Bayard Rustin- Activist and American

I don't think it's progressive, Jim, to talk about individual responsibility without also talking about responsible social policy. "Counting on government intervention to solve all problems" is a right-wing bugaboo, their description and dismissal of any advocacy or action that would make the rules of the game more equitable, just, fair, wise, and "progressive".

After all, who among us here on the putative left believes that government intervention will solve all problems? Instead, I'd guess that we'd tend to approach it from the other side -- that it's the lack of key government interventions that prevents some problems from even being addressed. Keeping the rules as they are protects those who are currently privileged from those who want to work at changing the country.

So, yes, let's talk about personal responsibility. But let's do it in the context of your excellent closing sentence: "Radical change in this country is going to take both a change in government and how we do business, as well as personal change."

But I don't expect Obama to talk about the responsibility to use birth control. It's not in sync with his outreach to evangelicals. Neither do I expect him to take on the beer and liquor companies. He wouldn't want to appear anti-business. Drugs, well sure, that can fit in with the "shape up, black people" theme. But if he attacked drugs and alcohol with references to our commercial culture's manipulation of people's vulnerabilities and to the commercial exploitation of many people's propensity to seek escape through chemistry of one sort or another, that could sound too anti-America, too much like Tipper Gore attacking rock music, or like you saying that "we are a weak willed and hedonistic people". (That's not a good campaign sound bite, Jim. And it begs several questions: in what sense are we "a people"? Can we be described by labels that apply en masse? To the extent that people are weak-willed and hedonistic, how did they get that way? Or were we/they always like that? Where do we look for the answers -- individual moral failings, psychology, sociological factors, cultural forces?)

But back to Obama: the easy way to show one's independence and post-racial or metro-racial credentials is to criticize young black men.

By happy (?) coincidence, right before I read your post, I did my weekly catch-up at the Black Agenda Report web site. A regular contributor, Adolf Reed, Jr., a political science professor at the U. of Pennsylvania and a long-time Obama skeptic, has some interesting things to say about "Where Obamaism Seems to be Going".

To give you an overview of his thinking, here is the series of highlighted quotes that constitute the subheadings of the article:

"It is ironic that Obama would be the one to complete Clinton's redefinition of liberalism as conservatism."

"Since when has it been unorthodox or unsafe politically to malign black poor people in public?"

"An Obama presidency (maybe even just his candidacy) will likely sever the last threads of any connection between notions of racial disparity and structurally reproduced inequality rooted in political economy."

"Obama represents a class politics, one that promises to cement an alliance anchored in the professional-managerial class and the ‘progressive' wing of the investor class."

"An Obama presidency would further legitimize the imperialist orientation of US foreign policy by inscribing it as liberalism or the "new kind" of progressivism."

"The courts issue looms so large because the liberals have given away everything else."

"Although I've been clear about my own decision to abstain from this charade, I'm not arguing that people shouldn't vote for Obama."

"Obama threatens to go beyond any of his Dem predecessors in redefining their all-too-familiar capitulation as the boundary of the politically thinkable."

"Many young people don't understand the difference between a political movement and a protest march, chat room or ad campaign."

"How can we hold them accountable once they're in office if we can't do it when they're running?"

That's a lot of stuff to think about, discuss, and argue about. Each quote can serve as the basis for a polemical essay, for or against.

I quite agree with Prof. Reed, right down the line. I'm willing to argue whatever points anyone takes exception to -- I need something to spur me to go through my bookmarks and drag out the facts and arguments that I've been too tired to marshal in defense and elaboration of my statement some months back that Obama is basically conservative rather than progressive. I'd like it if someone could convince me otherwise, so please try. I'm still educable.

Bill

I think both you and Jim have good points. I wasn't expecting this issue to arise from Rustin's post, but I'm glad Rustin's ideas still have resonance to the world of today.

I think self help is an important message. The point Rustin was making was that African American activists should group together with other liberal organizations to most effectively fight for progressive change. If these groups work together to make structural changes to grant equal economic and social opportunities to young African Americans trapped in poverty, it'll help reduce the number of people who need to hear a message of self help.

Rustin wrote:

"To what extent can the kind of self-help campaign recently prescribed by Eric Hoffer in the New York Times Magazine cope with such a situation? I would advise those who think that self-help is the answer to familiarize themselves with the long history of such efforts in the Negro community, and to consider why so many foundered on the shoals of ghetto life. It goes without saying that any effort to combat demoralization and apathy is desirable, but we must understand that demoralization in the Negro community is largely a common-sense response to an objective reality. Negro youths have no need of statistics to perceive, fairly accurately, what their odds are in American society. Indeed, from the point of view of motivation, some of the healthiest Negro youngsters I know are juvenile delinquents. Vigorously pursuing the American dream of material acquisition and status, yet finding the conventional means of attaining it blocked off, they do not yield to defeatism but resort to illegal (and often ingenious) methods. They are not alien to American culture. They are, in Gunnar Myrdal's phrase, "exaggerated Americans." To want a Cadillac is not un-American; to push a cart in the garment center is. If Negroes are to be persuaded that the conventional path (school, work, etc.) is superior, we had better provide evidence which is now sorely lacking. It is a double cruelty to harangue Negro youth about education and training when we do not know what jobs will be available for them. When a Negro youth can reasonably foresee a future free of slums, when the prospect of gainful employment is realistic, we will see motivation and self-help in abundant enough qualities.

Meanwhile, there is an ironic similarity between the self-help advocated by many liberals and the doctrines of the Black Muslims. Professional sociologists, psychiatrists, and social workers have expressed amazement at the Muslims' success in transforming prostitutes and dope addicts into respectable citizens. But every prostitute the Muslims convert to a model of Calvinist virtue the ghetto replaces with two more. The Muslims, dedicated as they are to maintenance of the ghetto, are powerless to affect substantial moral reform. So too with every other group or program which is not aimed at the destruction of slums, their causes and effects. Self-help efforts must be geared, directly or indirectly, to mobilizing people into power units capable of effecting social change. That is, their goal must be genuine self-help, not merely self-improvement. Obviously, where self-improvement activities succeed in imparting to their participants a feeling of some control over their environment, those involved may find their appetites for change whetted; they may move into the political arena.

Let me sum up what I have thus far been trying to say. The civil rights movement is evolving from a protest movement into a full-fledged social movement -an evolution calling its very name into question. It is now concerned not merely with removing the barriers to full opportunity but with achieving the fact of equality. From sit-ins and Freedom Rides we have gone into rent strikes, boycotts, community organization, and political action. As a consequence of this natural evolution, the Negro today finds himself stymied by obstacles of far greater magnitude than the legal barriers he was attacking before: automation, urban decay, de facto school segregation. These are problems which, while conditioned by Jim Crow, do not vanish upon its demise. They are more deeply rooted in our socioeconomic order; they are the result of the total society's failure to meet not only the Negro's needs but human needs generally."