Recent Elections and Black Politics: The Maturation or Death of Black Politics?

Abstract

Black politics is not maturing and may be degenerating.' To explicate this thesis, let me borrow from Nelson George's (1989) critical study of Afro-American music in the post civil rights era.2 George argues that the development of crossover artists and music, and their effective marketing to mainstream white society, has resulted in the death of the music as an authentic black cultural expression. George, the former Billboard music critic, writes In the twenty years since the Great Society, which marked a high point of R&B music, the community that inspired both social change and artistic creativity has become a sad shell of itself: unhappily, while the drive behind the movement for social change was the greatest inspiration for the music, the very success of the movement spelled the end of the R&B world (1989:xiii). The new black politics initiated in the late 1960s, like the music of the era, was conceived as a social change agent, the continuation of movement politics by other means. It would indeed be sad if the conditions for its success require it to become a deracialized mainstream shell of itself (on the deracialization thesis in terms of the 1989 elections see also McCormick, 1989). Do the 1989 elections really represent a new phenomenon? Do these several elections really indicate something new in terms of candidates, issues, strategies, white crossover voting, and coalition politics? The coverage in the national press and in the early scholarly reports, including several articles in this symposium suggest that there was something entirely different, nearly beyond belief about the election of Wilder and several of the mayors. Although all elections are local in that candidates, issues, and symbols tend to be idiosyncratic, to the extent that patterns are discernible I would argue that the 1989 elections are not all that new in terms of what we know about the post civil rights pattern of black electoral coalitions and govern-