Last week, Joe Biden promised Wall Street profiteers that he could reach “consensus” with conservatives. He offered proof of this skill by recalling his cordiality with racist senators, among them the late senator James Eastland, a Mississippi plantation owner who referred to black people as an inferior race.
But Biden represents another problem that goes beyond his personal affinity for political miscalculations: he epitomizes the failures of white liberalism.
In contrast to the virulent white nationalism accepted by the Republican party, Democrats have fashioned themselves as the party willing to diversify the beneficiaries of America’s imperialist and capitalist spoils. But this objective has failed black Americans, who are disproportionately loyal to the Democratic party yet suffer most when Democrats make policy with racists and a wealthy minority. Despite the common narrative that the party has had black votes in the bag since the peak of the civil rights era in the mid-1960s, there is a more complicated history with clear implications for the 2020 presidential election.
While the likes of Eastland were thwarting civil rights legislation, black Americans primarily in the south risked their lives in a bitter struggle for “radical” ideas like voting rights and equal access to jobs, social services, and quality education. In response to this activism, Democratic president Lyndon B Johnson signed civil rights legislation in 1964 and 1965 that effectively aligned black voters with the party.
Further north, however, there was growing discontent among black communities who saw the other side of the integration battle, where de facto segregation replaced state-sanctioned policies and urban ghettos birthed new economic and social problems. It was in this social hotbed that Malcolm X, the fierce counterpart to the civil rights movement’s Martin Luther King Jr, captured the ears of the most disillusioned black Americans in a critique of the white liberal establishment eerily reflective of the current political moment.
Three months before Johnson signed the 1964 Civil Rights Act into law, Malcolm X cautioned audiences in Cleveland and Detroit about politicians such as Johnson, who aligned themselves with segregationist Dixiecrats while deftly collecting black votes. In what has become known as the Ballot or the Bullet speech, Malcolm X told the crowd:
Lyndon B Johnson’s best friend is the one who is … heading the forces that are filibustering civil rights legislation. You tell me how in the hell is he going to be Johnson’s best friend? How can Johnson be his friend and your friend too?
While voters nevertheless elected Johnson that year, black voter turnout declined for a decade thereafter, only reaching 1964 levels with the election of Barack Obama more than 40 years later. At the same time, black Americans’ material conditions have deteriorated: they face growing wealth disparities, a revived caste system under mass incarceration and various forms of segregation, and homeownership rates that remain unchanged since the late 1960s. This state of affairs is due to bipartisan neoliberal policies, including harsh and discriminatory prison sentencing, militarized police enforcement, the banking deregulation that led to the 2008 financial crisis, the privatization of public services and corporate tax breaks.
Liberals who emerged during this period, such as Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, have been heralded as particularly popular among black Americans. But Clinton garnered the lowest black turnout of the past 30 years in his 1996 presidential run. Today, pundits are basing their theories of Biden’s popularity on polling numbers that are practically worthless at this early juncture.
Black people cannot afford to forget how the party’s establishment has stood in the way of advancing genuine equality, from Johnson’s own relationship with the segregationist Eastland and his tenure as a lawmaker who opposed every civil rights measure he could vote on, to Clinton – who dog-whistled conservatives about being tough on crime, ending welfare and busting unions, while increasing welfare for corporations.
Nor can we afford to forget how we have fought back. Johnson’s collaboration with racists was challenged by black leaders like Malcolm X, and black people across the country pushed back against the Biden-led, Clinton-passed crime bill, which the NAACP called “draconian” and inspired the unprecedented Million Man March in protest.
We are told establishment Democrats have amassed universal popularity among black people, despite the party’s perpetual failures and consistent black disillusionment. For those who actually want an equitable society that transforms the lives of the poor and working class, let’s make 2020 an election year when we reject the failed legacy of white liberalism.
Malaika Jabali is a public policy attorney, writer, and activist whose writing has appeared in Essence, Jacobin, the Intercept, Glamour and elsewhere
