CBC's ALC: Black America's Best & Brightest? What if We Really Believed It?

Bill Quigley

05 Sep 2007

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by BAR managing Editor Bruce Dixon

What if we really believed what the boosters of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's Annual Legislative Conference (CBC-ALC) say about the affair --- that it's an annual gathering of black America's best and brightest leaders, doers, dreamers and achievers who come together to chart the future course of our people and our nation. If our business class politicians were really the movement leaders they claim to be, what would the CBC ALC look like? What would it do? What should we really expect, and what does the difference tell us?

CBC's Annual Legislative Conference: Black America's Best & Brightest? What if We Really Believed It?

by BAR managing Editor Bruce Dixon

Let's imagine for a moment that the Congressional Black Caucus's Annual Legislative Conference is exactly what its relentless self-congratulatory hype says it is --- the annual gathering of black America's best and brightest, focusing their energies on racial and societal uplift. Just what would that look like, anyway? What would a yearly, agenda-setting conference of black America's top-drawer dreamers and doers, its leaders, achievers and organizers in dozens of fields of endeavor actually do every September?

What new insights into the nation's and our people's problems would CBC Week offer in this alternative world? What old and new strategies and tactics would it map out and implement for pressing problems like the ubiquitous national policies of racially selective policing, prosecution and mass incarceration? What sorts of legislative and extra-legislative campaigns would it map out to tackle HIV-AIDS worldwide and race-based health disparities at home? How would it see that the black community's deep and widespread skepticism of empire and imperial wars, is distinctly heard in the national conversation? What alternatives would the CBC ALC offer to this society's prevailing and only model of urban economic development --- moving poorer, often black people off coveted urban real estate and moving wealthier residents in? And how would the CBC's ALC in this imagined world, have responded to the crime of ethnic cleansing of the Gulf Coast in the wake of Hurricane Katrina?

If the brightest lights of black America turned their attention to the questions of racially selective policing, prosecution and disproportionate incarceration rates, they might recommend measures such as the elimination and sunset of all mandatory minimum sentences and two and three strikes legislation on the state and federal levels. Being grown folks, they would be keenly aware that the prison - industrial complex has powerful friends, and that the plans for turning around these failed public policies would go far beyond mere lobbying to include a massive campaign of public persuasion and education to stretch if necessary, a decade or two into the future.

Farfetched? Maybe not when you recall the legal strategy to overturn Jim Crow, was conceived by Charles Hamilton Houston in the 1930s and carried through more than 20 years by a team of attorneys eventually headed by Thurgood Marshall, and that extralegal strategies of civil disobedience were pushed during all the 1950s and 1960s.

Black America, like the rest of America only more so, whenever the alternatives are described to them in detail, favors the same kind of single payer health care system every other advanced industrial country in the world uses to provide universal care for its citizens. In our alternative world, a CBC ALC focused on pushing health care agendas that serve the CBC's voting constituency would further popularize the news that half of all bankruptcies in the US are due to unpayable medical bills, often incurred by families who were "insured" at the onset of their illnesses. Surely it would devote at least one of its "braintrust" workshops to put together Physicians for a National Health Care Plan with the predominantly black National Medical Association, and mobilize black communities for actions to demand national, universal single payer health care.

A CBC ALC agenda on the global HIV-AIDS epidemic would certainly include a public exposure of how US drug companies and US trade policies conspire to keep the price of life-saving retroviral and other drugs too high for millions in Africa, Latin America, Asia and here in the US. Thanks to these policies, less than half the planet's HIV-AIDS cases get any treatment at all.

When pollsters sampled black opinion at the eve of the Iraq war, 70% of African Americans were in opposition to the invasion of Iraq, a proportion nearly three times as high as among whites. A CBC ALC intent upon making the political will of black America felt on the national stage would be intently concerned on what African Americans in particular can do to ensure that the troops come home, and that fewer, not more of the nation's resources are diverted to the Pentagon, which already consumes more than the rest of the world's military expenditures combined.

