Behind the Mule

Race and Class in African-American Politics

Michael C. Dawson

• Editorial: Princeton University Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780691212982
• Categoría: Sciences sociales
• Categoría: Études afro-américaines

Political scientists and social choice theorists often assume that economic diversification within a group produces divergent political beliefs and behaviors. Michael Dawson demonstrates, however, that the growth of a black middle class has left race as the dominant influence on African- American politics. Why have African Americans remained so united in most of their political attitudes? To account for this phenomenon, Dawson develops a new theory of group interests that emphasizes perceptions of "linked fates" and black economic subordination.

Part One

BEHIND THE MULE: THE HISTORICAL ROOTS OF
AFRICAN-AMERICAN GROUP INTERESTS

Whatever else the blues was it was a language; a rich, vital expressive language that stripped away the misconception that the black society in the United States was simply a poor, discouraged version of the white. It was impossible not to hear the differences. No one could listen to the blues without realizing that there are two Americas.

(Samuel Charters, quoted in Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory)

You want to know where did the blues come from. The blues come from behind the mule. Well now, you can have the blues sitting at the table eating. But the foundation of the blues is walking behind the mule way back in slavery time.

(Bluesman Booker White, quoted in Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory)

1

The Changing Class Structure of Black America and the Political Behavior of African Americans

Most people are totally unaware of the darkness of the cave in which the Negro is forced to live. A few individuals can break out, but the vast majority remain its prisoners. Our cities have constructed elaborate expressways and elevated skyways, and white Americans speed from suburb to inner city through vast pockets of black deprivation without ever getting a glimpse of the suffering and misery in their midst. But while so many white Americans are unaware of the conditions inside the ghetto, there are very few ghetto dwellers who are unaware of the life outside.... Then they begin to think of their own conditions. They know that they are always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do. . . . They realize that it is hard, raw discrimination that shuts them out. It is not only poverty that torments the Negro; it is the fact of poverty amid plenty. It is a misery generated by the gulf between the affluence he sees in the mass media and the deprivation he experiences in his everyday life.

(Martin Luther King, Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?)

Introduction: Images of Unity and Conflict

During the 1988 presidential primary season, African Americans marched to the polls in support of Jesse Jackson. Northern and Southern, urban and rural, rich and poor, large numbers of African Americans supported Jackson’s quest for the Democratic party’s nomination for president of the United States. Five years earlier, Harold Washington had been elected the first black mayor of Chicago when the city’s black community, often divided by political bickering, came together with an unprecedented degree of political unity. And in 1990, when Jesse Helms of North Carolina conducted a racist campaign to retain his seat in the U.S. Senate, the black turnout rate for Helms’s opponent, black Democrat Harvey Gantt, was 95 percent. These instances of electoral solidarity typify the political unity of African Americans in what many have come to call the New Black Politics (Preston 1987b). This New Black Politics is characterized by the transformation of protest politics into electoral politics with high levels of black political unity. This is the first image given by the evolution of African-American society and politics—an image of a profound political unity that transcends class.

But there is a second image. In Chicago, a city torn by interracial strife, middle-class blacks and whites united in a fight to keep poor blacks from attending the excellent public schools in Dearborn Park, one of Chicago’s few well-integrated neighborhoods (Thomas 1989, 1990). One of the poor black parents stated, “There is a lot of politics behind this. I don’t believe it is so much color as it is economics. . . . People have this fear of their children going to school with project children, but a project child wants an education like everyone else” (Thomas 1989). This type of conflict, argue scholars such as Wilson (1980), is one of the political consequences of the class divisions that are becoming more pronounced among African Americans. When members of a racial or ethnic group become affluent, they seek to preserve their “well-earned” measure of security and privilege by forming coalitions with other racial or ethnic groups whose economic interests are similar. This second image of African-American politics is one in which the growing economic polarization within black America leads naturally to increasing class conflict among African Americans.

