This conversation, hosted by the Harvard Book Store and moderated by Rev. Eugene Rivers, took place in conjunction with the Boston Review's (2012) forum on the power and potential of black movements. Featuring a lead article by Michael C. Dawson, the Future of Black Politics forum included responses from William Julius Wilson, Andra Gillespie, Tommie Shelby, Rev. Patrick H. O'Connor, Jennifer L. Hochschild, Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, Dorian T. Warren, and Robin D. G. Kelley, with a reply by Michael C. Dawson. Here, the conversation continues.

William Julius Wilson: I agree with the arguments put forth by Michael Dawson in his thoughtful paper in the Boston Review, especially with his call for the Black public sphere and Black political organizations to address both racial justice and economic justice for all. Like Dawson, I strongly feel that both should be emphasized. But since the quest for economic justice has received far less attention from African American leaders, I will argue briefly for why it should at least receive some attention, or as much attention as the struggle for racial justice.

The pursuit of economic justice, as Dawson suggests, requires multiracial cooperation. Accordingly, to strengthen the foundation for multiracial cooperation, we need to develop a new public dialogue on how our problems should be defined and how they should be addressed. And this public dialogue should feature a rhetoric that focuses on problems that plague broad segments of the American public, from the jobless poor to the struggling working and middle classes.

This new public message should help ordinary Americans become more aware of how global economic changes—as well as monetary, fiscal, and social policies—have increased social inequality in recent years. It should make clear that inequality in the labor market has risen just as new constraints have emerged on use of federal resources to combat social inequities. More specifically, it should be explicitly pointed out that many of the government's policies exacerbate rather than alleviate the economic stresses of ordinary families. These include monetary policies to combat inflation that elevate real interest rates and lead to increased unemployment, trade policies that place low-skilled labor in the United States in greater competition with low-skilled labor around the world, tax policies that favor wealthier families at the expense of ordinary families, and congressional inaction on or opposition to programs such as public investment and national health insurance.

Although the various racial groups in America suffer from many of these common problems, the racial dialogue in the United States often obscures that fact. And this is seen especially in the tendency to view current problems in the African American community as exclusively a matter of race. Blacks still confront racial barriers in the labor market, as Michael Dawson so clearly points out in his article. However, many of their problems, especially those of low-skilled African American workers, stem from changes in the demand for labor in the global economy. In general, highly educated and highly skilled workers of all racial groups have benefitted, whereas workers with lower skills face the growing threats of job displacement and eroding wages.

If leaders in the African American community perceive the economic problems of Blacks as separate from the national and international trends affecting all ordinary Americans, they will be less likely to join forces with other groups seeking economic reform. This would be unfortunate because no group in the United States would benefit more than African Americans from the creation of a progressive multiracial coalition.

Michael C. Dawson: I think we have a difficult task, and I think what you'll see today is a little bit of a division of labor. Given the hegemony of neoliberalism over the past few decades, and the American public discourse in American politics, neither racial equality nor economic injustice nor inequality has been at the center of political discourse, particularly within the main political parties in this country.

I agree with Professor Wilson that, particularly among Black leadership over the last twenty to thirty years—and there has always been a fight about this in Black political history, there has been an inattention, and in fact a disdain for paying attention, to economic inequality within the Black public discourse and within Black politics more generally.

What makes this a particularly difficult task is that when we look at American politics more generally, we find that most White Americans, since the 1990s, believe that Blacks are doing better than White Americans. From recent survey work, we know that many White Americans believe that they suffer racial discrimination more than any other group within the nation. So we, on one hand, have to do an immense amount of education and struggle to bring issues of class back to Black politics, and at the same time fight the fight that African American activists have been fighting for hundreds of years, to not let the general progressive movement in American politics lose sight of the brutal facts of racial inequality.

One of the key factors about racial inequality that Wilson suggested very strongly, is that it has a particularly nasty and devastating impact on the poorest African Americans, and that has not been the focus of most scholarly work, of most political work in Black communities over the last thirty or forty years. So what I've argued and will continue to argue, is that we need a healthy Black politics; a Black politics that is not exclusionary. Virtually all Black political movements, even most of the Black nationalist movements, had the twin aims of organizing within Black communities and influencing and working with those who have similar interests and aims in general American communities.

