Cedric J. Robinson by Cedric J. Robinson;H.L.T. Quan;

Author:Cedric J. Robinson;H.L.T. Quan;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Book Network Int'l Limited trading as NBN International (NBNi)

THE POLITICS OF REPRESENTATION

I surmise that the present appearance of “African-American” is the Black professional intelligentsia’s response to the peripheralization of the most audacious expression of Black bourgeois political ambition in American history: I refer to the 1988 presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson.

Let me immediately concede that other social groups – political progressives, factory workers, farmers, and the rural and urban underclasses – identified with Jackson’s campaign. But I would also argue that the possibilities for the eventual satisfaction of their needs and aspirations within the realm of American electoral politics were always remote. Jackson’s highest social vision consisted of a populist reform of the American electoral system not its revolutionary transformation. And we must admit that Jackson’s broadly evangelical mission of economic justice and the rationalization of U.S. foreign policy repeatedly failed to confront or even to correspond finally with the genesis of our presently horrific and cataclysmic world. His complaints targeted the excesses of capitalist exploitation, class privilege, and racial insurgency rather than the structural transformations foregrounded by American imperial decline, militarism, deindustrialization, and the decay of the global economy.3

In truth, then, it was only the Black political class which could realistically anticipate a dramatic or tangible reward from Jackson’s ascendancy. As either the leader of the Democratic Party, as vice president or as some other functionary in a Democratic Administration, Jackson would have served to leverage these representatives of the Black professional class into State power. Thus positioned, that class would have been provided with an unprecedented locus for social and cultural intervention.

If I am near the mark then the resolute and sudden intercession of “African-American” can be taken as an indication of the resilience with which the most privileged aspirants of this class experienced the means of the subversion and ultimate rejection of Jackson’s campaign by America’s political elite. The Black political intelligentsia, having largely repressed the extent and frequency with which racial discourse routinely intervenes the narrative, doctrinal, and moral conventions of this society, was undeterred. But having already foresworn race politics as too crude a political agenda for the corporate boardrooms and the sites of State power to which they aspire they have now turned to the gentility and sentimentality of ethnic politics.4

In their eagerness to seize upon a negotiable historical identity the broker intelligentsia has rendered meaningless the relentless litany of instances in American social, cultural, and legal history where race marked the boundaries of the polity:

It was more important, for example, to have a ratified Constitution even if it accepted the legitimacy of slavery, than to have had the sectional strife that might have meant no Constitution. It was more important to respect property rights than to distribute land and power on an equitable basis to those freed from slavery by the Civil War. And it was more important to ignore altogether the plight of the newly freed in order to get on with the “business” of industrializing America.

In the twentieth century, fighting the Great Depression meant ignoring, and then barely noticing, the plight of Black Americans, lest powerful Southern members of Congress be offended.

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