Misrepresenting the Black community

THIS WAS not the first time Barack Obama chose a South Side church in Chicago as a platform to denounce Black men as "boys" who supposedly ignore their responsibilities as fathers.

Invoking the worst stereotypes about Black men, Obama said three years ago, in an identical speech to the one he gave this past Father's Day, "There are a lot of folks, a lot of brothers, walking around, and they look like men, and they're tall, and they've got whiskers--they might even have sired a child. But it's not clear to me that they're full-grown men."

Then as now, it was much easier to go for cheap Sunday service laughs at the expense of reviled Black men than it is to actually look at and have something intelligent to say about the state of Black neighborhoods and communities.

There are real and serious issues facing Black neighborhoods that are a result of decades-long unemployment, underemployment, an eroding tax base, poor schools, poor housing, police brutality, murder and corruption--all of which have shaped the social and economic crisis in working-class African American communities.

The numbers are needed to curb the attempts to frame Black deprivation as a result of Black moral turpitude.

In Chicago, Obama's home base, from 1980 to 1990, the number of jobs within 10 miles of where most Black workers lived declined by 50,000. Between 1991 and 2007, in the 14 area municipalities where Blacks make up at least 30 percent of the population, 45,000 jobs were lost. Conversely, in 41 municipalities where Blacks were less than 1 percent of the population, 61,000 jobs were added.

In 1960, the Chicago Black community of Riverdale had 16 percent unemployment (in the 1960 census, only male unemployment was tabulated). In 2000, in the Black South Side community of Douglass, unemployment for both men and women was more than 43 percent--four times greater than the rest of Chicago.

Ten of Chicago's 15 poorest communities are at least 94 percent Black, and in 2001, there were 20,000 more Black men in Illinois state prisons than there were in Illinois state universities.

This unemployment and resultant disproportionate level of poverty illustrate the entrenched institutional racism reflected in studies that show people with "Black-sounding names" like Jamal are twice as likely not be called back for jobs in the Chicago area.

But there are also structural shifts in the economy and federal budget cuts that have exacerbated Black employment. For example, in the 1980s, a federal jobs program that gave 25,000 inner-city youth jobs for the summer at minimum wage was cut and abandoned.

The culmination of all of this, not to mention the problems in general housing, the destruction of Chicago's public housing and the crumbling nature of public education in Black communities, has resulted in high levels of depression and suicide among young African American males.

The third-leading cause of death among young Black men is suicide. From 1980 to 1995, suicide rates amongst Black children rose by more than 200 percent--the highest leap in the U.S.

NONE OF this is a portrait of the violent, sociopathic community that does not care about its children or its own welfare--the picture consistently invoked by the mass media, and occasionally dragged out by Black and white politicians looking to score easy political points by blaming Black people for all that is wrong in America's cities. Rather, it is a picture of communities ravaged by hopelessness, sadness and bewilderment about how to stop the never-ending attacks.

But it's not just the Black middle class that engages in this callous finger-pointing. Black workers and the poor themselves also accept many of these racist stereotypes, while at the same time patiently asking for jobs and greater social services.

In the political climate over the last 30 years, it would be surprising if working class and poor African Americans did not accept blame for their worsening condition. Since the end of the social movements of the 1960s, there has been a one-sided chorus denouncing ordinary Blacks for illicit behavior and a loose moral foundation as the real explanation for persistent Black poverty and unemployment.

While this refrain has always existed, at the height of the Black radicalization and Black Freedom Movement, these explanations were rejected. From Martin Luther King Jr. to Malcolm X to Fannie Lou Hamer, the American state was held on the hook for the condition of Black people in American cities and outlying rural areas across the South.

In New York City in the late 1960s a coalition of welfare mothers was the core of a national poverty movement that put at its center a demand for a guaranteed income and employment for those who wanted it. The movement created enough pressure that the notion of a guaranteed income became part of the debate about welfare, not just among activists, but among politicians in both the Democratic and Republican Parties, that such a thing would even be discussed in today's political climate is utopian.

The point is that when the fortunes of the left were good, poor people and workers understood why they were poor and exploited, and often joined organizations to combat those conditions. With the decline and disappearance of such organizations, individuals became increasingly disconnected from material explanations for their poverty and accepted the dominant discourse that their poverty was their own fault.

These are the reasons today that, despite the historic presidential campaign of Obama, there remains, now more than ever, the need for a political and independent left to breathe more life into campaigns that defend workers and the poor. Moreover, there is a need for a revival of a Black radical left that can stand up to Obama when he attacks Black workers in a way that white radicals and progressives would be chastised for doing.

Obama's campaign, as evidenced by his increasingly conservative rhetoric does not spell the end of Black politics, but serves as an example of why now more than ever, we need to rebuild an independent Black left that does not repeatedly parrot the idea that the best African Americans can do is continue to vote for Democrats who have yet to demonstrate in practice that the well-being of Black communities--in terms of jobs, good schools and good housing--is a priority for them.