We need Black politics and Black activists to not only rebuild independent Black political organizations, but also to work within multiracial organizations and formations. We need a Black politics that is no longer sundered from labor; no longer sundered from economic fights; no longer sundered, for the first time perhaps in American history, from progressive faith communities; one that also reclaims its proud heritage of internationalism, a progressive, anti-imperialist internationalism.

The silver lining, so to speak, is that when you look at public opinion among African Americans, there hasn't been much change among the Black mass public or counter-public, as I sometimes call it, as there has been among Black political leaders. African Americans still remain broadly supportive of economic redistribution and social justice. African Americans also were by far the group that most opposed American military intervention in Iraq in 2003, more than Democrats, more than any other group, period. In fact, a majority of African Americans opposed the war, even when the war was being launched, when you normally see a rally-around-the-flag effect.

Finally, another aspect of Black politics that we must reclaim is that we must see the quest for the struggle for racial equality not just linked to struggles for economic equality, but as part of a universal struggle to promote human flourishing and to bring attention to the effects of capitalism, which have been out of control for far too long.

Eugene Rivers: We now have in excess of 8,000 Black elected officials, and a Black president of the United States. Yet, conditions for the very Black and very poor, as Professor Wilson has brilliantly documented over the past three decades, are arguably worse in some areas than they were in 1960. How should one account for this rather spectacular achievement?

Dawson: Part of it is structural. When you are elected by a major political party, you are constrained by the politics of that party, you are constrained by the sponsors who give you money. Black politicians are no different than any other politicians. By and large, with very few exceptions, they prefer large donations to small donations. Those who give you large donations have a tendency to occupy one's attention, and those who don't, don't. That's one part of the answer, but it's not the only and maybe not the most devastating part of the answer.

The second part of the answer is that many African American politicians have increasingly been divorced from struggles of various sorts. A good segment of the initial cadre of Black elected officials came out of the labor movement, came out of the needle trades union, came out of meat packers unions, came out of the auto plants, steel mills, and mines. But ever since the McCarthy era, there has been increasing sundering of the connection between labor and civil rights, or labor and Black liberation, with some notable exceptions, for example, Detroit in the 1970s. But that being said, many of our Black politicians have no connection to a legacy of struggle or any personal experience in activist movements.

Third is that many of these politicians also believe increasingly that there is not much of a structural story in terms of the consequences of unregulated capitalism. They have rejected European models of capitalist social democracy, and very much have, I would argue, adopted a blame-the-victim approach, which makes it very easy then not to focus in on the bottom third of our communities. To quote a minister I was talking to recently, we have Black politicians today who are more conservative than Richard Nixon. I would agree with that. The Democratic Party today is to the right of the Republican Party when I was protesting the right-wing politics of the Republican Party in 1968.

Wilson: Allow me to look at this in a slightly different way. The late Black historian, Vivian Henderson, stated that it is as if racism, having put Blacks in their economic place, stepped aside to watch changes in the economy and technological change destroy that place. And it is unfortunate for Blacks, particularly poorer Blacks, that three fundamental changes have adversely affected their position in the labor market. One is the computer revolution, which rewards skilled workers and displaces low-skilled workers. The second is the growing internationalization of economic activity, where low-skilled workers in this country are in greater competition with low-skilled workers around the world. And the third is the increasing movement of industries from the central city. And these changes are just on the economics side. If you look at the political side, The New Federalism of the Reagan administration sharply reduced federal support for urban areas where Blacks are concentrated, and increasingly focused attention on suburban areas, which tend to provide greater support for Republican candidates.

These economic and political changes have accompanied some fundamental demographic changes that have taken place in inner-city neighborhoods since the early 1970s. During the 1960s, the typical inner-city Black community was densely populated. In fact, families had to share apartments because of housing shortages. With the great migration from the South to the North ending in the 1970s, and the outmigration of industries and higher-income groups, including higher-income Blacks from inner-city neighborhoods to other parts of the city and to the suburbs, poor Black neighborhoods moved from areas that were densely populated, reinforced by the constant flow of migrants from the South to neighborhoods that have become depopulated. If you watch HBO's The Wire, David Simon, the creator of the show, really captures this process with his depiction of abandoned buildings and the vacant lots in inner-city Baltimore neighborhoods—neighborhoods that suffer from lack of social organization, and feature incredibly high levels of joblessness.