"...if the CBC's Annual Legislative Conference really was the premiere gathering of black America's braintrust, brought together for the advancement of all of us, this would be the second or third in a row held it would be held on the Gulf Coast. "

If the CBC ALC was truly a gathering of leaders in the field of civil and human rights, it would long ago come up with economic development plans for the urban areas where most of our people live which lift up and benefit the residents in place rather than doing what urban "revitalization" plans now invariably do --- simply move poorer residents on to other poor communities and wealthier ones in.

And finally, if the CBC's Annual Legislative Conference really was the premiere gathering of black America's braintrust, brought together for the advancement of all of us, this would be the second or third in a row held it would be held on the Gulf Coast. If the CBC's Annual Legislative Conference lived up to its self-congratulatory hype it would, in the weeks after Katrina, have brought together dozens or hundreds of black urban planners and architects, along with black banks and construction firms and representatives of the survivors to draft the the progressive plan for the rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. The CBC Foundation would have assembled leaders in the fields of education and health care to ensure that the new Gulf Coast had jobs at living wages, affordable housing, schools that worked, health care and opportunity for everyone, and played a key role in marshaling the political (and not strictly lobbying or electoral) muscle to make it happen.

If this sounds unlikely, we should not forget that before the waters receded in New Orleans the right wing Heritage Foundation and similar operatives had publicly advanced plans to rebuild a "free market" paradise in the ravaged Gulf Coast, free of labor and environmental laws, public schooling or public health facilities, gated communities, privatized essential services and huge tax breaks for the wealthy, Blackwater-type mercenaries hired for unspecified domestic duties and as free as possible of the region's least desirable (to them) residents. These are the conditions under which "reconstruction" of the Gulf Coast is proceeding.

But have no fear. In our imaginary world, the CBC's ALC would not limit its recommended solutions and strategies to those approved by corporate donors and establishment media, and certainly not to lobbying, to seminars on "black love" and how to do business with government. It might not shrink from confronting federal and local officials on the Gulf Coast or elsewhere not just a one-day million man picnic-style march, but a massive and sustained campaign of civil disobedience on a scale not seen in forty or fifty years, aimed at erecting housing, restoring opportunities and making whole the communities dispersed and dispossessed in the aftermath of Katrina.

"Unlike white politicians and business people, our black elite habitually claim, when it suits them, to be leaders of, and sometimes the end product of an insurgent movement for civil and human rights"

The only problems with this imaginary gathering of black America's best and brightest under the auspices of the CBC is that if we believed the rhetoric of the actual CBC's Legislative Conference, if we took at face value the language its principals and honorees heap upon themselves and each other, we would expect them to do all these things and more. The fact that this generation thinks a "movement" is no more than an electoral campaign or a single day conference, picnic and march a sustained grassroots organizing drive or a weeks and months of mass civil disobedience is a result in part, of our excessive respect for anointed and appointed black leadership. We have allowed the claims of black business people, preachers and politicians to be leaders of and heirs to "the movement" to go unchallenged for far too long.

Unlike white politicians and business people, our black elite habitually claim, when it suits them, to be leaders of, and sometimes the end product of an insurgent movement for civil and human rights. So what's illegitimate? Our imagination? Our expectations? Or the self-congratulatory hype of the black business, entertainment and political class whose show the actual CBC's ALC is?

There are those who would make an excuses for the real-world CBC and its ALC, excuses that go something like this: It's unreasonable, they'd say, to expect politicians, business leaders, entertainers and well-established preachers to lead a movement. These people are not SNCC or Martin Luther King, They are what and who they are.

Maybe.

The Congressional Black Caucus exists for a very good reason. Black America is a separate and distinct polity within the larger American one, historically, socially, often geographically separate from the larger American polity. An annual gathering, supposedly of black America's best and brightest funded by the same corporations which dominate America's political and social landscape cannot reasonably be expected to represent that polity.

But until our black business class and corporate funded leaders, who call most of the shots at the real CBC ALC abandon the claim that they are some latter-day "Moses" or "Joshua Generation", the end products or the current leaders in the struggle for human rights and dignity, until they stop telling us that it is they who are at the forefront of the fight for peace and justice we are entitled to expose their hypocrisy, and to try to hold their little clay feet firmly to the fire.

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