African American Political Thought and American Culture

The Nation’s Struggle for Racial Justice

Alex Zamalin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781349553099
  9781137528094
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137528100
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book demonstrates how certain African American writers radically re-envisioned core American ideals in order to make them serviceable for racial justice. Each writer's unprecedented reconstruction of key American values has the potential to energize American citizenship today.

Chapter 1

African American Political Thought and American Culture

On March 18, 2008, a US Democratic senator and presidential candidate from Illinois named Barack Obama delivered the most important public speech on American racial inequality in the post–Civil Rights era. Distancing himself from controversial comments made by his African American pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who saw American foreign policy hubris in the Middle East as responsible for the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, Obama told his Philadelphia audience that race still mattered. Slavery contaminated the democratic aspirations of the American founding, and its post–Jim Crow legacies continued to stifle equal opportunity for African Americans. “The past was not past,” Obama declared, because “segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education . . . and legalized discrimination—where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages . . . helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white.”1

Obama’s attempt at public education was radical by any account. He sought to chasten the belief, widespread across the American ideological spectrum, that racial equality had been fully achieved. He did so almost fifty years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which made good on the Fourteenth Amendment’s commitment to equal legal protection and nondiscrimination, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ensured African Americans full access to voting, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which sought to eliminate racist practices in mortgage lending, home buying and zoning. Here was an elected public official acknowledging the problem of structural racial inequality—a problem virtually ignored in mainstream political discussions. Neither white racism nor black laziness explained the problems many African Americans faced. Racism was systemic, entrenched and pervasive.

Redressing racial inequality required collective action, Obama said, at a time when many Americans subscribed to the idea of colorblind equal opportunity, a pick-oneself-up-by-the-bootstraps mentality, alongside a belief in limited government. Deeds rather than words were needed, specifically “by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations.”2 Like the nineteenth-century African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the twentieth-century African American historian, sociologist and essayist W. E. B. Du Bois and the 1960s African American activist Martin Luther King Jr., Obama argued that government was indispensable for the realization of racial justice—a condition in which African Americans would be treated equally under the law and given a fair share of social and economic resources.

Obama’s appeal, however, was not based on abstract arguments about the need to treat everyone fairly, the importance of achieving national security, the need to keep black Democratic Party constituents satisfied or even economic cost effectiveness. At its center was the US Constitution, which became, for Obama, more than a legally binding document that laid out the rules, powers and constraints through which Americans enacted their politics. It articulated the core values for national collective action: “liberty, justice and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.”3 Obama followed in the footsteps of the early-twentieth-century progressive reformer Herbert Croly who, in The Promise of American Life (1909), invoked American national identity to call for federal government to counteract the power of big business,4 as well as Franklin D. Roosevelt, who, as Democratic presidential candidate in his “Commonwealth Club of San Francisco Speech” (1932), used American identity to justify New Deal social liberal programs for the less fortunate during the Great Depression. Obama also evoked President Lyndon Johnson who, in the mid-1960s, announced his Great Society vision, at the center of which was the War on Poverty legislation that expanded welfare, education, social security, healthcare and Civil Rights programs.

At the same time, Obama argued that realizing American liberty and justice required a specific practice of citizenship. His stance of calling upon Americans to jettison self-interest and struggle politically for the common good recalled the civic republican tradition of early American statesmen like James Madison and John Adams. Obama’s specific focus on socioeconomic issues like better healthcare, jobs and education would have pleased the social democratic reformers, philosophers and educators John Dewey and Jane Addams. “It means,” Obama said, “continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances—for better healthcare, and better schools, and better jobs—to the larger aspirations of all Americans.”5

Moreover, Obama’s plea to African Americans to understand white resentment toward affirmative action and public school integration recalled King’s plea for black Americans to understand white Southerners’ fears about racial integration during the Jim Crow era. African Americans needed to see that whites “are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away . . . opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense.”6 At the same time, Obama’s conservative call for self-reliance, personal responsibility and self-help would have found admirers in the eighteenth-century American statesman Benjamin Franklin or the late-nineteenth-century African American educator and public intellectual Booker T. Washington, whose plea for African Americans to “[c]ast down their bucket where they are” called for social uplift through hard work rather than political struggle.7 “They must never succumb to despair or cynicism,” Obama told African Americans about the faith they ought to instill in their children. Rather “they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.”8 All this would create a “more perfect union,” making real the American faith in progress, and the idea that tomorrow would be better than today.9

Obama’s view blended dominant strands of American political thought but expressed just a thin slice of twentieth-century African American political thinking about American identity, exemplary citizenship and racial justice. James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison offered strikingly alternative visions. In his autobiography, Dreams from My Father (1995), Obama recalled how he turned to Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) and Baldwin’s essays to deal with his growing frustration, bitterness and rage as a black man in a predominately white Hawaiian high school. He remembered how Baldwin’s declaration of love was transformed into bitter disappointment; Baldwin’s “weary flight” into Europe represented for Obama “withdrawal” and doubt of “art’s redemptive power.”10 In his first presidential campaign, Obama listed Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon (1977) as one of his favorite books, and he discussed its profound impact on his life when awarding Morrison the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012: “I remember reading [it] when I was a kid and not just trying to figure out how to write, but also how to be and how to think.”11

