Kindle Notes & Highlights
As Massell continually portrayed growing black political power as a threat to white interests, he also pursued other methods to highlight this issue and to try and nullify growing black electoral strength. In December 1971 Massell submitted a proposal to the state assembly that would, without a referendum, have expanded the city limits to take in an extra fifty thousand people, practically all of whom were white, in time for them to participate in the 1973 mayoral election.
Atlanta
In 1975, leading executives of the financial institutions that held most of the city’s mountainous debt orchestrated an extraordinary and radical restructuring of city finances that drastically reduced the city’s social spending and public assistance programs. This episode not only highlighted the power of entrenched white economic interests but, in hindsight, as political scientist David Harvey has explained, proved a pivotal moment in global economic history. As the first major example of the kind of aggressive corporate-interest–driven economic restructuring that compelled the retrenchment
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NYC
The pragmatic Nixon backed affirmative action in part because, like his theory of black capitalism, it did not threaten to offend broader public opinion among the “Silent Majority” in the same way that welfare state liberalism did. Affirmative action did not require the direct redistribution of wealth (via increased taxes or social spending on the poor) or the expansion of government’s scope or responsibility through federal government public employment programs.
Affirmative action would help increase minority employment; those who found jobs could then provide for themselves and their own families and would not be dependent on government. In these ways affirmative action perfectly complemented the president’s black capitalism initiatives, as did the establishment of federal contract set-asides for minority businesses.
Finally, just as Nixon’s support of black business development was designed to grow the black middle class and win them over to the Republican fold, affirmative action was similarly intended to offer African Americans the scope for greater upward mobility.
While policies aimed at developing black businesses, therefore, certainly had the capacity to increase wealth throughout the black community and could help make those businesses (as Robert Kennedy had foreseen) a generator of urban improvement, they also predominantly concentrated economic benefits among a restricted class. Those who gained most from such policies tended to be black men from the middle class and elite.
At the same time that the Carter administration cut social welfare spending, it wrote support for minority business more boldly into law through federal contract set-asides. Under the Reagan administration, which decimated federal support for social welfare spending, federal procurement from minority businesses continued to rise. In 1981 minority businesses received 3.4 percent of all federal procurement expenditures. By 1994, they received 8.3 percent, or $14.4 billion.
As policies that primarily benefited poor and working-class blacks (and women in particular) were being pared back aggressively, alternative political approaches designed to bolster and expand the black middle class became ever more tightly fixed in national policy.
From Bradley’s first campaign for mayor in 1969 to the end of his five terms in 1993, black voter turnout in the city decreased by 38 percent.
Los Angeles
During that period, as Grady-Willis explains, intraracial inequality in Atlanta has only deepened, with the city’s wealthy black suburbs expanding steadily over the past three decades (thanks in part to many northern black professionals relocating to the city to take advantage of the economic opportunities available). The poor, however, have become ever more marginalized in the city’s political affairs (a trend that worsened sharply during Young’s mayoralty).
During period of black mayorship beginning with Maynard Jackson
Rather than challenge the class and gender biases in mainstream American society, black politics—as it came to be defined by the political opportunities and pressures created by white interests and opposition—served primarily to reinforce them.
Indeed, rather than viewing black middle-class success as a betrayal of “the revolution,” this book reveals the ways in which they were in fact related. It was precisely because of the emergence of radical Black Power and its advocacy of the politics of “revolution” that mainstream white politicians, institutions, and organizations sought to engage with Black Power through the public policies examined in this book.
To the veterans of the 1965 Watts rebellion taking part in WLCAC’s half-centenary retrospective, the present must have seemed all too like the past. The conditions that inspired rioting in black inner cities from the mid- to late 1960s—including police brutality—have persisted and in some respects worsened over the past five decades.
In the field of education, 86 percent of black adults aged twenty-five and older today have completed high school. In 1964 the figure was only 27 percent.
Although black business income is far higher today than it was in 1969, that income is not evenly spread. Nearly 96 percent of black-owned firms in the United States today are small businesses that have no paid employees.
Indeed, the Great Recession wiped out post-1960s increases in black home ownership completely.
Back in April 2008, when the Illinois senator’s campaign for the Democratic nomination was well under way, black political scientist Adolph Reed described Obama as “a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him,” whose “fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.” Nine years later, Reed’s analysis rings true with those of growing numbers of African American critics who have come to see the limits of Obama’s political style.
For Obama—every inch the consensus politician—the very purpose and meaning of BLM should have been to engage with the political establishment: “The value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then to start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved.”43
