As I stare down the road that diverges soon, I feel compelled to offer unsolicited endorsements for candidates running for a variety of offices in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania, where I reside, as well as offer a personally grounded “black lives matter” politics as a Democratic elected official.
First, to cut to the chase, I endorse and encourage you to vote in the Tuesday, April 26 Pennsylvania Democratic Primary for:
- Senator Bernie Sanders for candidate for U.S President
- Mayor John Fetterman for candidate for U.S. Senate
- Commissioner Josh Shapiro for P.A. Attorney General
- Councilwoman Valerie Scott Cooper for Norristown 3rd District Council
Senator Bernie Sanders for Democratic nominee for U.S. President. I am publically supporting Senator Sanders because I believe his politics are generally courageous and want to move the country in a direction that takes seriously issues of economic and social inequality in America. Senator Sanders’ weakness in relating to black voters is a matter of performance, not public policy. That is to say, Sanders is a white boy from Brooklyn, who choose to go into the woods of New England, and doesn’t know how to play a saxophone, or clap off time to gospel music, or sound churchy, while not believing in religious evangelicalism, or eat collard greens and pinto beans. The Clintons have real bona fides in the civil rights movement (see Congressman John Lewis go to the mat for Secretary Clinton), but the Clintons' cultural connection to African Americans via their southern sojourn is probably equally or more important for election campaigning, but not absolutely essential, as evidenced by Sanders’ impassioned endorsement of Jesse Jackson in 1988 in the Vermont Caucus for Democratic nominee for U.S. President. He has supported the right public policies, even as he has failed on the personal and cultural connections. However, politics is about optics, and performance matters. The Clintons win there.
So there has to be a critical mass of African American elected and other significant civic leaders (such as clergy, academics, organizational leaders, black labor, black public intellectuals and activists) who understand policy enough to endorse and support Bernie such that Clinton does right by black people, and doesn’t just appoint a bunch of bourgeois black folks who are beneficiaries of the post-civil rights movement into positions of power, while being willing to sell out the black poor writ large (and increasingly the fragile and fractured black middle class), as was done with the 1994 crime bill, and 1996 welfare reform. Let’s be clear, Clinton sold out the black poor, by culturally appealing to the black middle class and that makes the black middle class complicit in acts of political racism, because those same women and men in the Congressional Black Caucus, those same black mayors and county executives, those same black activists and academics and artists are the same who tout their photo ops and position with the Clintons even as the families they represent have been irreparably harmed by 20 years of failed policies enacted by Clinton, with the support of his wife. Such a remix in 2016 does not value black life – period. We don’t need apologies, while people (re-en)act politics prepared to sell us out again. I am prepared to support Hillary Clinton in the general, but only by pushing Bernie Sanders in the primary so we not only get the right optics, but we get the right damn politics! As a side note, I take quite seriously that Congressman Elijah Cummings ought to be vetted for vice-president. (http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a42894/elijah-cummings-vice-president/) Don’t let this chatter for a minute about Hillary doing an “all-woman” ticket distract folks from the fact that her NEEDING the black vote ought to be recognized on the ticket, just like Obama had to recognize he needed the white and white working class vote, by getting a senior Senator, who was a hawk in foreign policy, and born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania – who is a pretty good progressive too!
Finally, on the idea that Senator Sanders does not have public policies that are achievable, we should remember that a black lives matters politics is rooted in struggle. Frederick Douglass is the one who said where there is no struggle there is no progress. The end of slavery was struggle. The end of Jim Crow was struggle. The hymn says, “Shun Not the Struggle, ‘Tis God’s Gift.” I know we get tired of struggle, but I also get tired of being a pawn, being used, being a prop. Bernie may need to better understand black people, but Clinton needs to better represent black people. And given how black life is always already hybrid – middle passage, separately from something, while not embraced in another, seeking to swim while others are determined to make it sink in the middle of nowhere, we have made a way out of no way, and therefore, our politics must be critical, comprehensive, reflective, historically informed and committed to winning something, before we arrive at anything called compromise. Bernie’s support of universal healthcare (single-payer), his commitment to challenging Citizen’s United, his commitment to end the capitalist commodification of the human being as it relates to basic rights to education and health mark a path of political struggle worth staking out, such that Clinton at least holds the damn gains made under President Barack Obama, even as we be brutally honest about our confidence in her to move them forward in any meaningful way. Supporting Bernie is about telling Hillary not to backslide, and stop talking and start walking. It is also a message to her black consiglieres (who are considerable, many and varied) that if you’re going to speak for the rest of us, you better sure speak for the rest of us!
