THE DISAPPEARANCE OF THE ‘VITAL CENTER’

The Revolution, of course, never arrived. Race riots became a rarity after 1968, and relations between blacks and whites settled down to the state of tense normality that has prevailed ever since. The swaggering ultra-militancy that set the tone for the horrible last years of the sixties, vividly on display that night in Austin, gradually faded as blacks devoted themselves to entering the schools, occupations, and other institutions that had previously excluded them. It would not be surprising to learn that the Black Power champions who preached aggressive self-defense in Austin eventually joined the system as teachers, lawyers, or even as elected officials.

In many of the most important respects, then, the current environment represents a vast improvement in America’s racial atmosphere. Yet while racial integration has moved ahead in fits and starts, the mood of black America, as indicated by the statements of its most prominent political and intellectual personalities, is in some ways more hostile and angry than during the most polarized days of the Black Power era — reflecting an alienation from America, a rejection of “white-controlled” institutions, and a deep pessimism about the future. At a recent public forum in Harlem, two respected black intellectuals, Alvin Poussaint and Cornel West, declared off-handedly that blacks laced the threat of “genocide” at the hands of white reaction — not some vague form of cultural suppression, but physical elimination such as was suffered by the Armenians and, as West put it, “our Jewish brothers and sisters” earlier this century. This nightmare vision of a racial holocaust echoes the predictions of racial annihilation frequently advanced by legal scholar Derrick Bell, whose best-known work is a fable in which black Americans are sold as slaves to visiting space aliens. Moreover, the predictions of race war routinely expressed by the younger generation of black intellectuals have been accompanied by a major, and disturbing, shift in the character of black leadership. Figures who were once regarded as marginal and extreme have become not merely acceptable as spokesmen for black aspiration; they have, in the figure of Louis Farrakhan, become a dominant presence.

The rise of Farrakhan and others means we can no longer automatically console ourselves with the reassuring commonplace that, despite what they hear from their orators, black people do not believe they are the target of racial annihilation, do not regard Jews as their oppressors, and do continue to identify with the American Dream of middle-class prosperity. There is a disturbingly large constituency for Farrakhan’s paranoid fantasies and even for the glib prophecies of genocide issued by black intellectuals. Polls show that many blacks believe that AIDS was deliberately introduced into the black community, that whites have singled out “strong black leaders” for elimination, that the white power structure has a conscious “Plan” to destroy black neighborhoods by allowing the drug trade to flourish in the inner city. Perhaps even more unsettling is the fact that it is precisely the most successful blacks — those who have entered the professions and the corporate world — who tend to be the most pessimistic about the present conditions and future prospects of black America.

There are many and complex reasons for the deterioration in the caliber of bl ack leadership and the overwrought quality of today’s racial rhetoric. But cert ainly an important part of the explanation can be traced to a collapse of what once formed the Vital Center of black political and community life. The Vital C enter consisted of an impressive network of black-owned and black-run institutions, ranging from churches and newspapers to funeral parlors and fraternal organizations and even to trade unions representing black workers. At the core of the Vital Center, however, was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its shrewd director Roy Wilkins. The NAACP was often damned by radicals and even by the liberal media as too bland, too accommodationist, too much a part of the Establishment. Yet it was the NAACP that for many years was the principal representative of black Middle America, the hard-working, church-going, community-conscious core which constituted the most authentic voice of racial pride and attainment — the missing voice in today’s ill-tempered debate.

It was Wilkins, Whitney Young of the National Urban League, and a few other like-minded figures who stood firm for the civil rights movement’s integrationist goals when they were under attack from the advocates of separatism. Wilkins also publicly rebuked Martin Luther King when King attempted to radicalize the struggle for racial change by linking it to the growing movement against the Vietnam war. Wilkins was convinced that the cause of racial change would be jeopardized if the civil rights movement became identified with the unpopular and unpatriotic New Left, a belief that the course of events was to vindicate. when it followed the wrong course, as it did in the

The NAACP made its share of mistakes, but even when it followed the wrong course, as it did in the case of busing, it often did so for worthy reasons. Busing, we now know, has actually impeded integration by accelerating the pace of white flight from urban schools, and has played a major role in the alienation of white Americans from activist government. Yet even here, the NAACP was initially acting on the premise that the future of black America would be enhanced by its thorough integration in a white-dominated institution; thus even this misguided policy represented an embrace of American society and not its rejection. At the same time, Wilkins and other NAACP officials were among the earliest critics of the federal government’s policies of racial preference, which they opposed for both political and moral reasons.

The personalities and organizations associated with the Vital Center also set the tone for the marches, public manifestoes, and alliances which carried forward the tradition of black protest. They made sure that the events and statements had an interracial complexion, and they were careful to exclude the extremists and demagogues — a group that, until recently, included Louis Farrakhan.

