In this book, Katherine Tate tells the story of the evolution of black lawmakers in the U.S. Congress. She details the process by which they have gone from outsiders to the American political process to the position of Washington insiders, with more mainstream or moderate views resulting from their numeric increase and advancement in senior leadership roles within the Democratic Party and U.S. House of Representatives. As a result of said incorporation, they are now less inclined to pressure the Democratic Party and the president of the United States to support radical group interests (like reparations) using collective tactics. That is to say, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) has evolved from voting as a bloc to leverage their influence over policy outputs in government to recognizing compromise as a political necessity they now deem an inevitable part of the legislative process. In their roles as liberal activists, black lawmakers have often resorted to bloc voting in opposition and later compromised as part of their bargaining efforts. They have now emerged as active policymakers in the U.S. Congress, taking on a more expansive role that involves more than the mere articulation of black policy interests. Whereas much of the extant literature has suggested that the CBC has been unable to deliver substantive policy change and achieve high bill-passage success because it was too ideologically rigid and overly ambitious to bargain with leadership effectively, Concordance offers us a more dynamic interpretation and comprehensive account of the process by which this group has managed to reinvent itself in response to the ever-changing political landscape.
Tate’s insightful analysis makes this clear—that is, a cohort change as well as numeric expansion in size contributed to the growing ideological moderation of the CBC. First, black lawmakers from the Civil Rights generation were replaced by a less race-oriented and system-challenging post–Civil Rights generation. Second, an increase in the number of black lawmakers from the South with more conservative views made the CBC less radical. At the same time, and no less importantly, the elevation of black lawmakers to senior leadership positions has contributed to the liberalization of the Democratic Party. Tate explains how such an evolution from radicalism to mainstream liberalism emerged as an adaptive process in concert with two parallel trajectories. Black lawmakers became more moderate in their views as they advanced in the Democratic Party and took on senior leadership positions in the U.S. House of Representatives. Correspondingly, the Democratic Party itself became more liberal on racial issues and adopted a number of policy stances that benefited black citizens both here and abroad; for example, black lawmakers sponsored a number of bills on African foreign-policy initiatives, generally, and black committee chairs, specifically, held a number of hearings on African-related matters. Arguably, the latter strategy has influenced the content of Congress’s foreign-policy agenda to a greater extent than typical bill introductions. Tate refers to this mutual adaptation, or process, as, “concordance.”
Today, black lawmakers are more likely to vote with the Democratic majority than ever before. Considering that black lawmakers will continue to serve a vital role in the U.S. Congress, Tate’s book should be required reading for scholars of Congress and the presidency, generally, and African American politics, specifically. The author makes an important contribution to our practical and theoretical understanding of political representation over 30-plus years. She focuses squarely on some of the most vexing and controversial policy issues to date, which have defined congressional–presidential relations as they relate to the CBC over six administrations from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama.
Using multivariate regression as her method of choice, Tate adopts a measure developed by Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal that is calibrated precisely to measure change over time in legislative voting behavior. Her analysis relies on data collected on black House members’ votes on key legislation from 1977 to 2010 and on their level of support for six presidents and for the Democratic Party. The analysis uses the Congressional Quarterly Almanac definition of key bills pertaining to legislation involving national controversy, presidential politics, or American lives. Tate’s introduction of a new measure, House majority participation, is both creative and innovative insofar as it shows how liberal or conservative black lawmakers are on economic policies and government spending programs, demonstrating at the same time, how often they voted with the majority of House members on major legislation. She finds that they are now voting more often with the majority. The author argues that the move from more radically left positions to more moderate ones, as well as the move to vote more frequently with the House majority when their party is in power, is the result of their political incorporation. In this sense, political incorporation makes black lawmakers less radical and more pragmatic. But, she maintains that it is a two-sided, dynamic process that facilitates party unity even in periods of divided government. The two major findings of the book are congruent: 1) The CBC has become less radical because of incorporation, and 2) there is a mutually adaptive process, or “concordance,” that evolves between black legislators and the Democratic Party in national politics.
Previous research has taken a somewhat static approach, presenting black lawmakers as radical and ineffective political actors. Until recently, the topic of political representation by black lawmakers has been studied almost exclusively as a domestic phenomenon limited to the geographic borders of the United States. Tate’s analysis departs from this, as it offers a much more nuanced and dynamic understanding of black legislative behavior in the U.S. Congress. While not the main focus of this important and timely study, the fact that black representatives often act as surrogate representatives with both a humanitarian and global focus is noteworthy and should be duly recognized, as it shows the extent to which black lawmakers, being members of a racial diaspora with affective transnational ties to ancestral African homelands, feel obliged to represent a global black community through their efforts as legislators and committee chairs in the U.S. Congress. Despite a number of arrests of black lawmakers for repeated demonstrations during the mid-1980s against apartheid and the incarceration of political prisoners in South Africa, Tate argues that those lawmakers have incentives to be less radical with regard to their tactics—that is, to be less likely to challenge the Democratic Party or Democratic presidential leadership by way of racial rhetoric and dramatic actions that worked in the past to draw critical attention to their collective interest.