Baldwin, Ellison and Morrison influenced the first African American US president, but had Obama paid closer attention to their writings, he would have noticed how they reimagined core values of American political culture. Baldwin revised freedom to mean self-examination and flexibility in one’s thinking. Ellison reenvisioned democratic commitment to mean awareness of democracy’s tragic costs. Morrison revised the idea of generosity to be something fundamentally unconditional. Obama would have noticed that for all three, everyday thinking and ethical behavior were as, if not more important than, creating good public policy or legislation. No other African American thinkers had so thoroughly devoted their work to showing how a revolutionary change in Americans’ private, everyday self-perceptions and, in their judgment, communication and sense of collective responsibility was essential for developing a racially just society. This book argues that Baldwin, Ellison and Morrison expanded the boundaries of the American political tradition and that attending to their ideas is still useful for contemporary political life.

Baldwin, Ellison and Morrison eschewed American political thinkers’ concern with defining political values so as to justify the structure of political institutions meant to distribute collective goods. Theorists of freedom debated whether freedom meant protection from government or the positive ability to realize one’s ends.12 Democratic theorists debated whether democratic commitment was simply a matter of voting, following the rule of law or ensuring equal access to opportunities, whether democracy was solely a public, political good or social and economic, appearing in the household, the school or the workplace.13 Those concerned with public generosity like social welfare wondered whether it was a public good and, if so, whether it needed to have stipulations or be unconditional for recipients.14 Settling on definitions of these ideas helped ground American arguments about the distribution of collective goods—whether equal treatment by government or an equal share in American society or politics.

Baldwin, Ellison and Morrison instead gave crucial political significance to cultivating these values beyond the voting booth, town hall meeting or public protest. They centralized the relevance of practicing these values in the home, the bedroom, the street corner, the workplace and even the recesses of the mind. Realizing freedom, achieving democratic commitment and being unconditionally generous required abandoning the idea of individual infallibility and seeing fragility in oneself and others. One’s inner life, social existence and outcomes issuing from one’s own obligations needed to be seen as full of unexpected events, far from purely positive, uncomplicated and easy. One needed to embrace the unknown, relinquish the fantasy of total order and safety. One needed to abandon means-ends thinking based on rational self-interest and self-preservation. Hope for the possibility of change needed to replace faith in the inevitability of progress.

For Baldwin, Ellison and Morrison, these shifts in perspective were essential in addressing racial injustice, which they insisted was as much a product of socioeconomic disparity as it was of everyday racism, racial myths, moral apathy and moralistic paternalism. In “Let America Be America Again” (1936), the great African American poet Langston Hughes sought to redeem and make whole the nation that never made good on its democratic aspirations. In one dazzling line after another, the poetic speaker’s voice announced how, for African Americans, Native Americans and the poor, America was nothing but a gross contradiction, defined not by justice but by violence, exploitation and exclusion. Yet the poem concluded on a hopeful note: America could still be what it said it wished to become.15 Baldwin, Ellison and Morrison sought to help Americans realize the promise that Hughes defended. But they did this by revising the very vocabulary upon which American political thinking subsisted. This constituted their unique attempt to reconstruct the nation.

Baldwin, Ellison and Morrison were artists and public intellectuals rather than statesmen. They were writers rather than scholars. One approach to their work might be to examine their literary inspirations. Studying their diction, literary tropes or authorial voices can help explain how they fit into the Romantic, modern, or postmodern traditions.16 Another approach is to study them as creators of American culture, with an eye toward what each has said about language, style and creative expression.17 Still another is to write a political biography of them. They all lectured widely, penned editorials, wrote essays and, as some of the most influential African American writers of their time, were implicated in black politics, whether through action or silence. Likewise, there is serious merit in studying their political beliefs and entanglements or considering their view on political-theoretical ideas of citizenship, the role of the state, justice, power and rights.18

This book mixes these approaches eclectically. An examination of the literary genres, authorial voices, figurative language and plots they deployed fleshes out their artistic-political objectives. Biography provides texture to their cultural contributions and gives a sense of their political lives. Central to this book’s story, however, is how three African American writers engaged American political culture. Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba famously define political culture as “the specifically political orientations—attitudes towards the political system and its various parts, and attitudes toward the role of the self in the system.”19 For them, political culture describes citi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• 1 African American Political Thought and American Culture
• 2 James Baldwin’s Reconstruction of American Freedom
• 3 Ralph Ellison’s Democratic Vision
• 4 Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Generosity and Racial Justice
• Conclusion: Racial Justice Today
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index