Mayor John Fetterman for Democratic Nominee for U.S. Senate. I have never met Mr. Fetterman, and he has never asked for my support. I wish he had. I have spent seven years in politics laboring in a borough – Norristown, PA, just like Fetterman has labored in Braddock in Western Pennsylvania. Further, Fetterman and I both studied at the Kennedy School of Government (I as part of my studies at Harvard Divinity School, and he as a mastor of public policy candidate at the Kennedy School). We are outsiders, pioneers, seeking to renew, old mill towns from within, even as we come from without. As such, I personally resonate with Fetterman’s narrative, which I first learned of via the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/magazine/13Fetterman-t.html?_r=0. A A possible critique of Fetterman is he is a media creation – of media no less than the New York Times. But I think there is more. I have spent years interacting with elected officials from the commonwealth’s boroughs, from Braddock to Bridgeport. Their leaders, are often older, whiter and more conservative. But without a doubt, as leaders of these small communities, they know better than almost all other public officials how the buck stops with them. If the Feds don’t and the Commonwealth won’t, local officials have to figure out something. We cannot use phantom revenues, and creative accounting gimmicks to say we have balanced budgets, and we cannot blame others, if we can’t deliver even basic services such as clean and safe streets (to invoke the mantra of one Norristown activist). Plainly, Fetterman knows the reality of all the social traumas and toils that have happened to small-town America. As someone laboring long and hard, with far too often too little to show for it in these boroughs and townships, what I believe is we need someone who truly knows our pain. While Fetterman can be viewed as an interloping, Harvard Square liberal carpet-bagger, frankly, so could I. But the sacrifices that people like Fetterman have made to live and breathe in such towns speaks to how we can enflesh a politics of possibility for communities that are neither city nor country – but something else. These small towns are often suburbs of big cities, and are the frontiers of immigration, de-industrialization, poverty, challenges to public safety, as well waiting for renewed opportunity and shared prosperity. A federal politics too long dominated by a well-worn narrative of cities as big, urban, poor and non-white, and suburbs as rural, wealthy and white simply denies the reality of the America we live in. That America is often Norristown and Braddock and we need more federal leaders who understand that. Further, we need leaders who when they invoke local control and local solutions, they don’t do so to ignore the way public policy has deliberately shaped a demography and geography of social inequality and opportunity hording that makes some places and people wealthy in opportunity and others poor. To end the tyranny of zip codes is to engage in politics at the commonwealth and national level that enhance and improve every locality and every life.
Commissioner Josh Shapiro for Pennsylvania Attorney General. I first got to know Commissioner Shapiro when he was first running for commissioner with Leslie Richards in Montgomery County. After he was elected, I was part of a small group of African American locally elected officials in Montgomery County who engaged the Commission Chairman to engage in progressive policies of inclusion and diversity. I have found the Commissioner to be personally collegial, personally invested in a politics of improvement, and thoroughly committed to enacting policies of fiscal responsibility (though I disagree with some of this, which was at Norristown's expense). And while doing this he hired the first African American female to lead any county agency, hiring Keir Bradford Grey as chief public defender of Montgomery County. Moreover he supported the CPD as his administration supported meaningful reforms in criminal justice in Montgomery County as it related to disproportionate minority contact. DMC broadly refers to evidence based analysis that concludes racial bias and discrimination as it relates to minority “contact” with the criminal justice system and others, from everything to stops by police, to arrests, sentencing and parole. Given that Montgomery County is generally a wealthy, predominantly white suburban county outside of Philadelphia, the needed reforms, the needed conversations, and more important actions to confront government enabled or worse, government enacted discrimination would not have been addressed at all in such a county with our demographics, without leaders on the board of commissioners like Shapiro. But there is much more work to be done, and we should vote for Commissioner Shapiro with a clear eye towards that much more work. Like Secretary Clinton, Commissioner Shapiro has amassed an avalanche of black endorsements from Philadelphia, and likely from his home base of Abington, which has a small, but strong elite black middle class community. My support of Commissioner Shapiro really is less concerned about him, and more concerned about the black leaders who have unqualified support of him and what that might mean. There is no connect between support of black leaders in Philadelphia and improvement of black lives outside of Philadelphia. While a significant portion of the commonwealth’s black population lives outside of Philadelphia, there is a way in which black politics functions in the commonwealth as it’s all about Philadelphia. The arrangement at play where almost all black elected have lined up for Shapiro bodes well for the city, but what about significant minority populations throughout the rest of the commonwealth? I recall here a personal reality that my late wife, was a respected thought leader and program officer changing outcomes for youth in the City of Philadelphia, but rarely if ever was consulted by leaders in Montgomery County or Norristown. Too many talented black folks are forced to focus on Philadelphia even though they live in Montgomery, because of the reality of how politics gets done in this region.
