Washington Commanders majority owner Josh Harris, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell announce using public money to build a football stadium. Image: Washington Business Journal
Mayor Bowser going along to get along with Donald Trump is unsurprising to anyone who has followed her political career. She is the Black misleader par excellence.
Black Agenda Report is credited with coining the phrase “Black misleadership class,” although that acknowledgement should go to James A. Warren, who as far as anyone knows was the first to use that term in a 2005 Black Commentator article entitled, “Thirty-seven Years of Non-Struggle Leadership.” Journalistic standards require that we make this correction, but we do take credit for popularizing this term which describes the bulk of U.S. Black elected officials and others in prominent organizational leadership positions. At this moment, a dictionary definition of the Black misleadership class should include a photo of Washington DC mayor Muriel Bowser, who fits the description perfectly.
Not only is Bowser a neo-liberal who suspends a bill to raise the tipped minimum wage, and cozies up to real estate developers and who allocated $856 million in public funds to build a stadium for the Washington Commanders football team, but she has joined in the bipartisan consensus of using of Black people as the face of crime and she has stood in the way of even modest reforms that would decrease the draconian nature of law enforcement in the capital city.
Thus Bowser has always been, but the depths of her cynicism and fecklessness is now on full display thanks to Donald Trump. Trump’s August 11 announcement of a takeover of the Washington DC police force was met with noticeable timidity by the mayor. On the one hand she stated that Trump’s actions were “unsettling and unprecedented,” quite the understatement, but she also added, “The fact that we have more law enforcement and presence in neighborhoods, that may be positive.”
Bowser is accurate in pointing out that president Trump and any president may declare a 30-day emergency and take over the function of the district’s operations. She is not correct that she must take a milquetoast path of least resistance, and offer up bizarre claims that have nothing to do with the facts of U.S. history, such as: “American soldiers and airmen policing American citizens on American soil is #UnAmerican.” Such events are in fact very American, particularly if the people being policed are Black.
Bowser’s statements and actions make sense to those who have been following this neo-liberal misleader’s career. The path to any city hall in a major United States municipality goes through the deep pockets of rich donors. The ruling classes choose elected officials by making sure their favorites have plenty of campaign cash. Muriel Bowser led in fund raising in all three of her campaigns, as is usually the case with election victors across the country. A 2016 report written after she first won office states the obvious. “There is a good deal of evidence that many of D.C.’s recent policy decisions have been pursued to please the donor class.”
She proves herself useful to her patrons as she did in sealing the deal on yet another example of public resource theft to build a football stadium for a billionaire owner. Josh Harris is the controlling owner of the Washington Commanders and is worth an estimated $12 billion. Like every other billionaire owner of a sports team, he made sure that the bulk of expenditures were made with the people’s money and not his own private haul of cash.
In order to get the deal done, Bowser and Harris had to lie about the stadium’s benefits. As is true in other projects of that type, the economic impact report was full of inflated projections, wishful thinking about revenue generation, and made up estimates on tourism attendance. Bowser isn’t alone. The first Black governor of Maryland, Wes Moore, was competing to have the stadium built in his state and he did so with the same dubious assertions.
Bowser’s waffling on the National Guard deployment is actually a necessity for someone in her position. She could speak up more forcefully on behalf of her constituents and protest when Republican governors of South Carolina, Mississippi, Ohio, and West Virginia announce they will also add National Guard units to patrol Black people who don’t want them in their neighborhoods. But therein lies the rub: Bowser wouldn’t be mayor at all if she represented her constituents in the way that she should.
As Glen Ford pointed out, “Black self-determination – Black people’s independent ability to shape their own collective destiny – fits nowhere in the Black Misleadership Class’s political designs. All they seek is ‘representation’ in the Democratic Party and its sponsoring corporations – meaning, appointments and contracts for themselves.”
Simply put, it isn’t possible to have Black mayors who truly represent the needs of their people when they depend upon the big donor casting couch to get into office.
For decades Washington DC was known as Chocolate City, with a peak Black population of 71% in 1970. It might now be called Cafe au Lait City, as its Black population has shrunk to just 43% of the total. A series of mayors like Bowser helped the gentrification process along, and in the process kicked thousands of Black people out of Washington. But again, that makes them no different from Black politicians across the country, whose positions depend upon gaining and maintaining friendly relations with the forces who want Black people to get out of town.
Inevitably Trump’s crass racism has led to sympathy for Bowser and other Black mayors who he very publicly excoriates for being soft on crime, or proponents of DEI, or the cause of homelessness and every other societal ill.
Political maturity demands that no one fall for that ruse. What good does it do to have a Black mayor who is not unequivocally opposed to National Guard units from places like Mississippi patrolling the streets of Black neighborhoods? It also does little good to have Black mayors act as errand boys and girls for billionaires. Bowser and her ilk should have been kicked to the curb long before the second Trump term.
Extolling the supposed virtues of Black representation is a loser’s game. We need self-determination, which is antithetical to electoral politics and the tired game of Black faces in high places. Yes, Bowser should go. Her current term, her third, should be her last. But her departure will do little good if she is followed by another smooth talker who lies to and disregards the needs of the people.
The people are speaking up. They are declaring that Trump’s racist triumphalism shall not stand. They are asserting their rights. In short, the demand for self-determination is alive and well and must be cultivated. The misleaders at city halls around the country can do a lot less damage when the people are mobilized and organized. That scenario is what we all should wish for Washington.
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