The Black Caucus's Black Eye?: Criticizing the Critics

The Congressional Black Caucus is “On Notice,” proclaims Jill Tubbman of Jack & Jill Politics. The warning – echoed by others – represents the latest boon of virtual venom spewed into the blogosphere as well as the mainstream media landscape by people criticizing William Clay Sr.’s edict back in August, mandating that the Congressional Black Caucus remain an all-black organization. Clay’s proclamation – made either in advance or in spite of white, Democratic, so-called racial rabble-rousers David Yassky from Brooklyn and Tennessee congressional hopeful Steve Cohen – lit another log on the already stoked fire of race politics in this year’s election.

Whether or not the CBC really represents the interests of African Americans is not the question we’re all that interested in at the moment. See Jack and Jill – they are. Nor are we most interested at present in whether certain CBC members have fallen prey to corporate interests. See The Republic of T – he is. So is Captain Ed. Not that these issues aren’t important, they’ve just been taken up by so many others – none of who seem to acknowledge or understand the kind of rose-colored-glasses-meets-denial kind of criticism popularly lodged against the “we’d prefer no whites” policy of the CBC.

The kind of criticism of which we speak continues despite the fact that threatened potential member Yassky lost his primary to a black woman, Yvette Clarke, after protest by retiring seat-holder Major Owens and other black community leaders in New York City. Not to mention – Steve Cohen, the frontrunner in Tennessee’s 9th District hasn’t himself actually claimed that he would seek entrance into the CBC. But not since the summer has anyone seemed to grasp the hypocrisy of what some call the hypocrisy of race politcs faced by those such as Yassky and Cohen who had hoped (and hope) to be white representatives of majority-black districts.

So here it is – a June piece in the New York Press (The Washington Times strikes a similar chord), where John Desio asked his readers to envision a situation where the roles were reversed: where whites were trying to keep a black candidate from representing a majority-white district because he was incapable of adequately addressing the interests of white people. He argues that in the then-current case, “what would have seemed racist has become legitimate political discourse.”

The legitimacy of such discourse is anything but absurd, though. Inference of reciprocity in such scenarios is inappropriate, and the arguments are stale. We have heard countless times that if colleges preferred white students in affirmative action programs, no one would stand for it. But they did (and they do) and lots of folks have and continue to stand for it. We have heard that White Student Unions on campus would be racist, so it should be considered equally racist to have Black Student Unions.

This reasoning is faulty and ignores the historic legacy of racial discrimination. African Americans are still disproportionately denied access to power. Their lack of proportional representation in America’s power structure is neither a function of genetics nor lack of hard work. There continues to be a need for people of color and women to organize, and while reasonable arguments can be made that alliances with those in power (of whatever color or gender) might be better made by allowing inclusion into those formal groups (a tactic used by groups such as the National Organization for Women, for instance), it is not appropriate to characterize the exclusion of whites from historically-black groups as “racism.”

Desio claims in his piece for the New York Press that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “argued for a color blind society” and that “he probably be sick with embarrassment” if he heard the calls for a white candidate to be kept off a ballot because of his race. We disagree. King envisioned a society where people were not judged by the color of their skin, but it’s doubtful that he would have agreed with ignoring the reality of racial power differences thirty-three years after he gave that famous speech in Washington, D.C. He certainly would not be embarrassed by the work of Major Owen and other members of the CBC. Whether he’d vote to let a white man in, however, is another question.

Read past related stories in:

The Queens Tribune
New York Metro
The Washington Post
The Tennesseean