The difference between poor inner-city neighborhoods today and poor inner-city neighborhoods in previous years is that in the earlier period adult residents were poor but a high percentage were working. Today, these same neighborhoods feature joblessness. And jobless neighborhoods trigger all kinds of problems, ranging from drug addiction and crime to the breakup of families.

Dawson: But we should add to that the Thatcher- and Reagan-led rise of neoliberalism during the 1980s, because neoliberalism had five consequences that go hand-in-hand with the type of globalization that Wilson is describing. One was a worldwide privatization of the state, sometimes externally enforced by international organizations, which cripples states' capacities, in both developed and developing countries. Another component is that markets should be emulated by virtually all types of institutions, and market values are those that we as individuals should embrace. Institutions should function under market principles whether you're talking about arts groups, universities, government—all have to run according to market-based principles.

Third was the dismantling of the social safety net, which made civil society much less capable of taking care of its own. Fourth was deregulation, and fifth is a type of free trade which was aimed at the dismantling of labor rights, health and safety regulations, and environmental regulations all in the name of free trade. All these have had a devastating effect on the political economy and the politics of the countries in which we live.

Rivers: I want to drill down again, however, into the Black leadership question. Let's grant these macrostructural tendencies that produce the kinds of conditions we have now. Within that context, how are we to understand what one may call Black leadership and our Black elected officials? Are we saying that Black political activity, behavior, participation, is largely irrelevant to these macrostructural deals so that we have what may feel like a sort of a deterministic scheme, or is there any agency? And within that context, how do we think creatively?

Given the trends that you have analyzed, how are we to understand historically, if you will, Black political leadership over the last twenty years? Professor Wilson, I want to hone in on this, because when you wrote The Declining Significance of Race in 1978, you received a strong response from the established Black political leadership. First there was this almost tsunamic denial that we should even be discussing the question of class. And you caught a lot of hell for that.

Wilson: First of all, what I wrote in The Declining Significance of Race is now conventional wisdom—the point I made about the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots in the Black community. When I wrote that book in the latter 1970s, I was upset that there were very few Black leaders who signed on or supported the Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment Bill, which, if passed, would have significantly benefitted the Black masses. What were Black leaders focusing on? The Allen Bakke Affirmative Action case. I'm a supporter of affirmative action; I think it's very, very important and I'm worried about the Supreme Court's pending decision, which might overturn affirmative action. But affirmative action, which benefits, primarily, more trained and educated Blacks, does not address the demand factors that contribute to massive Black joblessness.

I talked about this problem in 1978, and I continue to be amazed at the lack of attention African American leaders have given to demand factors that affect Black employment. Take, for example, the ongoing political debates about the adverse effects of legislation that increases competition of American workers with workers in developing countries that do not have the labor laws and environmental protections that have evolved in the United States. To the extent that free-trade legislation increases the displacement of low-skilled workers, African American workers are thereby disproportionately affected. Yet, few Blacks leaders have been prominently involved in the ongoing debate over free trade.

I would like to see Black leaders join with other progressive groups in coming up with the kind of legislation that would improve the conditions of ordinary Americans and enhance their prospects in this economy. That said, things would be a lot worse if it weren't for Barack Obama. Obama's stimulus package prevented us from going into a depression. Did you know that the stimulus package included sixty billion for low-income people? Sixty billion. When Robert Greenstein, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, was asked by the Obama administration to draw up a budget to be included in the stimulus package that would address the economic needs of low-income people, he drafted a sixty billion dollar budget. When he submitted the budget, he apologized for the high figure. And, much to his surprise, the Obama administration accepted his full budget. He was shocked, absolutely shocked. Greenstein told me that if anyone had told him prior to 2008 that a president of the United States and his administration would include sixty billion in a budget for low-income people, he would have laughed at them.

Moreover, Obama risked his presidency passing health-care legislation. And who benefits disproportionately from health care? Blacks, people of color, Hispanics. One of the reasons why the Tea Party is so against the health legislation is because they feel it doesn't really affect them. They have health insurance. Many of them believe that the legislation was created mainly to help poor people of color.