The author’s main thesis is that once black lawmakers began backing the legislative process and rose in the ranks of senior leadership, they were forced to move away from radical tactical maneuvers—that is, the tactic of voting as a united racial faction in defiance of the party and presidential leadership. But the frequent participation of black lawmakers in demonstrations meant to draw attention to humanitarian issues in Africa raises questions about the extent to which her theory of concordance rings true for members of the CBC who show signs of affective transnational ties and continue to perform the role of radical state actors. For example, Representatives John Lewis (D-GA), Keith Ellison (D-MN), Donna Edwards (D-MD), and other black lawmakers were arrested outside the Sudanese embassy in Washington for protesting against genocide in what was then the Darfur region of Sudan between 2006 and 2012. Determining whether or not these lawmakers and their participation in said demonstrations are exceptional—quixotic examples of a few lone diehard activists—is key, as these acts in and of themselves seemingly contradict Tate’s main thesis. Several important questions, therefore, remain unanswered: For example, have these efforts of black lawmakers to bring Congress’s attention to African-related issues remained consistent? Or have they been confined to time-bound political events when African issues achieved the greatest public salience?
Tate suggests that the CBC is no longer a vehicle for radical change because it now employs conventional means by which to illuminate previously ignored perspectives on salient policy issues. As chairs of committees and subcommittees, black lawmakers now utilize scheduling powers to bring attention to their preferred issues, to squelch attention to others, and to prioritize issues for legislative action. In this way, they continue to play an important role in the legislative process. Although black lawmakers have become far less radical or ardently liberal, it is important to note that they remain more liberal than their Democratic colleagues. It is presumably less so today than in the 1970s and 1980s because black lawmakers have adopted a stronger identity with their party and the institution. To maximize its power, the CBC has also experienced more pressure to work with the Republican Party in this postracial age of Obama. The generational change in membership, with an increasing number of young, post–Civil Rights African American leaders joining the CBC, has resulted in a less prominent, explicitly “Black Agenda.” New, young black lawmakers are more inclined to believe that they can achieve more through a race-neutral approach.
Tate’s work reminds us, however, that this younger-age cohort is indebted to a pioneer cohort comprised of older black lawmakers who once used the legislative branch differently to wield political influence, invoking racial solidarity and bold, tactical strategies. With that said, the CBC was once able to achieve the “balance of power” whereby, black votes became the “margin of victory” for legislative outcomes, establishing a kind of “brokerage politics” within the U.S. House of Representatives through unconventional, radical means. From flamboyant rhetoric and dramatic oratory to emotion-satisfying gestures, the original founding members of the CBC became known for excitable speeches that resembled a staged drama or cultural performance that conformed to the public persona of a radical state actor. To be sure, the extant literature on black lawmakers often fails to capture the why, or personal motivations, of representatives who challenge institutional norms (one notable exception being Richard Fenno’s Going Home, 2003). Herein lies the void in the literature. Congressional studies are far more concerned with how lawmakers participate by traditional, formal means versus the why through informal, unconventional actions in the legislative process.
Since it has been argued that the ascendency of black lawmakers to legislative leadership positions leads to less rebellious acts, it begs the question: What is lost when black lawmakers adopt more moderate or conservative approaches to legislative policymaking? The historic significance of those black lawmakers who came together and formed the CBC in 1971 cannot be stressed enough; they challenged status quo policies and exerted legislative influence through their bold and tireless efforts to present viable policy alternatives.
Shirley Chisholm, a founding member of the CBC, was the first black woman to serve in the U.S. Congress in 1968. She had refused to accept her initial assignment to the Subcommittee on Forestry and Rural Farms during her first term on the grounds that it would deprive her constituents of the best utilization of her service as a national representative from the 12th District of New York (Brooklyn). According to the mainstream press, she “created a furor in Congress” when she rejected this committee assignment. Chisholm, like the 12 other founding members, understood the process by which elected representatives “stood for” their constituents (read: black Americans). She was particularly cognizant of being a “first,” and possessed a strong desire to behave in such a way that members of her home district would be proud and—because she was descriptively like them—proud of themselves as well. By “standing up,” she encouraged her constituents to do the same. Concordance captures this noble sentiment by providing numerous details of the valiant efforts that have come to define a rich historical legacy.