Commissioner Shapiro has shown signs that he understands that the inequalities at play in Philadelphia vs the commonwealth, are at play across the commonwealth, which is why him signaling that he would use the power of the Attorney General’s office to tackle the constitutional mandate for the commonwealth to fund public education as a strategy to attack the state’s inability to enact and equitable funding formula. But it should be noted that a large faith-based coalition that looked at Wolf’s initial proposal, which has long sense died and been buried, even that ideal formula underfunded school districts as their percentage of ethnic minorities increased statewide. (http://powerinterfaith.org/power-study-shows-racial-bias-in-pa-public-school-funding/) Improved funded that results in reinscribed inequality in funding based on race cannot be the outcome of any legal intervention the AG’s office might pursue. Moreover, there might be less education funding disparity in the state if there wasn’t so much housing segregation in the state, including Montomgery County. It’s is statistically clear that Norristown, the one borough in the county with the single largest percentage and number of ethnic minorities, is also the county’s poorest jurisdiction and has the highest number of housing choice vouchers in the county. While Commissioner Shapiro has rightly noted that HCVs are used in 90 percent of the county’s localities, it is equally true that somewhere between 45% and 35% of those HCVs are used in one locality – Norristown, and if you used census tract data to analyze where HCVs are used, they are used in the poorest census tracks in the county. Concentrated poverty is directly attributable to housing inequality fostered by where affordable housing is placed, and how the county housing authority operates the federally funded HCV program. The AG’s office must make tackling the even unintended, but nevertheless clearly substantial and substantiated consequences of segregation from government housing policy a priority at the AG’s office, less we forget what the supreme court has said. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/25/the-supreme-courts-housing-decision-is-a-warning-against-subtle-segregation-everywhere/) If real mobility existed in the commonwealth, that alone would assist with educational opportunity. Housing is the tougher and thornier legal fight, less politically captivating, but one that promises to offer a deeper and better politics in response to the needs of black folks throughout the commonwealth, and not just Philadelphia. Commissioner Shapiro, who is thoroughly familiar with housing law is the right person among the candidates to champion this issue, given the steps he attempted to take to start to ease the burden of segregation on Norristown and neighborhoods of color throughout Montgomery County.
Councilwoman Valerie Scott Cooper for Norristown Third District Council. Ms. Cooper was appointed to the 3rd District Council Seat last November after the sitting member of council resigned because she apparently had broken a law related to her qualification in order to maintain her office. I’ve personally found Valerie to be committed, interested and responsive to constituents in her tenure as an appointed member of council. Ms. Cooper originally grew up in Norristown and returned here, after living elsewhere for a number of years. She’s has had a career both in government and the private sector, and has a sense of history about Norristown, its needs, its issues and its opportunities. I know of no compelling reason not to elect her to complete a full term, and in this instance – alone – offer my unqualified support.
First, these are not unqualified, nor unequivocal endorsements, with the exception of the local race. This means I asked you to vote for these people while still raising significant issues about these persons, and further generally, I am prepared to support any candidate who secures the Democratic nomination for their office. Second, I am not endorsing anyone in races I have not closely followed. Thirdly, the endorsements and the politics behind them are what I personally label progressive pragmatism. This means I am committed to a liberal form of politics marked by a commitment to expanding understanding and implementation of equality in every aspect of our common life, while willing to do the best I can to get as much as we can get in any historical and social moment. My eye is on the prize, but we must live better in the now, even as we fight for the as yet not attained best in the future. In fact the best, frankly, is merely theoretical, while better is a deep commitment to the actual. Therefore, I can compromise as long as I don’t yield my core convictions and deliver some real results that positively affect change. The debate is over building power to get a better that is good enough to be worth compromising and waiting or ceding to the next generation the task for getting more.