I could go on and on about the things that Obama has accomplished, which are somehow not really well known. He has done a very poor job of communicating what he has accomplished. Although he inherited a twelve trillion dollar debt, annual deficits of close to one trillion dollars, an economy in the tank, he kept this country from going into a depression, which would have severely hurt Black people. So, unlike a number of liberal critics, I'm going to give Barack Obama a pass.

Rivers: Professor Dawson?

Dawson: I would like to go back to your previous question and then work to your last question. One thing, in terms of Black leadership generally that we really shouldn't de-emphasize, is the role of agency. And this is, applies, drilling down from some of the more abstract comments made about neoliberalism a few minutes ago. One of the key components of neoliberalism that Black political leaders are embracing consciously, either for reasons of self-interest or because they agree with it, is a narrowing of the definition of politics to purely electoral politics. All other types of politics are considered to be illegitimate, or at least ineffective, which totally flies in the face of the history of Black politics.

With that, of course, comes a narrowing of political discourse. Even if you go back twenty to twenty-five years ago, you would have found a healthy discourse between social democrats, Black feminists, Black socialists, Black nationalists, and Black conservatives, but there has been an extraordinary narrowing of the political discourse within the Black community, which has led to the ability to label people such as Reverend Jeremiah Wright as being anachronisms, or at the tail end of the distribution, when actually they are in the middle of the distribution and well representative of a substantial segment of Black opinion.

There has also been a redefinition of Black politics as interest-group politics which, among other things, makes it easier for Blacks and Latinos, White workers, and other groups to to be pitted against each other because of increasingly narrow definitions of group self-interest.

This narrowing of economic vision in terms of full employment among black elites very much flew in the face of the views of the great majority of African Americans. Remember this, if you asked in any poll of African Americans, whether it was in surveys conducted at the University of Michigan, or at Harvard when Professor Lawrence Bobo and I were conducting surveys, or polls conducted by the media, you asked Black respondents, what's the number one problem? Jobs. That was always the first answer, without any variation whatsoever.

And you don't hear Black politicians today talk about full employment, let alone Humphrey Hawkins. We don't talk about extension of unemployment programs. So even when there are programs that are extremely beneficial to poor Black people, or poor people more generally, I think part of the communications problem is that some Black politicians do not want to make those gains known due to fear of being labeled as advocating a “socialist” program.

Wilson: Michael, you mentioned Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres' book in your excellent piece in the Boston Review. And they argue that the most effective way to involve people of color in racially inclusive coalitions is to organize them first around political issues that are explicitly race-specific. They assert that people of color are less likely to respond to calls for coalition building if their leaders do not first speak to and organize them around matters that relate to their racial experiences. What is your take on that?

Dawson: I have two thoughts about that. To begin, the view that Blacks must first organize among themselves was initially popularized in the twentieth century by Marcus Garvey. This view was also popularized in the book Black Power by Stokely Carmichael and Charles Hamilton during the 1960s. But this view doesn't completely match my experience of organizing, even at the height of the Black liberation movement during the late 1960s and 1970s. When I was organizing Black workers, what was critical was to talk about speed-ups, layoffs, and other issues that affected their lives. It doesn't have to be racially specific. I think what Black workers and Black poor people want, like anybody, is to talk about the issues that matter to them.

Now, where you sometimes run into trouble is if you are part of a group that ignores some of the racist connotations or racial implications of their lives. As you do that, then you have a problem organizing people of color. But people of color are like anybody else; if they can't put food on the table, if they don't have jobs, if they're suffering from extraordinarily poor government service, you can organize around those issues and it doesn't have to be racially specific.

Rivers: Let's open this up to a few questions from the audience.

Question: Could you possibly talk about the benefits of education, how they disproportionately affect Black people when they have or don't have such benefits? Why aren't leaders really addressing this, because it really could make all the difference in the world for this generation and the next one?