This book examines the tension—highlighted by these two images— between racial interests and class interests as factors shaping African-American politics. The tension arises from the historical legacy of racial and economic oppression that forged racial identity of African Americans. As bluesman Booker White suggests, the key to the historical origins of African-American social identity can be found “behind the mule.” It is this legacy of a social identity in which racial and economic oppression have been intertwined for generations that has been the critical component in understanding not only the cultural basis of African-American politics, as Henry (1990) has argued, but also the material roots of black politics. As blues analyst Samuel Charters suggests, only when one “stripped away the misconception that the black society in the United States was simply a poor, discouraged version of the white” could one understand African-American society (Baker 1984). Although Charters was referring to the blues, his point is equally applicable to black politics. African-American politics, including political behavior, is different. It has been shaped by historical forces that produced a different pattern of political behavior from the pattern found among white citizens.¹

But as some African Americans move from behind the mule and develop a stronger class identity, does their racial identity become politically less relevant? To answer this question, I develop a framework for analyzing African Americans’ racial group interests. This framework aids in predicting which social identities of African Americans are politically salient. It also helps predict the conditions under which African-American political diversity is likely to increase. I test the framework by analyzing both individual and aggregate data on African-American political behavior and public opinion. A consequence of this test is an increased understanding of the circumstances under which race or class (or the interaction between the two) becomes the dominant influence in shaping African-American political behavior and public opinion.

The Problem: Race and Class as Competing Theories of African-American Politics

This study was motivated by a set of questions that have captured the attention of scholars such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Robert Dahl, and William Wilson. The central question, simply stated, is whether race or class is more important in shaping African-American politics. This question has been central both to the study of African-American society and to the study of ethnic politics. Both traditions have investigated when social scientists should expect racial and ethnic loyalties to decline, and when that decline is accompanied by a parallel decline in racially or ethnically oriented politics.

These questions are of general interest for two reasons. First, America is becoming racially and ethnically more diverse, and the effects of that diversity are being felt politically: rapidly growing Asian and Latino populations are reshaping politics in politically important states such as Florida and California, and, in addition, the increasing racial tensions that accompany increased diversity are sometimes played out in the political arena. Examples of the salience of racial tensions in the political arena during the 1980s and early 1990s include the 1983 mayoral races in Chicago and Philadelphia (won by Harold Washington and W. Wilson Goode, respectively), the strong showing among white voters in David Duke’s 1991 gubernatorial race in Louisiana, and the English-only referenda in several states. Jesse Helms’s 1990 Senate campaign, already mentioned, was a model of how to exploit racial fears, tensions, and outright racism.

Second, racial politics presents analysts of the American party system with several puzzles. One is the lack of diversity in African-American politics. Many scholars and political activists ask, Where are the black Republicans? Another puzzle is why the study of black politics has not become more central to the study of American political parties and other major American political institutions, despite the recognized importance of racial politics. Carmines and Stimson (1989) have argued that the party system has been transformed by racial politics, whereas Huckfeldt and Kohfeld (1989) argue that class politics has been submerged by racial politics. This research responds to these puzzles by focusing attention on the presumed lack of diversity in black politics.

To sum up, the two major questions I address are these: Why have African Americans remained politically homogeneous even while becoming economically polarized? Is greater political diversity likely in the near future? To arrive at answers, I explain the relative importance of race and class in shaping black political behavior and public opinion, and I suggest the conditions under which African Americans will become politically more diverse.

In the remainder of this chapter, I briefly sketch the competing arguments that claim that race or class is the major determinant in African-American life in the late twentieth century. The themes introduced will be much more extensively developed in later chapters. Next, I present the framework for analyzing African Americans’racial group interests, that is, for using individual perceptions of African-American group interests as a tool both to predict current political behavior and to describe the conditions under which one would expect a decline in the political salience of race. This framework, too, is more extensively developed in later chapters. I conclude this chapter by describing the structure of the rest of the book.