Finally, for me, all of this is rooted in a “black lives matter” view of democracy, or put another way, how shall the descendents of the middle passage emerge as fully American in a way that is committed to justice and equality, which is anti-imperial and anti-colonial? In fact the more pressing question is how shall those angry white folks, who have spent their entire history building their American identity on the otherness, the non-Americaness of others engage in a politics of recognition that dismantles the normativity and exceptionalism of America where all others have to be “recognized” by set of culturally and politically imperialistic ideas? As a descendent of slaves from Newberry, South Carolina, even a basic knowledge of that fact makes me to know I have had a complicated history related to the republic we call the United States of America. Black American politics is rooted fundamentally in a politics of recognition. See political philosopher Charles Taylor’s seminal work “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition.” Amazon.com describes the first edition, published in 1992 this way: “In this book Charles Taylor offers a historically informed, philosophical perspective on what is at stake in the demand made by many people for recognition of their particular group identities by public institutions. … In his essay Taylor compares two competing forms of liberal government: one that protects no particular culture but ensures the rights and welfare of all its citizens, and one that nurtures a particular culture yet also protects the basic rights and welfare of nonconforming citizens. Questioning the desirability and possibility of the first conception, Taylor defends a version of the second.” http://amzn.com/0691087865
It is worth noting to those voting in the commonwealth that the editor, and one respondent to the Taylor essay in its first edition is University of Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann, a LEADING theorist of identity, democracy and freedom in areas like education, and well positioned to implement, if not downright impose, her ideas of such through a privileged and immensely powerful presidency at UPenn.
Black Americans labor under a politics that struggles up against this very issue – the issue that we only became American when those who did not recognize us were finally forced to do so, and even so, it may be only to the end that the particular cultural hegemony which is “America” only seeks to recognize “basic” rights of Americans who are black, which begs the question what constitutes basic?
Or put another way – black lives matter!
This is to say that black politics must, at minimum, be maximally committed to expanding human flourishing and enriching basic notions of rights within American democracy. Our particularity must constantly be deployed to unmask the failure of the democracy to recognize its citizens precisely because of their particular identities which the country seeks to subsume, if not obliterate under the guise of the American.
In brief, I do not support Taylor’s theory (and to the extent Gutmann supports it, her too) of cultural hegemony, which offers all certain basic rights, because the lived experience of the American citizen who is black, the statistical analysis in police shootings, or home foreclosures, or rate of unemployment, or access to healthcare, or any relevant measure of the citizenry glaringly exposes that black Americans are far too often not recognized, and therefore not afforded the (basic) rights that are afforded to others.
My sensibilities of a black lives matter politics not only creates tension with a politics of recognition with a politics of revolution, the commitment to overthrow that which does not adequately reform (give King what he wants, or you can deal with Malcolm or the Panthers, ya 'digg?), but also a deep sense of the history of political education and political organizing, and pragmatic coalition building, which happens in the best black American politics.
When I ran for office, I ran as an Obama candidate -- one deeply aware of my cultural particularity but committed to a shared identity to which we all could appeal. Some of my strongest support in Norristown has been from the ethnic Irish and Italian communities, and I am frankly quite proud of that. To the extent that any identity that seeks recognition is one that is not based on imperialism and domination, then my politics has no problem recognizing such an identity, and further, working for public policy and the use of public law and public resources to result in further equality to any group who lacks such precisely because of their identity – for example LGBT persons, or undocumented immigrant workers. But this outward work for justice can only happen as black communities – often multivaried and disagreeably diverse – are empowered, educated and mobilized for political engagement. http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/under-the-sun/Racial-politics-not-new-for-Philadelphia-or-elsewhere.html
The extent to which any of these candidates will fail to deliver a politics where black lives truly matter is the extent which black folks will fail to politically assert that their own lives matter.
I have been proud to say I am a mentee, a protégé of those post civil-rights leaders, who saw black political leadership transition from activist only, to elected official. I’ve been deeply influenced by the late Mayor Maynard Jackson of Atlanta, and former Mayor W. Wilson Goode of Philadelphia. In the case of Goode, I’ve been personally mentored and coached in what it means to think that black lives matter over generations of black politics. BLM politics requires living among black life, a cosmopolitan view of political engagement and alliances, and a commitment to political deliverables that are not about a celebration of diversity, or becoming more inclusive, but measurable outcomes that evidence equal treatment under the law, and truly equal access to opportunity.
With that, I near the close of the book on this my own personal political era, and implore everyone to exercise their constitutional right to vote in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on next Tuesday, April 26.
