How to bring the Black Lives Matter and other races together because of the misunderstanding of our society. Everyone wants the same things, freedom, equality, but people are always putting each other against one another, instead of working together for the greater *** good. How and in what ways can a society provide changes that will create unity between the races?

How to bring the Black Lives Matter and other races together because of the misunderstanding of our society. Everyone wants the same things, freedom, equality, but people are always putting each other against one another, instead of working together for the greater *** good. How and in what ways can a society provide changes that will create unity between the races?

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JOURNAL ARTICLE

The Two Worlds of Race Revisited: A Meditation on Race in the Age of Obama

I think it can be said, and I think that most liberals would finally have to agree, that the presence of the Negro here is precisely what has allowed white people to say they were free; and it is what has allowed them to assume they were rich.

– James Baldwin, “Liberalism and the Negro” (1964)

I had to move without movin’.

– Trueblood, from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952)1

A Rasmussen poll published in Fall 2010 reveals that only 36 percent of Americans think the relationship between blacks and whites is getting better. This number is down from 62 percent who, in July 2009, reported feeling that race relations are improving. That was the same month in which Cambridge, Massachusetts, police arrested Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, and at a news conference following the arrest, President Barack Obama criticized the police. He acknowledged that he did not know the full situation, “not having been there and not seeing the facts,” but nonetheless he said that the police had “acted stupidly.” He continued: “[T]here’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.” For some people, this was just a half-fact, forcefully but inartfully expressed at that.

Obama’s response here may have been the beginning of a fracture along racial lines about precisely what Obama represents in “postracial America.” For the man who, as Joe Klein put it for Time magazine in 2006, “transcends the racial divide so effortlessly,” there was nothing postracial in the president’s analysis of the Gates affair.2 For blacks, Obama spoke the pure and simple truth: blacks and Latinos are stopped – harassed, really – much more by the police than whites. Young black and Latino males in particular live in a virtual police and penal state, where they are under constant suspicion. Consider the killing of Oscar Grant by a BART police officer on January 1, 2009, in Oakland, California. Grant is just one example of the many unarmed blacks who have been assaulted or killed by the police. (On November 5, 2010, the officer was sentenced to two years in prison; many blacks in Oakland, feeling the sentence far too lenient, responded with protest demonstrations.) And to think that a black professor at Harvard would be arrested on the grounds of his own home! That he would be asked to produce identification and prove that he lived there! For blacks, Obama was right to side with “the brother,” despite not knowing the facts of the case. He was right to be skeptical of cops and the so-called justice bureaucracy they represent.3

Many whites, on the other hand conservatives in many instances, but not exclusively or even mainly so – were appalled. How could the president adopt a stance on a case whose details were largely unknown to him? Why, indeed, was he even commenting on a case that involved local law enforcement? It was in no way a federal matter, and therefore the president, rightly, should have made no comment. To these white Americans, Obama’s response seemed as crazy as if Bill Clinton had commented on O. J. Simpson’s arrest in 1995 for the murder of his wife. As defined by federalism, presidents should not talk about matters of state law enforcement unless some urgent federal interest compels it. Moreover, many whites were uncomfortable about the president’s rush to judgment of the Cambridge police. After all, it is true that blacks and Latinos are stopped disproportionately by the police, but it is also true that they commit a hugely disproportionate share of violent crime in America – the other half of the fact that Obama’s initial response seemed to elide. (Blacks and Latinos, for instance, committed 89 percent of all murders in New York City between 2003 and 2009.4 Eighty-eight percent of the victims were also blacks and Latinos, which is why, from the perspective of blacks and Latinos, so little is being done about crime in urban minority communities.5

Blacks are generally proud that Obama openly took their side in this matter, that he understood, articulated, and, more important, legitimated their position. Many whites, however, were surprised that the president took any side at all, that he did not see the necessity as president to transcend such a matter. This was not Little Rock or Selma. The Cambridge police officer was not Bull Connor. (Indeed, the Cambridge Police Department is highly diverse, and its officers are given sensitivity training.) Henry Louis Gates is not an uneducated, unemployed black victim of the inner city but rather a man of considerable intellectual,financial, and institutional resources who can well take care of himself in his disputes with the city of Cambridge. The problem with African Americans (and their liberal left enablers and comrades), as many whites see it, is that they are constantly seeking to relive the days of grand martyrdom from the civil rights movement, recasting every racial disparity and every racial incident as a sign that nothing has changed. Blacks feel that they must be forever vigilant lest things, in fact, do change for the worse. Yes, the Gates arrest and Obama’s reaction may have marked the beginning of the end of the fragile racial unity and hope that Obama’s presidency had inspired in many Americans. Put another way, it may have been the end of the beginning of a stage in America’s relationship with its new president as we have come to know and understand him; it may have set in motion the work of unraveling a bit of the mystery of his political art and his extraordinarily packed persona.

Is Obama as emblem of post-racial America nothing more than the hopeful repository of all our racial desires? Is he the brave new world of American politics? Is he the representative, the embodiment of a new wave of post- American, minority-centered nationalism that will free us at last from a hegemonic white nationalist past? Is he the hero, the last grand martyr of a final American civil rights campaign? Is he the philosopher-king whose subjects are unworthy of him, a man who, as White House advisor Valerie Jarrett put it, “has never really been challenged intellectually”?6 Is he an abject failure, the affirmative action kid in over his head? Is he the confidence man in his ultimate masquerade, the king of bullshitters, the Ellisonian Rinehart, fooling both whites and blacks? Is he simply the confused, contradictory illusion of our collective – both black and white – racial hysteria and misperceptions? Who can say? What can be said is that for a time, Obama brought together, or possessed the promise of bringing together, what the late historian John Hope Franklin called “the two worlds of race.”7 He brought together the privileged majority and the aggrieved minority in a new way: instead of each complaining about how the other is dependent on it, each cooperated to achieve a common goal, electing Obama as a way to restart or redefine American history. Many hoped that Obama could permanently unify the two worlds of race: this was the prospect they found so exciting about his candidacy. Obama the bridge, the mixed race messiah, Obama the blended beneficence. Alas, it is questionable if he can unify us. In the end, the two worlds of race demand that we be on either one side or the other.

