The cohort of black business people and politicians who pass for African-American leadership is at an impasse, and so is the rest of black America. Our leaders have failed to produce economic development models for inner cities and for poor Black enclaves.
Not only is the black leadership unable to create jobs with living wages for the hundreds of thousands of black families who desperately need them, but they also can’t describe to the rest of the United States how such a thing might be done. The black leadership class does not acknowledge the acute shortage of low and moderate-income housing, or does not publicly question programs, like the Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere VI (HOPE), that exacerbate the housing shortage. The black leadership has proven powerless to prevent the nationwide imposition of separate and grossly unequal education, the disastrous application of high-stakes testing and the use of “No Child Left Behind” to discredit and de-fund public education.
African-American business and political leaders even lack the political imagination to rally their constituencies against the growth of a racially selective crime control and prison industry that has criminalized an entire generation of black youth, with far-reaching economic and social consequences.
With some notable exceptions like Congress members John Conyers (D-MI), Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-IL), Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) and Maxine Waters (D-CA) and others on the national stage, and a modest number of similar local office holders, black elected officials have generally proven unwilling or unable to defend the very democratic opening that made their own emergence on the national scene possible. Rather than leading the fight to preserve the public sector with its disproportionate share of black workers and inherent susceptibility to democratic influence, many black officeholders and appointees have eagerly embraced and sought to profit from privatizations. They have served as key players in the long-term diversion of public resources into private hands, and become willing accomplices in the spatial de-concentration and disempowerment of black communities.
Leading the nation in the number of black millionaires and governed by black mayors for more than 30 years, the city of Atlanta, Georgia provides the best example of the failure and duplicity of the black leadership class and its idea of economic development.
Thirty years later, the results are in: the experiment has failed. It is now indisputably clear that the economic development, as preached, practiced and administered by our African-American business and political elite, does not lead to economic justice. The bankruptcy of the black-business-lifts-all-boats theory is evident throughout black America, especially in Atlanta. The “black Mecca” that leads the nation in numbers of African American millionaires also leads the nation in the percentage of its children in poverty.
Former Mayor Maynard Jackson’s chief of staff and current Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin presides over 475,000 Atlantans in the hollowed out core of a metro area 10 times that size today. For a generation, Georgia’s white business and political elite have relentlessly punished Atlanta for the sin of being ruled by black faces, confining most public and private investment to the sprawling suburban donut that surrounds the city. Hence, metro Atlanta is the least densely populated of the nation’s big cities. The airport, freeways and a small number of subway lines are already built.
The only remaining goodies left to hand out in Shirley Franklin’s Atlanta are the few remaining public services that can be privatized, the future tax revenue that can be diverted to favored bankers and middlemen via bond issues, and the land that can be eased into the hands of well-connected developers by a number of means.
Strip mining the public sector
One of the Clinton administration’s chief domestic priorities was something called “reinventing government.” The happy talk was that “reinvention” would introduce competition, entrepreneurial spirit, and a customer service ethic into the functioning of state, federal and local governments.
Behind the happy talk, the “reinventing government” initiative was about privatization of a vast array of governmental functions on all levels from food service to fleet maintenance, from purchasing and payroll to prisons.
The push for privatization on the part of Democrats was a response to corporate campaign contributors, who aimed to make up for declining rates of corporate profit by cannibalizing the public sector.
For the black community, there were many downsides to this wave of privatizations. Due to the public sector’s relative lack of racial discrimination, government workforces historically contained more than their share of minorities. Frequently these government workers had achieved union contracts, civil service protection, medical care and defined benefit pensions. For generations, those steady if underpaid government jobs had been a lifeline that helped lift many black families, chunks of whole communities out of poverty and in to relative middle class prosperity.
Another downside of privatization is that is that when government functions are taken over by private corporations, elements of their processes and outcomes become private property, and are thus less susceptible to public oversight and democratic influence.
The economic empowerment of people who reside in inner cities and other black communities demands a combination of political will, visionary thinking, and organizing acumen. It requires the resurrection of the democratic media space inside black communities where spirited intra-community discussion can take place, and in which leadership can be held account. The business class has failed. Let’s move them out of the way.
