In the race: ‘Breakthrough’ of black politicians

“There has never been a change in the condition of blacks that has been as dramatic and consequential as the change from the time I was born to now,” Roger Wilkins, a 76-year-old historian, journalist and veteran activist told me. “Never. Never. And as the country changes, as the opportunity structure for black people changes, we’re going to get different leaders.”

The breakthrough has not occurred overnight, although it sometimes seems as if it did. There were critical moments along the way. In 2006, five black men ran for governor or U.S. Senate in Ohio, Maryland, Tennessee, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts. Three were Republicans. That was a breakthrough. But in the end, only one — Patrick — won.

But how quickly things shifted. By the time the Massachusetts governor went to Boston Common to endorse Obama two years later, 10,000 people gathered to cheer the two black men, who stood, hands clasped, on the same bandstand used by segregationist George Wallace as he campaigned for President in 1968. That was another breakthrough.

Similar signs of racial progress have been popping up everywhere, and many optimistic Americans seem ready to embrace it. In mid-2007, 71 percent of all voters assessed relations between blacks and whites as “very” or “somewhat” good. The pessimists, interestingly enough, were African Americans. Only 55 percent were willing to offer a similarly positive response.

Americans have come a great distance, as the 2008 election results and the multiracial euphoria that followed demonstrated. But when it comes to any issue, debate or ambition shaded by race, we have not yet come to a common place. Discussions are coded, and politicians often stumble unawares into definitional chasms. How was Delaware Senator Joe Biden to know the uproar he would ignite when he called Obama “clean” and “articulate?” And should Bill Clinton — famous for being simpatico with African Americans — have realized referring to Obama’s record as a “fairy tale,” or comparing his electoral victories to Jesse Jackson’s — would sound racially dismissive? John McCain stumbled into the same minefield when he caustically referred to Obama as “that one” during a Presidential debate. Whites I talked to considered it dismissive but not insulting. Blacks I talked to were outraged.

It can be consequential when intention diverges so sharply from meaning, and race is involved. Throughout our nation’s history, the most eventful change has often been driven by racial conflict. Wars have been fought, marches have been led, and movements have been nurtured from the pain and discovery of our evolving debate over the politics of difference.

Video   An intimate look at Obama’s ‘breakthrough’ Jan. 17: NBC’s Amy Robach sits down with Gwen Ifill, author of “The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.” Today show

“Segregation made us all alike. It made us think alike,” Julian Bond told me over coffee in a Washington, D.C. bakery where — integration aside — we were the only black customers. “We lived together. We read the same newspapers, our own newspapers, so we had a group consciousness that has been dissipated to some degree by the demise of segregation. So we are a different kind of people now than we would have been, say 30, 40, 50 years ago. And it has its upsides, and it has its downsides. “

Most of us — no matter what race — are content to remain perched on the sidelines of our great political debates. For the better part of the 1990s, Americans appeared more preoccupied with televised murder trials, helicopter chases and car pool than with voting. Certainly the news media was. We seemed capable of being roused from our spectator’s pose only when something truly spectacular is at stake. War. Terror. Global economic crises that threatened our 401Ks.

Obama’s 2008 run proved an exception to this trend. While overall voter turnout remained roughly the same from 2004, more Democrats propelled by the Obama candidacy did go to the polls. It was the Republicans who stayed home.

Politics affects every decision we make, as well as every decision taken out of our hands. It defines our past and dictates our future. When politics intersects with our lives, history books must be rewritten. This has been especially true for African Americans making their way in the United States, seizing equality, then power, in fits and starts.

Abolitionist Frederick Douglass was correct in 1857 when he said “power concedes nothing without a demand.” As the demands have grown more urgent, the history of blacks in politics has always been inextricably linked to the progress of the civil rights movement.

Rosa Parks did not just happen to be on that bus in Montgomery. She signed up for civil rights training first. Fannie Lou Hamer did not just happen to integrate Mississippi’s (unseated) delegation to the 1964 Democratic National Convention. She began trying to register to vote in 1962. And Martin Luther King, Jr. did not limit his agitations to marches and pulpits. Civil rights historians have chronicled how exhaustively he also pulled the levers of politics and power to maneuver passage of civil and voting rights legislation. Demand — some of it overt; some of it leavened with political nuance — has long been the coin of the realm for black political advancement in America.

Now that this demand has forced laws onto the books, and the black politicians have been elected, what has become of that movement? Who has inherited the King legacy? And, as the 1960s leaders age and fade, a new generation is asking a different question: Does this century even require another King — a single leader?

Tony West, a 42-year-old African American lawyer in San Francisco who raised money and knocked on doors for Obama in 2008, is the picture of upper middle class success in his downtown high-rise office. Pictures of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Michael Dukakis- the former Massachusetts governor who gave him his first job in politics — line the walls. He is enough of a political junkie that he studied for the bar while on the Democratic convention floor in 1992, and worked the floor for Obama again in 2008. Activism, he said, has taken on a different tone from the days when an older generation had to risk violence and arrest to make a difference.

He tried — once — to run for office on his own and got a taste of what happens when you step out of line. He was defeated resoundingly. “The lesson I learned is how angry people get with you when you don’t go through the traditional channels,” he says now. “When you don’t wait your turn, when you don’t kiss the ring, when you don’t do all the things that you’re supposed to do in order to get there.”

West says he learned how to take risks from his parents, who grew up, met, and were educated in the South. But his experience has been different. “Their day to day life experience in dealing with discrimination, dealing with segregation, Jim Crow, is just something that at best I’ve read about or know the stories of as told to me,” he said. “But it is not something that I have had to confront on a daily basis.”

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