In the Fall 2010 Rasmussen poll mentioned above, 27 percent of all respondents reported feeling that race relations are getting worse. Thirty-nine percent of whites think race relations are getting better compared to only 13 percent of blacks. The low percentage among blacks seems especially remarkable given we now have an African American president – or, more accurately, a president of American and African parentage whose ascent to the highest political office in the realm was meant to signal a remarkable coming of racial age in the United States, the proof of a new American exceptionalism. (Obama’s story could only have happened here. What are the chances of a person from a historically despised and persecuted minority being elected leader of some other nation?) Indeed, the poll numbers show a disparity of sorts in black opinion: while few blacks think race relations are getting better, 59 percent of blacks think the United States is moving in the right direction, more than twice the percentage of whites who share that view (27 percent). These numbers invite several observations. First, the era of good racial feelings that Obama ushered in at the beginning of his term in 2009 has, at least for now, ended, particularly as determined by African Americans themselves. In other words, African Americans generally are now both optimistic about Obama’s policies but increasingly pessimistic about his fate as president, insofar as that fate is somehow contingent on the belief that he represents a giant step forward in race relations. But for many African Americans, a step forward in race relations directly depends on white America’s belief in Obama’s policies.

Second, as of Fall 2010, whites are giving up on Obama, while African Americans, by a large margin, are remaining steadfast in their loyalty, although there is a significant gap among blacks between their overall approval rating for Obama, ranging between 85 and 91 percent, and their support of his policies. The latter is still a solid, healthy majority but is nowhere near his overall approval rating among blacks. (The president’s approval rating among whites, as of Fall 2010, is 38 percent. In the 2010 midterm elections, 90 percent of black voters voted for the Democratic Party, in support of President Obama’s policies, whereas only 37 percent of whites voted Democratic.) This consistent support from blacks is not simply because Obama, too, is black. Electing just any black person president would not necessarily have warmed the cockles of the hearts of most blacks. In fact, one can imagine some blacks being elected president who would have been vehemently opposed by most blacks. (Consider someone along the lines of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas or political activist and businessman Ward Connerly or some other outspoken opponent of affirmative action, someone who believes in a color-blind America or espouses the view that racism is no longer a factor in American life.) Blacks remain loyal to Obama because he is black and is pursuing policies that seem, contrarily, to place limits on American power abroad (or recognize the limits and abuses of that power) while at the same time expanding the reach of the federal government at home. Obama is not a quintessential liberal; he is a quintessential black liberal. Most blacks are comfortable with the way that he seems to represent the decline of an official American exceptionalism – an ideology born of the belief that America is blessed by providence to be the foremost power in white Western hegemony – and the concurrent rise of domestic federal power as an unabashed bulwark against markets and private wealth, against the provinces of white power and privilege. Since the days of slavery, blacks have sought protection from the federal government (frequently not receiving it), they have been skeptical of the old version of American exceptionalism, and they have despaired at being at the mercy of local or state power.

Third, blacks feel that moving the country in what they think is the right direction is jeopardizing the overall relationship between blacks and whites; however, they likely feel that this is a necessary price for seeing Obama succeed where change is needed. As much as blacks may feel that broad acceptance of Obama’s policies and leadership among whites would be a major step forward in race relations, there is uncertainty about how strong the black support of Obama would remain if his approval numbers were high among whites. Many blacks still have the sneaking suspicion that any black leader or any leader who happens to be black, as in Obama’s case, and who is making whites extraordinarily happy is probably doing it at the expense of blacks, selling them out or kowtowing to the white folk. In other words, blacks expect Obama to govern as a black or minority president, voicing a black or minority perspective, a black or minority consciousness, and redefining what it means to be an American. If whites oppose him, according to the view of many blacks, it is because many or most whites cannot abide having the minority perspective as the representative or standard interpretation of American experience.

What blacks and whites do have in common is a belief that race relations are somehow reflected as progress; either they are getting better or worse, improving or deteriorating. When race relations are framed in a larger narrative of progress, then some millennial aim or goal emerges: a moment to be reached when race relations or race itself shall be no more. For whites, this time could perhaps be when blacks no longer view themselves as a distinct grievance group, when they fit in, at last, no longer requiring special cheerleading and enabling, no longer making claims of exceptionalism as Americans because of their historical status as slaves. For blacks, perhaps it is when they have percentage representation in every profession and occupation, in every social and economic category, that is at least the equal of their percentage in the population; when their representation in negative categories, such as incarceration or single-parent households, aligns with their percentage in the population; when they cease to be a population defined by their pathologies, which they feel are not their fault. This moment will be the end of racism, and thus the end of race relations, which for blacks are just a calibration of the extent to which racism affects their lives at any given moment, as there would be no distortion in black American life.

