[Peace-discuss] The real problem with Selma

[C. G. Estabrook via Peace-discuss]

http://nonsite.org/editorial/the-real-problem-with-selma

...reduction of politics to a narrative of racial triumph that projects “positive images” of black accomplishment, extols exemplary black individuals, stresses overcoming great adversity to attain success and recognition, and inscribes a monolithic and transhistorical racism as the fundamental obstacle confronting, and thus uniting, all black Americans. History is beside the point for this potted narrative...

...the [Voting Rights Act of 1965] did not so much extend the franchise to black southerners as restore it...

...The campaign for disfranchisement that intensified in the 1890s was the direct outcropping of the dominant merchant-planter class’s concerns that blacks and white poor farmers and workers could align to challenge ruling class power. That was not a Freudian compensatory fantasy. Enough evidence existed even before the Populist insurgency of the 1890s to sustain those concerns. In Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement, Jack Bloom describes the context that underlay white elites’ fears. The insurgent Readjuster movement in Virginia won statewide office in 1879 on an alliance of black freedmen and white workers and farmers. More than 60,000 black people across the region belonged to the Knights of Labor, and they made up a majority of the Knights’ 3,000 members in Mississippi. The Colored Farmers Alliance, linked to the Populist movement, boasted more than 1,250,000 members. Most dramatically, a North Carolina Populist-Republican Fusion ticket swept statewide in 1894, including most of the major cities, and was re-elected in 1896. Tellingly, the Fusion government was overturned in 1898 in a white supremacist putsch conducted by Democratic elites...

...what most crucially connects successful disfranchisement at the beginning of the 20th century and contemporary efforts is not so much an invariant, transhistorical “racism” ... but a very pragmatic attempt by powerful elites to shrivel the electorate to solidify partisan advantages for their narrow programs of upward redistribution...

...the popularity of anticolonial metaphor gave a radical patina to formulations of black Americans as a singular “People.” As a standard of critical judgment, however, that perspective was never adequate for the interpretive or political challenges presented by the evolving post-segregation order or the revanchist turn in national politics begun in the 1970s and its many ramifications down to states and cities and the lives of all working people as that political turn consolidated on bipartisan terms and intensified over subsequent decades...

...forms of “doing well by doing good” ... lead precocious undergraduates to Teach For America and other organizations of neoliberalism’s Jungvolk. Similarly precocious public officials like Cory Booker or Barack Obama insistently define racial aspirations—indeed all concerns with social justice—in line with the interests of financial capitalism, and many, many others all down the pyramid of social standing and power also imagine individual futures and “success” in savoring fantasies of pursuing personal advantage by operating within what a broader perspective reveals are the structures of neoliberal dispossession. An interpretive posture that posits an unproblematic “black community” or “black masses” as a normative standard cannot adequately conceptualize the relatively autonomous tendencies toward neoliberal legitimation in black politics; much less can it confront them politically...

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