless squalor. The juxtaposition of the footage and lyrics in the video for “Me and the Devil Blues”/“Your Soul and Mine” (aka “The Vulture”) characterizes the systemic outcome of the economic shift to neoliberalism that unfolded in tandem with Scott-Heron’s recording career.

The use of New York City in 2010 as the background for the video is fitting. The metropolis represents not just Scott-Heron’s origin as a performing artist but also a structural space where the rise of neoliberalism took root in the US in the late 1970s. Like other urban centers in the 1960s, New York City increasingly faced budget issues that arose from the effects of deindustrialization and White flight.⁴

Alongside Nixon’s federal aid cuts to cities, the 1973–1974 recession aggravated an increasingly desperate situation; the urban crisis of the 1960s became the “urban fiscal crisis” of the 1970s.⁵ From this predicament, solutions coalesced around austere budgeting measures primarily affecting municipal workers, racial minorities, the poor, and the governing liberal politicians. Less was said regarding overdevelopment of capital enterprises, the relationships between municipal borrowing and financial institutions, or planners omitting industrial development.⁶

The crisis of New York City provided an entry point for the adoption of what Business Week had offered in 1974 as a way out of the debt crisis. “Cities and states, the home mortgage market, small business, and the consumer, will all get less than they want because the basic health of the US is based on the basic health of its corporations and banks: the biggest borrowers and the biggest lenders.”⁷ This suggestion—prophesying the next forty years of supply-side economics and the logic of corporate bailouts—emanated from the ideas of a Milton Friedman-led group of neoclassicist economists, or “neoliberals.” New York City became a symbolically important test case for implementing neoliberal policies. The resulting bailout deal between the New York City government and the financial industry replaced the prerogatives of publically accountable political institutions with those of private capital. This process marked a significant shift in the common sense of the post-World War II relationship between government and the economy. Social services (public health, education, and transportation) were cut, wages frozen, and public employment downsized. This restructuring, writ large from the 1970s through today, brought about a “restoration of class power” by conservatives and the business community after World War II, while amplifying the racial inequality gap.⁸ This new system of neoliberalism (the dominant set of economic ideas since the decline of the Jim Crow Keynesian welfare state) took root amidst the culture wars that erupted in the wake of civil rights gains in the 1960s and the drawn-out economic crisis that came to largely define the 1970s.

Modus Operandi

This article examines the rise of neoliberalism through the recorded work of Gil Scott-Heron, particularly his spoken word pieces. Scott-Heron is an important literary figure from the Black radical tradition, as his records provide an important extension of the legacies of Black Power and the Black Arts Movement into the post–civil rights era.⁹ Informed by the Black radical tradition and its centuries-spanning struggle against the processes of modernity, Scott-Heron’s critique of US society insistently marked the socioeconomic shifts reshaping American society after the 1960s as neoliberalism took form.¹⁰ The processes of modernity include the intersectional matrix of imperialism, colonialism, capitalism, slavery, the enlightenment, and nationalism.¹¹ Defined through this modernity, a Black radical tradition in the New World developed during European expansion, settler colonies, and the economic growth and ideological formations resulting from the Atlantic slave trade—including private property rights, ideas of civil society and notions of freedom built through the institutions of slavery and anti-Blackness.¹² As Richard Iton suggests, the plantation emerged as a key institution in defining the modern era, especially the transnational “haunting” of this “ innovation.”¹³ While the civil rights era dismantled the legislative frameworks characterizing the racial-economic evolution of US history—the Terrible Transformation, slavery, Black codes, Jim Crow, and New Deal institutional racism—the cultural impulse of anti-Blackness persisted, with the plantation remaining as a guiding specter.

While ideas of race have constantly undergone renewals or reforms, the role of anti-Blackness cuts a pattern across American history after its legislated adoption in the 1600s amidst the beginnings of the Terrible Transformation. This legislation tied explicitly to “property relations”—anchored through evolving notions of gender and sexuality—defines and confines Blackness to “the basis of enslavement in the logic of a transnational political and legal culture.”¹⁴ This world-historical, longue durée status starkly equates the blending of political and metaphysical ontology into a centuries-spanning configuration consigning Blackness to the material status of slavery and enshrining Whiteness as a marker of freedom.¹⁵ Designated as slaves, Black people existed as the paradox of civil society— socially dead entities whose extracted labor produced wealth for capital while remaining outside the protection of law.¹⁶ This calculus historically fuels a set of antagonisms within civil society, constrained by the communal unity of Whiteness or non-Blackness, as the “law” continues to marginalize Black people.¹⁷ In this curious relationship defining the contours of American life—from popular culture to miscegenation laws to the policing of geography—the role of anti-Blackness cannot be underestimated as a key lever tying economics to culture. As Jared Sexton writes, “If, in the economy of race, Whiteness is a form of money—the general equivalent or universal standard value—then blackness is its gold standard, the bottom-line guarantee represented by hard currency.”¹⁸

From the Black radical tradition, Scott-Heron’s early work examined the US through the prism of late 1960s Black Power conceptions focusing on the legacies of colonialism and slavery. As the 1970s progressed, he embraced a Pan-African sensibility, moving toward visualizing a global set of oppressions borne of modernity’s processes and highlighting the continued connection between the transnational fates of Black people. By the 1980s, his rhetorical strategy shifted away from a Pan-Africanist approach, mobilizing a liberal-left, multicultural critique against the rise of conservatism and the growth of multinationals and Wall Street as neoliberalism consolidated its role in the American state. Scott-Heron’s work provides a tour of the evolution of neoliberalism and its critique between the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, his later work builds on these foundations, offering structural clues to the impulses holding neoliberalism together.