But suppose race relations have nothing to do with progress, secular or providential. Suppose race relations do not get better or worse in a linear or statistical way but simply respond and adjust to the economic and technological features of any particular point in time. Suppose race relations have nothing to do with the will of either whites or blacks but rather react to the spasms of their nervous systems, to their co-constructed mythologies of reality. Suppose the relationship between blacks and whites is fixed as a continuous exercise in social experimentation, in which the power between the two sometimes pulsates in unexpected rhythm but never really changes. Suppose we have it completely backward. Suppose because it is whites who are the decided minority in the world that they will always be special. Suppose it is blacks who are the inadvertent enablers in the special status given to whites, who are themselves invested even against their will in this status as a form of chiliastic order in the world. Suppose one day leftist whites, who hate the idea of progress, particularly as embodied in the idea of economic growth, which they find to be an utterly destructive concept, can no longer square this view with racial progress, which in fact greatly depends on economic growth, as noted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan and other policy intellectuals in the 1960s when Dædalus published the first of two special issues on “The Negro American.” (Whites, on the whole, are willing to make concessions to blacks when the overall economic pie is getting larger. In this way, blacks make progress relative to their status in the past but never make any real gains in relation to whites. Therefore, there is no progress: things change without changing.)

We are trapped, however, in seeing race relations as a yardstick of progress. (Jeffrey B. Ferguson has a brilliant take on this in his essay in this volume.) How else could we account for all the wealthy black movie stars (Will Smith, Samuel L. Jackson, Eddie Murphy, Martin Lawrence, Denzel Washington, and the rest) and athletes (Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Serena and Venus Williams, Tiger Woods) who have such huge crossover appeal? Today, blacks direct mainstream Hollywood movies, appear in mainstream advertising, are celebrated authors and public intellectuals; they lead major white institutions, and they are doctors, lawyers, and Indian chiefs. Booker T. Washington preached racial progress as he sought funds from wealthy whites to support Tuskegee Institute at the turn of the twentieth century. W.E.B. Du Bois had once believed in it when he was involved with the NAACP. The movers and shakers of the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s – Du Bois, Charles S. Johnson, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke – all believed in progress and patronage. Thurgood Marshall believed in it, as did Benjamin Mays and A. Philip Randolph and the late Dorothy Height. Martin Luther King, Jr., based his popular vision on assumptions of it. And one can believe in it only if there is irrefutable evidence that progress is actually occurring.

John Hope Franklin, in a tough-minded way, acknowledged progress in his Dædalus essay from 1965, featured in the first of the two issues on “The Negro American.” “By the middle of the eighteenth century,” Franklin wrote, “laws governing Negroes denied to them certain basic rights that were conceded to others. They were permitted no independence of thought, no opportunity to improve their minds or their talents or to worship freely, no right to marry and enjoy the conventional family relationships, no right to own or dispose of property, and no protection against miscarriages of justice or cruel and unreasonable punishments.”8 This was the origin of the two worlds of race. By 1965, without question, things were better for blacks – much better. After all, they were no longer chattels! And Franklin’s beginning only underscored how far blacks had come by the 1950s and 1960s: civil rights commissions, civil rights laws, the beginning of the end of Jim Crow, and the promise of integration and equality. But the broad historical outline that Franklin’s essay provides showed how deeply entrenched the notion of two races was in structuring American reality and its historical self understanding, how much both custom and convenience supported it, and how much power and pride were determined to maintain it.

Black nationalists, such as Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, and Malcolm X, and black Marxists, as Du Bois became, never accepted the idea of racial progress. Nothing got better in any real sense as far as they were concerned. This view is not without its justifications. Blacks were at the bottom of the American social, political, and economic ladders in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and they remain there today. They are at the bottom of standardized test scores, at the bottom of accumulated or acquired wealth, at the bottom in life expectancy, at the bottom in marriage rates, at the top in single-mother birth rates, at the top in incarceration rates, and at the top for unemployment and high school dropout rates.9

What race relations so profoundly reflect in America is the complex nature of our social dynamic: how in this country, as Ralph Ellison brilliantly encapsulated in Invisible Man, one can move without moving. Many African American cynics ask, what has changed, except the façade that masks the great American racial leviathan, whose belly still contains the two worlds of race? What they may not appreciate is that for African Americans to move without moving is, in a sense, a finely wrought art, a virtuosic pose of existentialism. Blacks have made their conditions into an attitude. The difficult craft of post-racial racialism requires buying into a belief that everything has changed in modern attitudes about race (why not let your daughter or son marry one and bring a bit of diversity into the family?) while at the same time recognizing that the problems that stigmatize black people and make them distinct in the body politic are as intractable now as ever. The dance of post-racial racialism is to move without moving. It is precisely what Obama is trying to do as president, don’t you think? He is trying to be a black president without being a black president.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article headlined “The Alien in the White House,” columnist Dorothy Rabinowitz wrote:

A great part of America now understands that this president’s sense of identification lies elsewhere, and is in profound ways unlike theirs. He is hard put to sound convincingly like the leader of the nation, because he is, at heart and by instinct, the voice mainly of his ideological class. He is the alien in the White House, a matter having nothing to do with delusions about his birthplace cherished by the demented fringe.10

When Obama, during the 2008 campaign, jokingly referred to the fact that he does not look like the presidents on our currency, he was more right than he knew. According to his critics, he is far more different from them than he ever let on. Rabinowitz took special umbrage at Obama’s returning a bust of Churchill that was given by Tony Blair as a gift. “The new administration had apparently found no place in our national house of many rooms for the British leader who lives on so vividly in the American mind,” she wrote. “Churchill, face of our shared wartime struggle, dauntless rallier of his nation who continues, so remarkably, to speak to ours. For a president to whom such associations are alien, ridding the White House of Churchill would, of course, have raised no second thoughts.” Conservative commentator and writer Dinesh D’Souza, in his right-wing psychobiography The Roots of Obama’s Rage, offers this interpretation of the return of the bust:

Obama probably remembers Churchill as an imperialist who soldiered for the empire in India and Africa. Churchill was opposed to India’s independence movement. . . . Even as late as 1954, when President Eisenhower raised with Churchill the idea of granting self-government to all remaining British colonies in Africa, Churchill responded that he was “skeptical about universal suffrage for the Hottentots.” In the 1950s, Churchill was prime minister during Britain’s Fight against the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the native country of Obama’s father.11

D’Souza’s view makes some sense. Obama’s father was Kenyan. If the bust of Churchill was meant to symbolize some special relationship between America and Britain, returning the bust may have been meant to symbolize another sort of special relationship between former colonies and Britain. But why should anyone think returning the bust was necessarily an “alien” act, unless one assumes that the way whites see history is the only legitimate way to see it. Are whites somehow insulted that Obama, in returning the bust, was saying that Churchill was a white hero, if, indeed, that was what he was trying to say? They might respond by saying that the presidency is bigger than the race or religion of the occupant. In fact, the office has nothing to do with the race, religion, or gender of the occupant, and the election should not be seen as “correcting” or “repudiating” the so-called whiteness of the office. But if that is the case, what then is Obama’s difference supposed to mean? Or put another way, what difference is racial difference supposed to make?

Was it the expectation of whites, both those who supported Obama in 2008 and those who did not, that he would serve as president in a way that would be indistinguishable from a white serving in the office? Would this outcome have been their ideal of the post-racial? Blacks, by and large, probably had no problem with Obama returning the bust, as it was most likely their expectation – certainly their hope – that he would serve as an active agent of their interests, avenger of their injuries and insults, restorer of their place of respect in the world. (This was probably the hope of the white Left, too, whose watchword, after all, is transformative, which so many have called the Obama presidency.) Is this black Americans’ idea of post-racial, when a black person would not be expected to be indistinguishable from his white predecessors but, in fact, would be expected to be very different, the deconstructive counterpoint, the legitimation of black reality meant to expose the fact that there is a “white” way of governing and, naturally, a “non-white” way? What many whites looked for in Obama was a Sidney Poitier character from the 1950s; many blacks wanted the hero of a 1970s blaxploitation film. Shelby Steele, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed from October 28, 2010, warned against electing a redeemer rather than a steward because redeemers, by their very nature and mission, must be transformative. Stewards, conversely, simply wish to guard the values and principles, the institutions and wealth, of the republic. Perhaps. But that is probably too simple an explanation of how blacks and whites see democracy. And was there not a time, during the post–World War II development of the American studies discipline, when Americans understood themselves historically as a redeemer nation?12

In a recent Washington Post article, columnist Eugene Robinson attempted to answer the question, “What’s Behind the Tea Party’s Ire?” The party, “overwhelmingly white and lavishly funded,” is more upset about Obama’s race than his policies, according to Robinson. He describes the rhetoric frequently used at Tea Party rallies and by Tea Party endorsed candidates – calls for “taking the country back” and “returning the American government to the American people” – as implicitly racist. It disturbs him that many in the Tea Party see Obama as an elitist, “when he grew up in modest circumstances – his mother was on food stamps for a time – and paid for his fancy-pants education with student loans.”13 If anyone fits the bill as an elitist, Robinson suggests, it is George W. Bush, on the basis of his privileged background. Bush seems to have wrecked the budget with deficit spending before Obama entered the office, yet despite being widely unpopular, he does not seem to be blamed for these sins as Obama has been.14

This political button shows how the Left has also embraced the rhetoric of “taking back the country.” It features Jerry Brown, who was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, and Jesse Jackson, whom Brown said he would select as his vice presidential running mate if he was nominated.

Some of these same concerns and misgivings about the Tea Party are made (more compellingly) by historian Clarence E. Walker in his essay for this issue of Dædalus. But it is hard to judge precisely how racist the Tea Party may be. First, the environmental movement, the climate change movement, the animal rights movement, and the anti-war movement (its latest incarnation being in opposition to Iraq) all have an overwhelmingly white public face (at their public demonstrations, for example). No one makes this point to discredit or criticize these movements. Why not, if lack of diversity is a serious shortcoming in a political movement? Tea Party rallies generally have gone to great lengths to include black conservative speakers, such as Angela McGlowan and Alfonzo Rachel, and the movement has endorsed non-white candidates comprising African Americans, Indian Americans, and Hispanic Americans.15 Second, both the Left and the Right have used the phrase “taking back the country.” For example, the Left used it in the political button pictured above, featuring Jerry Brown, who was running for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, and Jesse Jackson, whom Brown said he would select as his vice presidential running mate if he was nominated.16

The Washington Post recently revealed that only 5 percent of signs at a Tea Party rally mentioned either Obama’s race or religion.17 Whether Obama is an elitist is hard to say and, frankly, is irrelevant to his abilities as a politician. But being an elitist – or some sort of social-status hound or cultural snob – is not at all contingent on the modesty of one’s background. A parvenu, which Obama and other highly educated black folk such as myself happen to be, can be the worst sort of snob, intensely elitist.18 It is arguable whether racism in the Tea Party movement even matters very much to black people’s interests. Black editorial writer Jason Riley, of The Wall Street Journal, made a point of criticizing the NAACP for issuing a report condemning the racism of the Tea Party; he called the report misguided and extraneous to the real issues and concerns facing black people in the United States.19