Race

Most students of black politics generally, and of black political behavior specifically, argue that one should expect continued political homogeneity among African Americans. This position is based on the belief that the primary imperative in black politics is to advance the political interests of African Americans as a racial group (Barker 1988; Pinderhughes 1987; Walters 1988).

This belief, in turn, is based on studies by numerous observers showing that race is still a major social, economic, and political force in American society and a major shaper of African-American lives. Socially, scholars of this school argue, residential segregation is still a fact of American life and has major ramifications. Residential segregation, they argue, determines the quality of schooling available to African Americans; it means that the property of the black middle and working classes appreciates more slowly than the property of the white middle and working classes, contributing to the enormous gap in wealth between black and white Americans; and by concentrating poverty in black neighborhoods, it negatively affects the neighborhoods even of the black middle class, which is less able to escape neighborhoods with significant concentrations of poverty than it would be if residential segregation did not exist (Massey 1990). These scholars also point to the apparent increase in violent racial incidents during the 1980s in cities and suburbs and on college campuses as a social factor that affects African Americans regardless of their class (Nelson 1990).

Within the economic sphere, adherents of this view argue, the entire class structure of black America is distorted by the legacy of racism (Boston 1988). A black capitalist class does not fully exist. Further, the black middle class is economically vulnerable because of its extreme reliance on public sector and quasi-public sector employment. In addition, middle-class blacks own less wealth per family than poor whites. The median and mean levels of household wealth are less for black families that earn over $50,000 a year than for white families that earn under $10,000 a year (Oliver and Shapiro 1989).

Wealth is an often ignored but important indicator of life chances because it signifies the ability to transmit resources from one generation to the next, to produce income from resources, and to survive financial setbacks (Landry 1987; Oliver and Shapiro 1989). Thus, the lack of wealth in the black middle class means that even affluent black families often find it difficult to pass resources to their children, that a pool of capital (often necessary for the survival of small businesses) is not available, and that many black middle-class families are, in Landry’s words, “one paycheck from disaster” (Landry 1987; Oliver and Shapiro 1989). Glass ceilings (unspoken barriers to the promotion of minorities and women to partnership in firms and top managerial ranks) and other forms of inequity have also harmed the financial stability of the black middle and working classes.

Politically, these same scholars argue, race remains a major force in the lives of African Americans. The lack of competition between the two parties for the black vote, in combination with the recent shift to the right in American politics, reinforces the need for African-American political unity to continue. Whether one is talking about the cut back of means-tested programs of vital importance to the black poor or about the massive attack on the affirmative action programs that benefit the more affluent African Americans, these scholars conclude that the political interests of all African Americans are still bound by race.

According to this line of reasoning, because the social, economic, and political realities of whites and blacks differ substantially because of race, racial interests continue to override class interests (whether individual or family). And as long as this is true—as long as the political interests of African Americans are bound by race—one should expect high levels of political unity among African Americans regardless of economic status.

Class

There is, however, increasing support for the competing hypothesis that race is no longer the most salient factor in African-American lives because economic polarization within the black community is accelerating. University of Chicago sociologist William Wilson has been the most forceful proponent of the thesis that class has become the most salient social determinant of African Americans’ life chances. In The Declining Significance of Race (1980) he makes three important claims. The first (the one that has given the book so much notoriety) is that discrimination is now less important in determining a person’s life chances than social status or economic class. His second claim (which several scholars and politicians have embraced) is that the civil rights movement benefited mostly middle-class, well-trained, younger African Americans. Wilson’s third claim is that to some degree the civil rights movement was consciously led by black middle class mainly to benefit their own class interests.

Wilson’s claims taken as a whole have profound implications for African-American politics. If it is true that in the 1960s American society changed so much that race ceased to be the overwhelming or even the major determinant of the fate of individual African Americans, one would expect African-American political behavior to reflect increasing diversity ...