The ‘black agenda’ and its discontents

Rev. Jeremiah Wright resurfaced last week in the pages of The Washington Post. In an interview with the controversial minister published Thursday, Wright spoke of how his life had changed since the 2008 presidential campaign, when the fire of his homiletic past and his proximity to President Obama before he became president was an issue — a kind of “what did he preach and when did he preach it” style of character assassination by association that went on far too long.

“It is unrealistic to think that one person can change the mess that this country has gotten into, but to pick on him is like picking on one of my kids,” Wright told The Post. “I have been knowing him for 20 years. I have not stopped loving him because of what the press did, and to see him beat up on because of things he is not responsible for is painful.”

This statement from the 2010 model Jeremiah Wright, defending Obama, seeks to calm some of the troubled racial waters of the campaign — waters stirred up as much by intragenerational black American politics in general as by any specific utterance by Rev. Wright from the pulpit of the Trinity United Church of Christ.

Wright’s statement was his Kum Ba Yah coda on his part in the intraracial conflict between Obama, vanguard of a new style of black leadership at the levers of power, and those of Wright’s generation for whom the old identity-dependent tools and strategies for fighting America’s racial ills have been mostly working just fine.

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Others from that generation have been heard from again.

In recent weeks, members of the Congressional Black Caucus have stepped up challenges to President Obama’s domestic agenda, exasperated at what they see as a lack of attention paid to issues specifically related to African Americans navigating the shoals of a ruinous recession.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers of Michigan told Politico that the White House is “not listening” to black lawmakers.

“I don’t think we expected anything to change overnight because we had an African-American in the White House, but the fact still remains that we’ve got a constituency that is suffering,” Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, told The New York Times. “I think he could do more, and he will do more.”

And off Capitol Hill, Michael Eric Dyson, author, lecturer, Georgetown University sociologist and an Obama supporter, is feeling let down: “All these teachable moments, but the professor refuses to come to the class,” he told The New York Times on Feb. 8.

It all came to a head, in a way, on the Feb. 23 edition of Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio call-in show, where Sharpton and guest co-host Charles Ogletree, author and Jesse Climenko Professor at Harvard Law School, spoke with a caller: Tavis Smiley, author, lecturer and presumptive general of the new-media-literate black empowerment movement. Their contentious exchange hinged to a large degree of how much responsibility Obama has for advancing what they characterized as a “black agenda.” Smiley, a longtime critic of Obama as a candidate and as president, wants that attention paid.



On a recent broadcast of the Tom Joyner Morning Show, seeking to justify such special treatment for black people, Smiley threw out one of those questions that was meant to stifle all debate coming afterwards: “Isn’t the African American agenda the human agenda?”

Kris Broughton, writing at Politic365, wasn’t having any:

“Tavis Smiley’s rhetorical question during his monologue last week on [Tom Joyner] is a sentence that reads the same backwards and forwards. Smiley would do well to heed his own advice, and learn to recognize that the White House efforts to back initiatives aimed at African Americans won’t always come with peel-and-stick “black agenda” labels.”

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The debate over the president’s fidelity to the black cause is the latest proof of a split in black American politics, a politics of two minds and approaches right now: One side calls for allegiance to the textbook civil-rights agenda, and to the strategy of identity-focused solutions to national problems. The other side seeks to incorporate the so-called black agenda into the wider necessaries of the nation’s business.

The old guard’s thinking necessarily provokes the question of what challenges now confronting black and minority Americans don’t confront everyone in the country. Among the most oppressing of them — jobs, home foreclosures, health-care reform — it’s not a matter of these issues hitting blacks separate from everyone else; it’s a matter of degree.

But the idea that a black agenda exists and should exist feeds into a hierarchical consideration, the idea of who should best define and articulate that agenda. That’s led to a kind of loyalty-oath reasoning that’s gone on for generations in black America, an us-versus-them attitude that’s troubling.