My point is not that Robinson’s column is superficial and poorly argued (hardly a novel or trenchant observation to make of an op-ed). I am not even trying to argue that the Tea Party movement isn’t racist. A book like political scientist Robert C. Smith’s Conservatism and Racism, and Why in America They Are the Same (2010) makes a provocative and sometimes compelling argument about the persistent historical connection between conservatism and its justification of white privilege or the status quo of white dominance. Rather, I am interested in how Robinson’s column reveals two significant anxieties that many African Americans feel. The first anxiety derives from the fact that Barack Obama is, without question, the most criticized black man in the United States now, not a surprising fate given he is president. He is probably the most criticized black man in the history of the United States because, once again, being the president he is the most visible and most powerful black man in history. Blacks, on the whole, have always felt uncomfortable, if not outright defensive, whenever a black person is stridently and caustically criticized, especially when it is a black man and especially when criticized by whites. African Americans frequently fluctuate between defensive militancy and special pleading in response to criticism because, throughout their history, they have been unjustly, sometimes savagely and opportunistically, criticized by whites. The group may feel that attacks on Obama are onslaughts to the manhood virtue of the race itself, and manhood remains a sensitive and potent issue for blacks, who still generally feel that their men are more at risk than their women. As Obama is the first black president, and as blacks who overwhelmingly supported him are highly invested in his success, they are strongly inclined to be piqued by attacks, while also proud of his ability to withstand the attacks, proud of his being in the arena where such attacks are made. This is the tension of what I call post-racial racialism: blacks want Obama (or any prominent black person of achievement) to receive special treatment because he is black, and they expect such achievement to be lionized not merely as exemplary but as heroic; on the other hand, they do not want the achievement of any prominent black to be diminished or dismissed, somehow qualified or patronized, because of race or any special consideration given to it. So the brutal give-and-take of partisan politics, which blacks know well enough, in this instance makes them uneasy. And they are not unjustified in their distrust of white motives: many blacks still remember the Republican Party’s Nixonian Southern strategy of the late 1960s through the 1980s, making a coded appeal as it did to whites as whites; many still remember the successful Willie Horton ad campaign that George H.W. Bush used against Michael Dukakis in 1988; many remember the racist affirmative action ads Jesse Helms used against black challenger Harvey Gantt in North Carolina. Some will say that blacks cannot take the pressure of being in the political arena and overreact to criticism of Obama, that they are overly sensitive to whites’ good or bad intentions. (Beating Hillary Clinton and John McCain, two highly experienced white politicians, in the arena of political debate and exchange was probably what made blacks feel most proud of Obama.) Others feel that the whites who do not like Obama use their harsh criticism of him to take racist potshots at the group as a whole through him. Besides, many blacks feel that they should defend Obama as vigorously as most conservatives defended Bush. If your opponents consider ideological loyalty a virtue for their side, why is it not a virtue for you as well?

The second anxiety is related to the group of whites with whom African Americans generally align themselves politically. This group usually comprises educated, highly cultured, middle- and upper-class liberal whites – those who, back in the days of slavery and after, would have been referred to as “de quality.” Historically, blacks have had little truck with lower-class whites or with white ethnics (except Jews). This political alignment is one reason why whites who hate Obama call him elitist, because they feel that the group of whites who back him are, by and large, elitist; they also feel that whites who support Obama treat blacks as favored pets while disdaining other whites who are not supporters. After all, these liberal, educated whites took to Obama largely because they felt they were dealing with one of their own: someone who went to their schools, read their kind of books, had their kind of habits, spoke their language. Obama impressed even upper-class conservatives such as David Brooks, Christopher Buckley, and Peggy Noonan for the same reasons. He is a black who did not, through his habits or inclinations, overly remind them that he is black: rather like the educated, deracinated “mulatto” colonial, in some respects. Lower-class whites have always been jealous of this alignment as a violation of white racial solidarity and because the blacks seemed to be rising at their expense.

One of the most remarkable racist allegories of this situation I describe is the series of Frankenstein movies made by Universal Studios in the 1930s and early 1940s. Doctor Frankenstein and his colleagues all represent the upper-class whites – scientific, rational, liberal, seeking new knowledge and wanting to overturn the old ways. The violent monster is the African American, the botched experiment of breathing new life into a dead people, of resurrecting them through science and rationality. Through the sheer will of a liberal vision, Frankenstein thought that he could create a being equal to those around him, that he could fabricate or engineer an equal being from the bits and pieces of bodies. The villagers are the lower-class whites – superstitious, fearful, and jealous of the monster, resentful of the better-off whites who scorn them as backward simpletons. And in virtually every Frankenstein movie, the villagers, with their torches, shotguns, and pitchforks, destroy Frankenstein and his monster.

In this fevered vision, no one is admirable; no one has the moral high ground, although the monster, in its way, represents a form of innocence, pathos: the upper and lower classes are flawed, either arrogant in their intelligence or mob-like in their ignorance, and the monster is deformed. A twisted reading of the Obama presidency – and some white conservatives are reading it in just this way – makes it out to be a modern Frankenstein story, the hubris of the modern Prometheus – the hubris of liberalism. Perhaps it is a hubris to answer the hubris the Left saw in the conservative policies of Bush, the hubris the Left sees in the American empire – what might be called the hubris of neoliberalism.

I know that in the life styles of any number of groups in the nation, there are many things which Negroes would certainly reject, not because they hold them in contempt, but because they do not satisfy our way of doing things and our feeling about things.

– Ralph Ellison, from a transcript of the American Academy conference on “The Negro American,” May 14–15, 1965

This is why I say that in order for the Negro to become an American citizen, all American citizens will be forced to undergo a change, and all American institutions will be forced to undergo a change too.

– James Baldwin, “Liberalism and the Negro” (1964)

The Negroes are asking for unequal treatment.

– Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Memorandum for the Secretary (1964)20

In 1964, Commentary magazine sponsored a roundtable on “Liberalism and the Negro,” moderated by Norman Podhoretz and including panelists James Baldwin, Sidney Hook, Gunnar Myrdal, and Nathan Glazer. Podhoretz, then-editor of the magazine, put it as well as anyone when he described the crisis in liberalism thus:

For the traditional liberal mentality conceives of society as being made up not of competing economic classes and ethnic groups, but rather of competing individuals who confront a neutral body of laws and a neutral institutional complex. . . . [T]he newer school of liberal thought on race relations maintains that the Negro community as a whole has been crippled by three hundred years of slavery and persecution and that the simple removal of legal and other barriers to the advancement of individual Negroes can therefore only result in what is derisively called “tokenism.” This school of thought insists that radical measures are now needed to overcome the Negro’s inherited disabilities.21

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ conferences on “The Negro American” in 1964 and 1965, as well as the resulting issues of Dædalus that published the conference papers and partial transcripts, reveal that nearly everyone was wrestling with this tension in liberalism, this ideological division in dealing with African Americans, their status, and their claims for justice. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a key figure at the American Academy conferences and author of what would prove to be one of the most important and controversial documents about the status of blacks in the United States, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965), was torn about the best way forward. Without some strong federal intervention to change hiring practices, the black male, who was the primary focus of Moynihan’s report, would never become the breadwinner and figure of stability that he needed to be if the black family was to cease being dysfunctional.

On the one hand, the idea of making race a permanent category in American politics by introducing preferential treatment for blacks was not simply distasteful but contrary to American ideology and the preferred aim of getting rid of racism by getting rid of race itself. Ultimately, liberalism essentially chose affirmative action under President Nixon and his Philadelphia Plan in 1969, and what emerged was the political fixture of racial categories in a scheme of preferred treatment, designed largely to stop the violent black rebellions in major American cities that had become commonplace by 1964 and horrendous by 1965 when the Watts section of Los Angeles exploded in racial violence that at times resembled out-and-out warfare. Instead of lasting only ten or twenty years – a kind of domestic Marshall Plan, as early advocates like Bayard Rustin and Whitney Young wanted – affirmative action has now lasted forty years and, despite challenges and changes, shows no sign of being abandoned as a policy position of blacks, white liberals, and the Left. Affirmative action is bolstered by a philosophy called multiculturalism, which involves radicalizing the concept of pluralism and tolerance as the active destruction of all marginalization; by the slogan of diversity (a form of bureaucratic bean-counting for proper representation); and by a network of government-enforced or government-encouraged forms of solidarity. As a result, affirmative action as a remediation policy has widened its reach to include virtually anyone in the United States who is not an able-bodied, heterosexual white man. For some, this “inclusion industry” has hurt blacks, as the idea of preferential treatment was originally conceived to address the specific needs that arose from the historical fact – popularized by liberal historians and sociologists in the 1950s and 1960s – that blacks had been slaves in the United States, a unique form of political oppression and social ostracism. They had been placed in a position of government-approved powerlessness and total abjection and thus had been incomparably damaged as a people by that institution. According to this view, blacks were the only true caste victims in America. They were also the only people in this mythical land of the immigrant who came here against their will. (There are some exceptions to this, such as immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean.) They therefore required a remedy that was beyond the normal avenues of redress others could obtain through constitutional means or the regular political process, with its built-in mechanisms for reform.

On the other hand, some have argued that affirmative action would never have endured as a policy had its client list not been widened in order to garner more political support. The country on the whole was not very interested in helping blacks overcome a socially imposed and politically managed inferiority status unless others who felt they had equally legitimate claims were also helped. In other words, blacks needed “victim allies” in order for the policy to be accepted. Yet some argue that including these allies has caused the policy not to work very well for blacks, or at least not work as originally intended.

Conservatives today are fighting for the alternative liberalism, the original liberalism, if you will, of competing individuals, race-neutral laws and institutions, and an essentially race-neutral public square; they would have race become what religion or any other form of identification is: a private realm, unforced and unenabled by a system of governmental rewards and disincentives. For these conservatives (old-fashioned liberals), the government has no compelling interest in maintaining racial categories or helping people on the basis of race. The biggest mistake America ever made was to recognize race as a way of legitimatizing slavery; continuing to recognize race does not rectify that mistake. The affirmative action liberals retort by saying the government invented and sanctioned race as a legitimate category; it cannot blithely get out of the race business now by declaring that race, in effect, does not exist because we now find race a repugnant idea. In other words, for the affirmative action liberals, the so-called original liberalism never existed except in the American imagination, in America’s fantasy of itself.22

The two worlds of race have produced two views of liberalism. And within blacks themselves the two worlds have produced two interpretations of America: one that reveals America as it really is, a view shaped by the special knowledge blacks have derived from their condition in America; and another view that denies them a true sense of what America is, shaped by the knowledge kept from them based on their condition. Novelist James Baldwin said in 1964, “I have watched the way most white people in this country live. I have worked in their kitchens and I have served them their brandy, and I know what goes on in white living rooms better than white people know what goes on in mine.”23 Ralph Ellison made this observation in 1965: “There are many parts of this complex American society which Negroes have been kept away from. Even most of our novelists do not give enough of a report of how life is actually lived in the country for a Negro to pick up a novel and get some clues. The constrictions and the exclusiveness very often have gotten into our perception of social complexity.”24 The two worlds of race created in blacks a contrary sense of what they knew about the United States and the whites who ran it, blending into a self-aggrandized sense of isolation: both inside and outside at once.