Many of the key institutions of black community life were, ironically, seriously weakened by desegregation. But important segments of the Vital Center might have survived had the civil rights movement pursued a strategy that concentrated on black economic and educational achievement. A focus on integration into the economic system would, to be sure, have rendered the traditional civil rights organizations obsolete, including the NAACP But new institutions would have emerged in their place to analyze the specific racial challenge presented by the post-industrial economic order and to stimulate community development, while treating the struggle against discrimination as a subsidiary concern.

Instead, the energies of the post-civil rights leadership were focused in the worst possible direction: toward the struggle against racism both here in the United States and around the world. By identifying white prejudice as the principal obstacle to racial equality, as expressed through the institutional bias of corporations and political parties and the foreign policy goals of the United States, the black leadership assured a permanent state of racial cold war in which failure to eliminate inequality stood as decisive evidence of white guilt.

The emphasis on white racism led to demands for unpopular and polarizing compensatory programs like affirmative action. More broadly, the fixation on racism invited black estrangement from American society. It also had a chilling effect on intellectual debate. Given the collective judgment of the racial leadership that America was consciously excluding blacks from their rightful place, it required something bordering on an act of dissent for a prominent scholar or politician to point to evidence of racial progress, to urge blacks to assume more personal responsibility, or to insist that something other than prejudice was responsible for the disparities in wealth and education.

Ultimately, the various institutions of the Vital Center made their accommoda tions with the prevailing dogma. Black newspapers, which once functioned as arb iters of community morality, soon fell in line with the new world view. They bl amed Jewish professors, Korean grocers, or other convenient scapegoats for blac k America’s problems; demonized Reagan, Bush, a nd Gingrich as enemies of progressive humanity; and concocted unconvincing alibis for corrupt officials like Marion Barry. Black clergymen intensified their involvement in politics and not infrequently adopted an accusatory, anti- white tone that stood in depressing contrast to the inclusive and hopeful language that marked Martin Luther King during his most influential years. Meanwhile, the NAACP slid from one crisis to the next, its major preoccupation being the expansion of preference programs for the emerging black middle class.

The pace of the Vital Center’s decline has accelerated in recent years. In 1993, Farrakhan was excluded from participation in the 30th anniversary of the labled March on Washington. With the Million Man March, he has achieved near- consensus recognition as the supreme leader without having modified his opinions to any discernible extent. To drive home the point that the correlation of forces had shifted, Farrakhan made certain that the speakers list at the Million Man March included a generous representation of radicals and nationalists, so that nationally prominent figures like Jesse Jackson, Rosa Parks, and Charles Rangel shared the platform with a bizarre array of separatist cult leaders, peddlers of “African” cures for AIDS, and rank anti- Semites.

At the same time as the liberal Vital Center was experiencing steady decline, a vaguely socialist, Marxian tradition demonstrated a surprising resilience among black intellectuals and even some black political figures. To be sure, few blacks actually joined the American Communist Party or supported the state socialism of the Soviet Union. But Marxism need not refer exclusively to a belief in an orthodox brand of Communism; for many blacks, Marxism signified a conviction that racial inequality derived from a combination of racial and class oppression, that the elimination of racial inequality would require a major transformation of capitalism, and that black Americans were joined to the colored peoples of the world as victims of white, imperialist oppression. While a black Marxist might reject the Soviet system because of its authoritarianism, he would probably sympathize with socialist “experiments” in Cuba, Nicaragua, Angola, or other Third World countries. Black Marxists were seldom anti-white; they were often anti-American and took special pride in their uncompromising hostility to American foreign policy objectives.

Although Martin Luther King remained a strong critic of Communism, he was, near the end of his life, increasingly drawn to the notion that social justice demanded a wholesale “restructuring” of the American economy, a code word for democratic socialism. He began referring to the ghetto as a “system of internal colonialism,” and asserted that just as white racism was responsible for the shattered lives of the black poor in America, white racism was also the driving force behind an imperialist foreign policy which maimed and killed people of color all over the Third World.

King developed these views during confused and angry times. But after his death, when the rest of America moved steadily away from the ideological excesses of the 1960s, black politics shifted in an even more extreme direction. On domestic affairs, the Congressional Black Caucus continued to press for urban Marshall Plans long after it had become clear that America could not sustain the old policies of tax-and-spend. And on foreign and defense matters, the racial divide became even more pronounced. Each year the Black Caucus issued an alternative budget which invariably called for a massive transfer of funds from military spending to the social welfare budget. Not surprisingly, the document was almost universally ignored, except by a few of the most left-leaning members of Congress.

