“The Negro needs to be able to occupy a bargaining position. If Goldwater has been defeated, but Goldwaterism remains triumphant in GOP councils, America faces a difficult future.”
- Jackie Robinson
Robinson described Goldwater as a bigot, having faced racial slurs, threats, and violence from Goldwater supporters at the 1964 Republican convention. It should be noted that Goldwater himself did not engage in overt White supremacist speech. Instead, he refused to support legislation that favored the welfare of African Americans, and he used language that devalued and delegitimized the actions of Civil Rights activists, and that could be interpreted by segregationists as invitations to use violence. At the 1964 convention, he famously declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” This thinly veiled language led Jackie Robinson, who had historically been a Republican, to declare that Goldwater “seeks to gain the Presidency by capitalizing on White resentment to demands for Negro justice.”
The description seems as relevant today as it was then, and not just for the Republican Party. Jackie Robinson contended that as a group, African people in the United States must remain politically flexible in order to capitalize on our voting power. In the case of the 1964 Presidential election, despite his Republican affiliation, he charged African Americans to vote for the Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, because he considered the Republican nominee so harmful to our collective welfare. That year 94% of the African American electorate voted Democrat, setting a record for the party that would not be broken until the election of Barack Obama in 2008.
Not two weeks ago, Bill Clinton, faced with challenges about the 1994 Crime Bill, and especially about his wife's support for it, in which she used the racially-coded language of superpredators, accused modern Civil Rights activists of supporting murderers. The Clintons' support for legislation that targeted African Americans for police repression and mass incarceration, and for other policies that stripped social support networks from the most vulnerable segments of the African American community, in my view, signaled a more aggressive anti-Black stance than Goldwater's vote against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Hillary Clinton's superpredator language, which was clearly code for poor, inner-city, predominantly African American youth constituted an invitation to the violent police repression of African Americans, and it more than matched Goldwater's innuendo. While Goldwater dismissed the validity and moral uprightness of the Civil Rights call for justice, Hillary Clinton reduced us to the station of animals with her "bring to heel" remark.
Robinson expressed a prescient concern about the persistence of "Goldwaterism" in the GOP. However, he did not envision the ascendence of it among the Democrats. Much of the modern African American electorate seems equally blind to this possibility, because despite the Clintons' rhetorical and policy affronts to the lives, liberty, and dignity of African Americans, a large swath of our community sees them as allies, and even as honorary members of the group. These perspectives are demonstrably at odds with the factual record, but the same was true of Jackie Robinson's view of the Republican Party of his day. At least, it was until the Republicans nominated Goldwater, showing unmistakably their contempt for African American life and liberty. At that point, Robinson understood that he could trust neither party to pursue the welfare of his people, and he came to see our votes as strategic tools with which to bargain or deliver punishment.
It is my expectation that like Robinson, the larger African American community will require some more open and egregious anti-Black actions and speech from the Clintons and the Democratic Party before we recognize them for the frenemies they are.
Perhaps then we will be able to collectively return to the more politically astute application of our votes that we demonstrated in the 1960's, using them as bargaining chips, rather than delivering them as bargain basement goods to be handed over in exchange for empty expressions of affinity for African American culture.
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