The Dædalus issues on “The Negro American” grappled with the conflicting views of liberalism in dealing with race as well as liberalism’s discontent with its own limitations at reforming a problem that has been at the crux of the American experiment: that is, how to integrate a forced-worker population that once was needed but is socially undesirable now that its original purpose for being here no longer exists; or, how to make the unwanted wanted. I thought that Obama’s election as president could be a useful pretext to return to this question or issue – one that has been significantly recast and reformulated since the Dædalus issues on “The Negro American,” now that we have lived for nearly fifty years with racism as a discredited idea, segregation as a thing of the past, and blacks as an officially sanctioned remedial caste. Having a president who is a black man, albeit one with a tangential or more oblique American experience, calls for a consideration of this new age, the “age of Obama.” A desire to explore the role of white liberalism in the context of a growing minority population in the United States – one that will, before mid-century, outnumber whites – also motivated my interest in revisiting “The Negro American” project of 1965. Our moment today is in every way as significant as that moment, following the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, when America seemed on the edge of a brave new world, poised for redefinition and ready to see itself a new.

The present volume is the humanist companion to the Dædalus issue (Spring 2011) that Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo is guest editing and that will more strongly feature the social sciences. The original Dædalus issues on “The Negro American” included only one essay by a true humanist, historian John Hope Franklin, a man I greatly admired. His essay is reprinted here, and my essay is meant in some ways, even with its title, to be a thematic continuation, a reimaging and reworking of the intellectual preoccupations in his essay, and a tribute to his work. I feel privileged to have the opportunity to be the guest editor of this issue, as I feel privileged to be in partnership with Bobo, another scholar I admire. I am extremely grateful to the brilliant contributors who wrote wonderfully thoughtful and engaging essays for this volume. I am glad the topic captured their imagination and that they had confidence in my skills as an editor. These are busy people, and I appreciate their taking the time. As Lou Gehrig said, “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth.”

2nd Article

In 2016 Civil Rights Activists of all generations were to meet with President Obama to talk about racial issues, injustices, etc. It showed that there is still gapes with blacks themselves especially blacks that are gender different.  They see that nothing really changes so why should they help this cause.  It shows that this country and people are still divided with much more work to be done to be united and to be civilized with each other in order to get their rights.

Thesis:  maybe – How to bring the Black Lives Matter and other races together because of the misunderstanding of our society. Everyone wants the same things, freedom, equality, but people are always pitting each other against one another, instead of working together for the greater good.

Cobb, Jelani. “The Matter of Black Lives,” The New Yorker, 14 March 2016.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/03/14/where-is-black-lives-matter-headed

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The Political Scene

March 14, 2016 Issue

The Matter of Black Lives

A new kind of movement found its moment. What will its future be?

By Jelani Cobb

March 7, 2016

Alicia Garza, a labor organizer in Oakland, espouses a type of ecumenical activism.Photograph by Amy Elkins for The New Yorker

On February 18th, as part of the official recognition of Black History Month, President Obama met with a group of African-American leaders at the White House to discuss civil-rights issues. The guests—who included Representative John Lewis, of Georgia; Sherrilyn Ifill, the director-counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund; and Wade Henderson, who heads the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights—were intent on pressing the President to act decisively on criminal-justice issues during his last year in office. Their urgency, though, was tempered by a degree of sentimentality, verging on nostalgia. As Ifill later told me, “We were very much aware that this was the last Black History Month of this Presidency.”

But the meeting was also billed as the “first of its kind,” in that it would bring together different generations of activists. To that end, the White House had invited DeRay Mckesson, Brittany Packnett, and Aislinn Pulley, all of whom are prominent figures in Black Lives Matter, which had come into existence—amid the flash points of the George Zimmerman trial; Michael Brown’s death, in Ferguson, Missouri; and the massacre at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church, in Charleston, South Carolina—during Obama’s second term.

Black Lives Matter has been described as “not your grandfather’s civil-rights movement,” to distinguish its tactics and its philosophy from those of nineteen-sixties-style activism. Like the Occupy movement, it eschews hierarchy and centralized leadership, and its members have not infrequently been at odds with older civil-rights leaders and with the Obama Administration—as well as with one another. So it wasn’t entirely surprising when Pulley, a community organizer in Chicago, declined the White House invitation, on the ground that the meeting was nothing more than a “photo opportunity” for the President. She posted a statement online in which she said that she “could not, with any integrity, participate in such a sham that would only serve to legitimize the false narrative that the government is working to end police brutality and the institutional racism that fuels it.” Her skepticism was attributable, in part, to the fact that she lives and works in a city whose mayor, Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s former chief of staff, is embroiled in a controversy stemming from a yearlong coverup of the fatal shooting by police of an African-American teen-ager.

Mckesson, a full-time activist, and Packnett, the executive director of Teach for America in St. Louis, did accept the invitation, and they later described the meeting as constructive. Mckesson tweeted: “Why did I go to the mtg w/ @potus today? B/c there are things we can do now to make folks’ lives better today, tomorrow, & the day after.” Two weeks earlier, Mckesson had announced that he would be a candidate in the Baltimore mayoral race, and Obama’s praise, after the meeting, for his “outstanding work mobilizing in Baltimore” was, if not an endorsement, certainly politically valuable.

That split in the response to the White House, however, reflected a larger conflict: while Black Lives Matter’s insistent outsider status has allowed it to shape the dialogue surrounding race and criminal justice in this country, it has also sparked a debate about the limits of protest, particularly of online activism. Meanwhile, internal disputes have raised questions about what the movement hopes to achieve, and about its prospects for success.

