This is late, but I need to point folks to No Exit in Black: Trapped by thr Economy and Politics by Marcellus Andrews in last week's Black Commentator.
Marcellus Andrews is an economist and senior research fellow at the New America Foundation. Dr. Andrews writes on economic policy and economic justice for academic and popular audiences, including The Political Economy of Hope and Fear: Capitalism and the Black Condition in America (1999, NYU Press) and Taking Back Capitalism: A Capitalist Road to Economic Justice (forthcoming, NYU Press). Dr. Andrews received a PhD in economics from Yale University and has taught economics at Wellesley College as well as the City University of New York.
I dropped the bonafides because I know that sort of think makes people take things more seriously.
Dr. Andrews has done the analysis and come to many of the same conclusions Black Conservatives have (so have I, frankly). But Black Conservatives, in general, don't carry the analysis through to the end. Dr. Andrews has. And though Black folks' future does, indeed look more conservative (note the lack of a capital "C"), it will not be including Black Conservatives, in my opinion. Why?
It is important to emphasize that what we will call the "New Washington" solution of black middle class development (in honor of, and irony about, the legacy of Booker T. Washington) is, by its nature, a program of economic and cultural development that is in stark opposition to the marriage of conservatives and racists that defines the Republican Party. The whole point of the New Washington solution is to gather together the economic and cultural resources of black people of moderate means to build a self-sustaining culture of achievement motivated by a profound historical sense of grievance against white conservatism as well as black failure.
The only way you're going to motivate an entire culture is by giving it an enemy to focus on (Republicans have just demonstrated that fear and anger trump intellect in the majority of people). That enemy will be the Conservative movement because they are the ones attacking.
The emergence of an assertive black middle class in response to the victory of the right in American politics will bring a very heavy price in terms of national unity. The New Washington solution is, by its very nature, based on the perception that the United States is so tainted by race hatred that black self-sufficiency is the only way for people of African descent to survive. The New Washington solution would not be a liberal program – in large part because it is would grow out of the failure of liberal politics to create a genuine post-racial society. Instead, the New Washington movement would be a sophisticated, multi-generational, non and even anti-governmental movement aimed at creating a secure place for black Americans, and those who would band together with them, to live, work and grow.
If all this sounds a bit of paranoid, it should: the program outlined here is a riff on that of the Nation of Islam, stripped of its cultish nonsense, its racism, its sexism and homophobia. It retains two things from the outlook of the Nation of Islam: first, a deep belief that politics is a dead end for black development in America precisely because blacks will never be accepted as genuine equals, and second, a permanent antagonism to the dominant political and cultural discourse of the United States so long as these are organized around commitments to white supremacy in daily life. Needless to say, this stance will lead to even greater fragmentation of American life by reducing the possibility of a shared sense of American nationalism. The New Washington solution, born out of the victory of white conservatism and the weakness of egalitarianism, represents the emergence of intransigent, post-liberal black nationalism at the heart of the republic that ultimately turns its back on Martin Luther King’s dream of a “beloved community”.
