Now there are all types of reasonable arguments TNR could have gotten some black non-Obama supporter to make. He’s a neoliberal (oh…wait, that doesn’t work because TNR is a neoliberal publication). He’s too moderate compared to Edwards (oh…wait, that doesn’t work because TNR didn’t support Edwards). Clinton’s health care policy is significantly better (oh…wait, the policies aren’t as dissimilar as folks are making them out to be).
I think partly because of the sort of racial narratives that are likely to attach within rightwing circles in the Democratic Party of an Obama defeat, as well as the subsequent role that he’d be likely to play in public life, that from the standpoint of progressive interests, we will ultimately be worse off with Obama as a defeated candidate than with Clinton as a defeated candidate.
I have to think about this. But I just wanted to throw this out there for folks to ruminate on. Pay particular attention to the differences between Reed and Harris-Lacewell with regards to politics. More here.
Black power is dead.
You know i’m out of pocket for a bit, but this is important.
Ok. So what I meant was there would be less SUBSTANTIVE blogging. (not like there was a lot to begin with.)
We already know that historically speaking whites in general and black elites want blacks to be damn near perfect in order to get the RIGHT of citizenship. We saw this here also with at least one black blogger (who shall remain linkless because I don’t want to embarass him) making some of the same claims about how perhaps the 6 should have just taken consistent beat downs, threats, and symbolic terrorist harassment, in order to make a much better claim.
We also know that significant components of the white progressive blogosphere has been focused on the bush administration in general and on Iraq.
But what I haven’t seen is a discussion about the political-economy of blogging. There are bureaucratic, economic, and ideological determinants of story choice in the media. The media focuses on urban poverty in large part because the victims are black and easily tagged as irresponsible (ideological), but also because they don’t have to spend much money to send reporters to cover urban poverty as opposed to rural poverty (economic).
Check out this quote written about MoveOn:
MoveOn’s management team — led by Eli Pariser, a 25-year-old Internet whiz — runs a sophisticated political operation, and its main preoccupation, beyond ending the Iraq war, is to keep growing. To do that, MoveOn is always looking for what Mr. Pariser and his team call “the message object” — the controversy of the month that will viscerally attract more liberals to sign up and write checks.
An attack on MoveOn from the Bush White House is, of course, the mother of all message objects. Six months after Mr. Bush’s re-election, when opposition to the Iraq war suddenly seemed to be breaking out like a rash around the country, Karl Rove publicly accused MoveOn and its liberal sympathizers of offering “therapy and understanding for our attackers,” and membership soared. That probably explains why MoveOn was eager to run the provocative Petraeus ad in the first place.
In a sense, MoveOn is shrewdly gaming liberal politics in the way the National Rifle Association has long gamed conservative politics; the more controversy, the more members it attracts, and the more power it has to leverage on their behalf.
How much money is MoveOn likely to garner by focusing on Jena 6? On Shaquanda Cotton? Moving from MoveOn which to be fair isn’t a blog, TO blogs….how many more trackbacks and visitors is blogger X likely to garner by focusing on an issue that makes their readers feel uncomfortable? The blindspot they’ve got then isn’t only the function of their own decisions about what is important and what isn’t, what they’d need to see to prove racism and what we’d need to see…it’s also about their assumptions about their readers and the community of bloggers they want to speak to.
I’ve written here about brokerage politics before. The brokerage politics model is fairly simple. You’ve got a large body of “clients” that for whatever reason cannot attain some good using their own devices. So in steps a “broker” who negotiates on behalf of the “client.” The end result is that the client gets something that he/she couldn’t get without the broker. The problem with this model politically speaking is that the clients are usually disempowered (the broker has no interest in giving the clients the resources needed to cut deals on their own), the broker cuts deals on the client’s behalf in private (which makes it impossible to determine whether a better deal could have been garnered by the clients themselves), and there are no means of holding the broker accountable (the broker is not usually a political official hence can’t be voted out of office, and the broker usually operates on a scale that makes shame ineffective).
Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are both brokers. Their livelihood has been garnered by a combination of powerful speaking skills, and brokering deals on behalf of black constituencies with private and public parties.
There was a time not long ago when events like Jena and Paris would have come to light THROUGH them (or someone like them). After ensuring that they had their facts straight, Jackson and Sharpton would then spread the word about the events nationally….and perhaps some type of redress would come from it.
The internet combined with black talk radio and other black information sources (remember, Shaquanda Cotton was picked up first by an African American Chicago Tribune columnist) in effect removes Sharpton and Jackson from the equation in their former capacity. Even if, because of the nature of rural political power, the people in Jena did not have the power to make change on their own…black people in Chicago, Detroit, and other urban areas DO have this power. They have the power of the podium, the power of numbers. Making these events transparent is usually enough to get some type of redress, because we have progressed enough that nationally shaming a municipality does work. Jackson and Sharpton are both sharp enough that they’ll hold on in some capacity…likely as media pundits.
However the problem here is that what we’re facing is much larger than rural racism writ large. There’s a reason why people went to Jena and stopped there, rather than say, continuing 4 hours and moving to New Orleans and camping out there until the city and the people in it are made whole. Transparency in the case of this form of subjugation is not enough. This requires a level of organizing and planning that cannot occur through this type of protest. And just as the media has a very short attention span….so do we. I have no idea for example whether Paris, Texas is dealing with its black children any better than it did before the Cotton case made headlines.
I mention the media.
The other thing to take from Jena and Paris is that we actually have developed what some call a “counter-public sphere.” A place where we can engage in debates and come to consensus on issues separate from those created by the mainstream media. However the types of events and discussions that are held in this virtual space is still constrained by a range of factors. We are more likely to talk about domestic subjugation than say the white progressive blogosphere (it’s important that this be acknowledged…it isn’t that the “progressive blogosphere” missed out on Jena while the “black blogosphere” picked it up. Rather the “black progressive blogosphere” picked it up and the “white progressive blogosphere” purposely missed it). But we are not any more likely to talk about say, the potential role of city-level socialism in ameliorating poverty.
There are a few issues in the news that I’ve wanted to touch on but haven’t had the time. Still don’t have the time.
So I’ll present a scenario and a question.
You’ve got a neighborhood of black people in a predominantly black city. Two populations–one rents, the other owns. There is a movement underfoot to give the neighborhood a historic site designation. Doing so would raise the property values, but also the rents.
Black people have a vested interest in building wealth. Black people also have a vested interest in affordable housing.
Both populations can claim to speak for “the black community.” The renters can say that the historic designation would hurt black people in as much as they need affordable housing. The owners can say that the historic designation would help black people in as much as they need wealth.
If there is a shared black interest here how is it to be figured out?
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Earlier, I had some strong criticisms of Obama. I didn’t really care about the “he ain’t black” stuff–that’s for the birds.
Today I was taping for The Barbershop, and one of the bits was about Johns Edwards’ poverty tour. I originally planned to compare Edwards’ platform on poverty to the non-existent platforms of Obama and Clinton, and wanted to double check just to be sure.
Obama has definitely stepped his game up. Here is his poverty platform. He’s cribbed some ideas from Edwards–his battle against mortgage loan sharks was presaged by Edwards for example. But he’s got some interesting ones of his own. The idea of giving environmental jobs to people in cities who needs work is a great one and one likely taken from the folks at worldchanging. This is the type of idea exchange/sampling/biting that I can roll with.