Moreover, the black leadership embraced a Third World perspective that led to a near-total rejection of the Reagan administration’s anti-Communist policies. The Third World leaders favored by the black leadership were often pro-Soviet a uthoritarians, such as Grenada’s Maurice Bishop. Leaders who cooperated with Am erica, such as Jamaica’s Edward Seaga, were treated as pariahs. This hostility to American interventionism outlived the Cold War. Opposition to the Gulf war w as almost unanimous within the black leadership and was often justified with th e most hackneyed formulations of the “No Blood for Oil” variety. The black poli tical Establishment was unmoved by appeals by high-ranking black military offic ials; indeed, many prominent blacks exhibit discomfort when confronted with evi dence of black progress in the military. They seem to prefer rubbing shoulders with black boxing champions to fraternizing with black generals. The glitter ma y be one reason, but another surely is that while black success in boxing doesn ‘t tell us anything all that interesting about America, black success in the mi litary suggests that, in one area at least, America has treated its black ci tizens with fairness and dignity. In 1989, for example, Louis Farrakhan found it necessary to call Colin Powell, then just appointed as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a race traitor.

Not surprisingly, the black leadership has encountered problems in adjusting to the global explosion of capitalism and the movement towards privatization and market solutions in the U.S. Here again, the black elites find themselves trapped in a time warp, lagging behind the old East European Communist rulers in their acceptance of the new realities. Once an advocate of self-help and entrepreneurship, Jesse Jackson today ranks as a bitter critic of the global trading system and the market in general. Cornel West, one of the more prominent younger black intellectuals, calls himself a democratic socialist and speaks of a “market-driven shattering of black civil society.”

West and others take pride in their anti-capitalism, which they believe links them to the prophetic, dissenting tradition of the civil rights struggle. In fact, resistance to the present economic order is the antithesis of the civil rights movement’s overarching objective of full participation in the entire spectrum of American life. The anti-capitalist message reinforces an all-too-prevalent defeatism among black men, who justify their lack of enterprise on the grounds that the system is rigged against them.

To a certain extent, the rise of Farrakhan may signify a decline in black Marxism. While preaching a vitriolic brand of anti-Americanism, Farrakhan is seldom critical of the market or of capitalism, and as the leader of the Nation of Islam, he presides over an extensive network of small businesses, most notably a private security force which has won contracts from public housing authorities in several cities.

But blacks have never been as meticulous about ideological consistency as the white left, and have demonstrated considerable flexibility in reconciling anti-capitalist prejudices with a racial nationalism that prizes business ownership. The intellectual result is what has been called Rainbow nationalism, a toxic brew that unites a feeling of solidarity with people of color throughout the world with a uniquely American sense of black grievance.

The person who most clearly embodies the spirit of Rainbow nationalism is neither Farrakhan nor Jesse Jackson, but Benjamin Chavis, the former national director of the NAACP. In his earlier career, Chavis was the consummate man of the radical left. He railed against capitalism, denounced Israeli “imperialism, ” spoke out for the Sandinistas, and played a leadership role within a network of organizations aligned with the American Communist Party. At some point, Chavis’s vocabulary shirred from an emphasis on the class struggle to the omnipresence of white racism. Police racism, corporate racism, Bush administration racism, the racism of the Gulf war — Chavis condemned them all, and went one step further by discovering an entirely new form of racism: environmental racism.

Environmental racism may be one of the great non-issues of our time. But Chavis’s identification with two morally impregnable causes quickly elevated him to a position of political respectability; he was named to the new Clinton administration’s transition committee on environmental affairs and, shortly thereafter, selected to lead the NAACP. His tenure there was brief and stormy, and he was fired after little more than a year for budgetary irresponsibility and charges of sexual harassment. His dismissal was also interpreted as a rejection of his radicalism, reflected in his attempts to broker “peace summits” among youth gangs, the establishment of NAACP chapters in foreign countries as an expression of internationalist solidarity, a covert campaign to magnify the influence of radicals and nationalists in organizational affairs, and a move to forge a de facto alliance with Louis Farrakhan.

It now appears that Chavis understood something about the volatile nature of today’s racial politics that his critics may have missed. By aligning himself with Farrakhan, Chavis has staged his own comeback. He served as chief organizer for the Million Man March and as Farrakhan’s liaison to the mainstream black leadership. As reward, Chavis has been placed in charge of a new entity, the National African-American Leadership Summit.

The leadership summit is billed as a big-tent organization that will bring together nationalists, radicals, and traditional integrationist groups like the NAACP and Urban League. But there can be little doubt that the summit is meant to solidify Farrakhan’s position as race leader, to ensure a place within the leadership ranks for the new generation of “community activists,” such as Al Sharpton, and possibly even to draw in such disreputable figures as Leonard Jeffries and other Farrakhan camp followers who traffic in anti- Semitism and conspiracy-mongering.

A favorite Chavis theme is the necessity of racial unit y, by which he means unity around Farrakhan. Farrakhan’s legitimacy is no longer subject to debate among those engaged in race politics. In previous times, the existence of a healthy Vital Center would have ensured that appeals to bigotry, organizational irresponsibility, and political immaturity would have been denounced by name. Never before has the absence of the great racial middle ground been the cause for so much regret.

Arch Puddington is senior scholar at Freedom House and has written widely on race relations.