Personal Background

Gil Scott-Heron was born in 1949 in Chicago, Illinois, to Bobbie Scott, a librarian, and Giles Heron Sr., a Jamaican professional soccer player.¹⁹ After his parents divorced, Scott-Heron moved to Jackson, Tennessee, where he lived with his grandmother, Lily Scott. In his poem “Coming from a Broken Home,” a tribute to not only the women who raised him but also a critique against the so-called failures (as suggested by the Moynihan Report) of Black families without the patriarchy of a strong father, Scott-Heron celebrates the strength of his grandmother:

Lily Scott claimed to have gone as far as the 3rd grade

in school herself,

put four Scotts through college

with her husband going blind. . . .

And she raised me like she raised four of her own

who were like her

in a good many good ways.

Which showed up in my mother

who was truly her mother’s daughter

and still her own person.²⁰

After his grandmother passed away in 1963, Scott-Heron moved to New York City with his mother and finished high school at the prestigious Fieldston School of Ethical Culture. Upon graduation, he attended Lincoln University, the alma mater of his hero Langston Hughes, where he went on to receive the Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award in 1968. Upon seeing the Last Poets perform at Lincoln in 1969, Scott-Heron grew interested in forming a similar spoken word group.²¹ By 1970, Scott-Heron had published his first novel, The Vulture; a book of poetry titled Small Talk at 125th and Lenox; and an LP titled after the book of poetry. Scott-Heron’s first LP personified, as Joyce Joyce suggests, the 1960s Black Power voice that bridged art with the needs of the community, embodying what the Black Arts movement defined as the “Black aesthetic.”²² Scott-Heron’s main influences were Hughes, James Saunders Redding (whom he studied under at Lincoln), Richard Wright, and James Baldwin, as well as Black Arts poets such as Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and musician/poet Stanley Crouch. After Lincoln University, and during his first few years as a recording artist, Scott-Heron received a fellowship to Johns Hopkins University, where he earned an MA in 1972. His second novel, The Nigger Factory, also released in 1972, coincided with an appointment at Federal City College in Washington, DC, where he taught creative writing until 1976.²³ Scott-Heron’s increasing success with his music eventually provided him a full-time career in the recording industry. His records regularly entered the Billboard 200, Jazz, and R&B charts; other artists such as Esther Phillips, Penny Goodwin, and LaBelle began covering his songs. While the spoken word components of his early records were increasingly edged out in favor of his Soul Jazz-inflected songs (written with creative partner Brian Jackson), across the thirteen albums recorded between 1970 and 1982 Scott-Heron continued to include spoken word pieces that served as evolutionary signposts of the new socio-economic system.

Sources of Vision

One of the most important contemporary influences on Scott-Heron in the late 1960s and 1970s was the Black Arts Movement (BAM).²⁴ These artistic enclaves helped facilitate “a new genre of post-Beat, Black avant-garde” statements out of free jazz and the “postwar experiments in Black poetics,” and initiated a new Black aesthetic.²⁵ Baraka’s vernacular shift in his spoken word between the 1964 recording of “Black Dada Nihilismus” and “Black Art” in 1965 set the tone for BAM’s “Black aesthetic,” merging the Black avant-garde with the street-level discontent of northern urban Blacks unaffected by civil rights reforms.²⁶ An array of spoken word albums appeared in the late 1960s and early 1970s that incorporated diverse musical backgrounds against poetic expressions.²⁷ These albums formed an important corollary to Black history as they addressed issues ranging from racism and the history of White supremacy...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Broadening the Contours in the Study of Black Politics
• copy
• Contents
• Research Articles
• Symposium II
• Work in Progress
• Trends
• Book Review Forum
• Book Reviews
• Duchess Harris, Black Feminist Politics from Kennedy to Obama, reviewed by Ange-Marie Hancock
• Andra Gillespie, The New Black Politician: Cory Booker, Newark, and Post-Racial America, reviewed by Aiisha Harden Russell
• Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd, Gender, Race, and Nationalism in Contemporary Black Politics, reviewed by Kiana Cox
• C. Riley Snorton, Nobody Is Supposed to Know, reviewed by Saidah K. Isoke
• Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, eds., The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States, reviewed by Jennifer Gutierrez
• Julia Jordan-Zachery, Black Women, Cultural Images and Social Policy, reviewed by Stephanie Hicks
• A Note on Passing: Michael B. Preston
• A Note on Passing: Jewel Limar Prestage
• Invitation to the Scholarly Community