Go back to previous topic
Forum nameGeneral Discussion
Topic subjectIt's all 'negro management' politics
Topic URLhttp://board.okayplayer.com/okp.php?az=show_topic&forum=4&topic_id=12978553&mesg_id=12978594
12978594, It's all 'negro management' politics
Posted by Reuben, Thu Feb-25-16 03:59 AM
Read some Adolph Reed he explains it well, much better than I can

"It would look a lot like, mutatis mutandis, the moment at the beginning of the 20th century when Booker T. Washington and others, both his antagonists as well as his pals, were vying to establish what Kenneth Warren describes as “managerial authority” over the Negro Question. That’s where we are now. Another way to look at the arc of this politics, of black politics, is on the analogy of the arc from Emancipation to the defeat of populism and the imposition of the Jim Crow order. There you had a fairly open politics, class-asymmetrical with respect to race in particular, but with black free people improvising and sometimes aligning with whites to engage in politics as a mechanism for making their lives better and for defining what making their lives better might actually mean. That got squashed, so that the activities of the likes of Washington were what was understood to be black politics until the mid-1920s through the 30s. As Judith Stein points out, there certainly were black people forming trade unions and fighting their employers and all that sort of thing before the mid-20s, but what was understood as “black politics” in this period was this elite enterprise, the professed aim of which was to articulate the interests of the popular black population—though it did this, of course, in ways consistent with what the dominant elites were prepared to hear. These race managers presented themselves as an organic leadership of that black population, and it’s an under-appreciated fact that in large measure these claims to organic race leadership themselves hinged on the premises of Victorian race theory.

By the mid-1930s the Popular Front and mass direct-action politics had emerged. This was the active, dynamic, and partly constitutive strain of black political activity until the victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the emergence of black political regimes in big cities between the late 1960s and the late 1970s. What we’ve seen increasingly since then, at least since Reagan if not earlier, is a reassertion of a black Professional Managerial Class (PMC) as a tutorial leadership class. This hinges on “underclass” ideology, which disqualifies a significant section of the black population from having the authority to articulate its own concerns. What disappears from contemporary black politics is a working class. There’s no space for an autonomous working class capable of articulating itself politically. This goes back to the 1990s and all that crap that comes out of the universities: the emergence of Cultural Studies discourse and people like Robin D. G. Kelly (alongside the vast majority of English professors) claiming that the black experience is opaque and unknowable to those outside and that it’s only possible to gain access to it through skilled racial interpreters."


http://platypus1917.org/2015/04/04/unite-many-interview-adolph-l-reed-jr/

There's also Lester Spence who just came out with a book detailing how neo - liberalism infected black politics after the civil rights, I made a post and tried to discuss it but it flopped.

Gotta go but I'll be back to discuss in full