But Birch and Heideman’s narrative is also plagued by their utter innocence of the history of the last half-century of black politics, which is truly astonishing, especially in light of their profound self-assuredness, though I suspect the former may be a key enabling condition for the latter. They show no knowledge or understanding of the relation of black political development to the growth of the large national, state, and local public-private anti-discrimination and diversity apparatus, or of the broader incorporation of black people into the various distributive regimes, market-based and not, that constitute and reproduce hegemonic neoliberalism. At this moment, in one tiny illustration of this phenomenon, my mother is engaged in dealings with a black-owned or black-fronted firm – not clear whether it’s for-profit or a non-profit NGO — that is enmeshed in a web of boondoggles outsourced from the Road Home program that the state of Louisiana created and administers in concert with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development to provide assistance to people who suffered property damage in Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.
Granted, the Road Home is an extraordinary policy intervention, and this is a trivial illustration. But this instance’s trivial and quotidian character is in a way the point. This sort of public-private, outsourced, marketized or semi-marketized activity is a node in an ever-expanding and reorganizing array of opportunity structures generated through neoliberalism and that contribute to its legitimation as everyday reality. More accurately, this activity and the individuals and organizations that participate in it constitute neoliberalization as an evolving political-economic, cultural and ideological order. People reproduce their material existence, not to mention pursue the entrepreneurial dreams that attest to the extent of Thatcherite ideological victory, through such nooks and crevices in the social administrative apparatus, whose public and private extrusions become ever more difficult to disentangle.24 At the same time, those structures and processes of neoliberalization are enmeshed with evolving black politics. The fact is that black people not only have access to these opportunity structures; they also participate in the processes that generate, shape, and legitimize them. The ambiguous relations of many prominent BLM figures and other black antiracist voices to the corporate and nonprofit interests that drive the assault on public goods and working people’s living standards underscore the class contradictions that antiracist politics papers over.
The black political regime that emerged out of contestation and negotiation over the terms on which the victories of the 1960s would be consolidated institutionally was rooted from its inception in the dynamics simultaneously articulating market-driven pro-growth politics from the municipal level through national Democratic politics.25 It is not simply that the center of gravity of black politics accommodated to the regime of regressive redistribution and punitive social policy as it took shape and became hegemonic. Race-conscious black political discourse and practice, grounded on underclass ideology and a sharply class-skewed communitarian rhetoric of uplift and self-help26 and racial redistribution – anti-disparitarianism — as the crucial metric of social justice helped to define the left wing of Democratic neoliberalism over the 1980s and 1990s. Moreover, black people participate as active and committed agents in the processes of neoliberalization, public and private – charterization of public education, devolution and outsourcing of the social service sector, direct and indirect attacks on public goods and labor standards in the name of individual enterprise (e.g., Uber, which openly promotes itself as providing opportunities for black Americans) or “community development,” private contracting at all levels, including the rent-intensifying real estate development that is unhelpfully called gentrification. Any serious left critique of black politics has to take those dynamics into account and must proceed from examining the actual complexities and contradictions, including class contradictions, in contemporary black political life.
That is why my colleagues and I who authored “On the End(s) of Black Politics” singled out as problematic “the conceptual and political confusion that underwrites the very idea of a Black Freedom Movement.”27 Formulations like Black Freedom Movement and Black Liberation Struggle suffer from the circularity problem: they posit what needs to be demonstrated through historical and political analysis. This is not simply a formal flaw. Those formulations impose an idealist coherence, what is in effect a racial supra-consciousness or the teleological equivalent of a vanguard party, that obscures the history of political differentiation among black Americans and its significance for understanding both past and present. They posit a transcendent goal – empty signifiers like “freedom,” “liberation,” or “self-determination” — that most crucially unites and defines black Americans’ political aspirations. This presumption that a deeper racial truth, constant across historical and social contexts, guides black politics requires diminishing the significance, and often enough necessitates the procrustean erasure, of the historical specificity of political dynamics involving black Americans at any moment in order to sustain the teleological narrative of fundamental continuity.
'''
As a campaign minion, I found myself often asking Sanders’s antiracist critics how any of the social-democratic items on his platform would not disproportionately benefit black people. None disagreed, but too many, especially those who considered themselves radicals, insisted at least in the logical thrust of their objections that black people’s status as union members, homeowners, low-wage and unemployed workers, public sector workers, retirees, current or potential college students, veterans, people concerned with immigration policy and likely to be adversely affected by neoliberal trade policy, people likely to benefit from universal health care, and people who live within a changing climate all must be subordinate to their generic racial classification. That mindset and its inadequacy for crafting strategies to counter neoliberal capitalism is an important illustration of the problem addressed in Willie Legette’s epigraph to nonsite.org’s new black politics section: “The only thing that hasn’t changed about black politics since 1965 is how we think about it.” Moreover, no matter what bizarre sophistries the likes of Birch and Heideman put forward to counter this contention, a politics of racial redistribution is fundamentally a class politics because its focal point is, as the characteristics of actual black politics I have discussed here indicate, pursuit of racial parity in distribution of goods and bads within the framework of hegemonic neoliberalism.
![Electronics Soldering Iron Kit, [Upgraded] Soldering Iron 110V 90W LCD Digital Portable Soldering Kit 180-480℃(356-896℉), Welding Tool with ON/OFF Switch, Auto-sleep, Thermostatic Design](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41gRDnlyfJS._SL500_.jpg)