Wilson: Well, the Obama administration is addressing the issue of education with the Race to the Top program. And part of the stimulus package included—I'm not sure about the figure, but about one hundred billion dollars—for education. And they do force schools to reform. In this connection, one of the things that the Obama administration has supported is the creation of public charter schools to compete with traditional public schools. Many people categorically dismiss charter schools as not being very effective. But if you look at the charter schools in Boston and New York, they are very effective. And these are schools that are overwhelmingly represented by poor children of color. For example, in New York City, only 4% of the students in the public charter schools are White. Yet these schools exceed the traditional public schools in New York City on the state-wide cognitive verbal and math tests, and they compete very well with the students in the surrounding suburbs on these same tests. The question you have to ask is, what is unique about these very successful public charter schools? What do they have in common?

There are several things that they have in common. One is an extended school day. The other is their ridiculously short summer vacation. In the summer months, children in the inner-city schools go home and watch TV because parents cannot afford to send them to summer enrichment programs. And so the gap between the haves and the have-nots widens dramatically during the summer. Unlike traditional public schools, students in these public charter schools are enrolled in classes throughout most of the summer.

A third aspect is the charter schools' ability to hire and fire teachers. They are not controlled by seniority rules. This creates problems for some charter school critics, but the fact of the matter is that they are able to select the best teachers for these jobs, and they do not reward teachers who are not doing a good job in the classroom.

Obama has received a lot of criticism for his support and promotion of public charter schools. Also, he has received a lot of criticism for his Race to the Top initiative, because it challenges the traditional ways we go about educating kids. It confronts the problem of institutional entrenchment. I would argue that the Obama administration has focused more on public education, put more effort into enhancing and improving public education, than previous administrations.

Dawson: I think a huge part of the problem is that we live in the federal system. This is a reality that causes problems in education, to name one area. In Chicago, many of the charter schools are doing quite well along the lines of ones that Wilson described in Boston and New York. But there are two problems that affect most of the children in public schools in Chicago. One is how public schools are financed. There are not enough resources coming into public schools to provide that type of intensive education for most of the children in public schools. And then what the Chicago political leadership has decided to do, as has most political leadership, is to devise a public school system that is extraordinarily good, as good as or better than the private schools for the upper-middle class and the upper class, but then not put any resources into the schools that go to the poorer communities.

This is not primarily a racial issue, because when you look at Whitney Young and other magnet schools in Chicago, the students are primarily children of color. They're doing extremely well. But the poor children in Chicago are not being well served, except for the few that have been lucky to get into some of these special programs.

Rivers: I have two questions. The way things are looking now, President Obama will probably be reelected. But how does one think strategically if he loses? And even if he wins, Black America is going to have an interesting time dealing with the ideological, political, and cultural blowback from the preceding eight years. How should Black leadership think about the future of the Black poor in 2016?

Wilson: Well, I really hope that if he loses, there will be a mobilization of groups concerned about inequality; that is, the creation of a multiracial coalition to put pressure, including voting pressure, on both Democratic and Republican leaders to pursue and adopt policies that reflect the interests of ordinary families. If Obama loses, you really are going to need such a coalition. I would also like to see Black leaders work with various grassroots organizations, women's rights groups, labor unions, religious organizations that are on the progressive side, organizations that are broadly representative of the various racial and ethnic groups. It would be great if such groups could be interconnected in local, regional, and national networks.

Dawson: Now we are getting into some areas where Wilson and I really disagree. If Obama loses in 2012, what we're going to see is a massive attack on labor, even more massive than we've seen already. Reproductive rights will be at more risk than they have been in half a century. It will be one of the most fraught situations we have seen in most of our lifetimes in terms of of savage political attacks and while we would like to see that type of coalition come together, it won't be in the context of the comfortable politics of the left. As we saw under the Bush administration, progressive churches will be hauled before the IRS and accused of violating tax, nonpartisan rules. So there will be institutional attacks from the executive branch and congress on virtually all aspects of any type of progressive institution.

Rivers: All right. Let's take another question.

Question: Regardless of what we think about him, Herman Cain really went far in the political process, and President Obama of course made it, ultimately. But when you look at other Black candidates before Obama—Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson—they never went as far as Herman Cain had done in this past pre-season. So can you give us your opinion on that? And if it wasn't for his indiscretion, he may have gone even further.

Dawson: Well, in 1988, Jesse Jackson actually was winning primaries and delegates. So he did it far better than Cain—he won Michigan. And in 1984 he won more delegates than Cain was going to win, indiscretion or none. I think what was clear, though, from the beginning, was that Cain was never the favorite of the Republican establishment. If he didn't shoot himself in the foot, there were going to be massive attacks on him, because they didn't see him as ultimately electable. And certainly given his ignorance on questions such as foreign policy in Libya, they knew that he would be worse than cannon fodder in a debate with the president.

Wilson: What shocked me is how Herman Cain stayed so popular for so long. It says something about the political process or how well informed some Americans are.

Question: What do you think of the Occupy movement?

Wilson: I think it's a very, very important movement because it has increased the awareness of rising inequality in American society. People are now talking about increasing inequality in the United States instead of denying it. And I think we should attribute the growing political awareness of the rising inequality to the Occupy movement. Reporters are now covering it. I get calls all the time from reporters about rising inequality. Politicians are now talking about rising inequality. They can't ignore it. So I think the Occupy movement has been one of the most important movements in the twenty-first century, and actually, of the last several decades.

Question: I'm in town from California, where I do a lot of organizing work in the Bay Area, particularly Berkeley—the bastion of all that's liberal and progressive. And we have an amazing challenge paying attention to the nuancing of Black identity as it relates to the way in which political strategies are created to enhance the issues of Black survival.

Do you have any thoughts about that particular challenge in this century. In Eugene Robinson's book, Disintegration, he suggests that the particular fragmentation of Black identity experienced in the United States requires a different response, or at least a different strategy to achieve progress, given the situations of Black people in this country; not all of us are in the same particular boat or location. I just wonder, particularly in this moment of coalition building, what does that look like?

Dawson: I organized there for fifteen years, and I would argue a few things. First, I agree that there is a set of common experiences, but I think we see something we saw in the early twentieth century, which is that those common experiences of Blackness are, to some degree, fragmenting along class lines as much as anything. Second, there has always been far more heterogeneity, not just along lines of class and ethnicity among people of African descent, but also regionally.

For me, organizing in the Bay Area and then going to New York and talking to a New York organizer was like living in different worlds to some degree. But that brings me to my third point. The way identities also get formed within movements—and to the degree that you have a political movement—that is going to shape how people view Blackness or express Blackness politically. So the political movements we build will have a lot to say about how fragmented those identities are, or what the content of those identities will be.

Question: In the macro social analysis that you have laid out, one thing that I thought was missing was a discussion of crime and carceral policy and how that contributes to Black poverty. This seems to be the principal source of ideological and material differentiation in Black communities. I think that we're kind of dancing around that question because that's one area where Black political ideologies aren't as progressive as we might expect them to be. Many people are quite comfortable with the idea of the Chris Rock version of a war between Black people and, you know, “niggas,” right? It's this idea that pathological behavior, or criminal behavior, separates the two, and that that's why things can't get off the ground in terms of full employment; that's why things can't get off the ground in terms of redeveloping ghetto communities. How do you think Black leadership can respond to that if there is ideological fracturing along the lines of how people think about Black criminality?

Dawson: When I talk about fragmentation around class, certainly the question of incarceration is totally tied to that. Indeed, a lot of the survey work we have done since the 1990s is that class divisions among Blacks derive from “How do you think about the police? How do you think about crime?” It's not “Is crime good or crime bad?” but how much do we do to prevent crime in the first place? How do we reintegrate people once they've gone through the criminal justice system? To what degree do we penalize people for relatively minor drug offences?

There are huge class questions there. But I think one of the answers, politically, is that we've seen some of those class divisions before. What is needed, and what I think we will see—and it's one of the strong points of the Occupy movement—is that we can't rely on the organizational forms and ideologies of the twentieth century. One of the things that Occupy is doing, but we'll see it coming out of Black and Brown communities as well, is creating new forms of organization. I think we will see people coming out of prison, people who are involved in carceral struggles, such as women who are organizing families to go see prisoners. Those are the types of forms that political movements will draw from and they will organize around those and other vital sets of issues.

Rivers: We are out of time. Thank you both very much for these brilliant thoughts on the future of Black politics.