The phrase “black lives matter” was born in July of 2013, in a Facebook post by Alicia Garza, called “a love letter to black people.” The post was intended as an affirmation for a community distraught over George Zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida. Garza, now thirty-five, is the special-projects director in the Oakland office of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, which represents twenty thousand caregivers and housekeepers, and lobbies for labor legislation on their behalf. She is also an advocate for queer and transgender rights and for anti-police-brutality campaigns.

Garza has a prodigious social-media presence, and on the day that the Zimmerman verdict was handed down she posted, “the sad part is, there’s a section of America who is cheering and celebrating right now. and that makes me sick to my stomach. we gotta get it together y’all.” Later, she added, “btw stop saying we are not surprised. that’s a damn shame in itself. I continue to be surprised at how little Black lives matter. And I will continue that. stop giving up on black life.” She ended with “black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter.”

Garza’s friend Patrisse Cullors amended the last three words to create a hashtag: #BlackLivesMatter. Garza sometimes writes haiku—she admires the economy of the form—and in those four syllables she recognized a distillation not only of the anger that attended Zimmerman’s acquittal but also of the animating principle at the core of black social movements dating back more than a century.

Garza grew up as Alicia Schwartz, in Marin County, where she was raised by her African-American mother and her Jewish stepfather, who run an antiques store. Her brother Joey, who works for the family business, is almost young enough to have been Trayvon Martin’s peer. That is one reason, she says, that the Zimmerman verdict affected her so deeply. The family was not particularly political, but Garza showed an interest in activism in middle school, when she worked to have information about contraception made available to students in Bay Area schools.

She went on to study anthropology and sociology at the University of California, San Diego. When she was twenty-three, she told her family that she was queer. They reacted to the news with equanimity. “I think it helped that my parents are an interracial couple,” she told me. “Even if they didn’t fully understand what it meant, they were supportive.” For a few years, Garza held various jobs in the social-justice sector. She found the work fulfilling, but, she said, “San Francisco broke my heart over and over. White progressives would actually argue with us about their right to determine what was best for communities they never had to live in.”

In 2003, she met Malachi Garza, a gregarious, twenty-four-year-old trans male activist, who ran training sessions for organizers. They married five years later. In 2009, early on the morning of New Year’s Day, a transit-police officer named Johannes Mehserle fatally shot Oscar Grant, a twenty-two-year-old African-American man, in the Fruitvale bart station, in Oakland, three blocks from where the Garzas live. Alicia was involved in a fight for fair housing in San Francisco at the time, but Malachi, who was by then the director of the Community Justice Network for Youth, immersed himself in a campaign to have Mehserle brought up on murder charges. (He was eventually convicted of involuntary manslaughter, and served one year of a two-year sentence.)

Grant died nineteen days before Barack Obama’s first Inauguration. (The film “Fruitvale Station,” a dramatic recounting of the last day of Grant’s life, contrasts his death with the national exuberance following the election.) His killing was widely seen as a kind of political counterpoint—a reminder that the grip of history would not be easily broken.

Garza had met Patrisse Cullors in 2005, on a dance floor in Providence, Rhode Island, where they were both attending an organizers’ conference. Cullors, a native of Los Angeles, had been organizing in the L.G.B.T.Q. community since she was a teen-ager—she came out as queer when she was sixteen and was forced to leave home—and she had earned a degree in religion and philosophy at U.C.L.A. She is now a special-projects director at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, in Oakland, which focusses on social justice in inner cities. Garza calls Cullors her “twin.” After Cullors created the Black Lives Matter hashtag, the two women began promoting it. Opal Tometi, a writer and an immigration-rights organizer in Brooklyn, whom Garza had met at a conference in 2012, offered to build a social-media platform, on Facebook and Twitter, where activists could connect with one another. The women also began thinking about how to turn the phrase into a movement.

DeRay Mckesson has announced that he is running for mayor of Baltimore. Photograph by Christaan Felber

Photograph by Christaan Felber

Black Lives Matter didn’t reach a wider public until the following summer, when a police officer named Darren Wilson shot and killed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson. Darnell Moore, a writer and an activist based in Brooklyn, who knew Cullors, coördinated “freedom rides” to Missouri from New York, Chicago, Portland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Boston. Within a few weeks of Brown’s death, hundreds of people who had never participated in organized protests took to the streets, and that campaign eventually exposed Ferguson as a case study of structural racism in America and a metaphor for all that had gone wrong since the end of the civil-rights movement.

DeRay Mckesson, who was twenty-nine at the time and working as an administrator in the Minneapolis public-school system, watched as responses to Brown’s death rolled through his Twitter feed, and decided to drive the six hundred miles to Ferguson to witness the scene himself. Before he left, he posted a request for housing on Facebook. Teach for America’s Brittany Packnett helped him find a place; before moving to Minneapolis, he had taught sixth-grade math as a T.F.A. employee in Brooklyn. Soon after his arrival, he attended a street-medic training session, where he met Johnetta Elzie, a twenty-five-year-old St. Louis native. With Packnett, they began sharing information about events and tweeting updates from demonstrations, and they quickly became the most recognizable figures associated with the movement in Ferguson. For their efforts, he and Elzie received the Howard Zinn Freedom to Write Award, in 2015, and Packnett was appointed to the President’s Commission on Twenty-first Century Policing.

Yet, although the three of them are among the most identifiable names associated with the Black Lives Matter movement, none of them officially belong to a chapter of the organization. Elzie, in fact, takes issue with people referring to Garza, Cullors, and Tometi as founders. As she sees it, Ferguson is the cradle of the movement, and no chapter of the organization exists there or anywhere in the greater St. Louis area. That contentious distinction between the organization and the movement is part of the debate about what Black Lives Matter is and where it will go next.

The central contradiction of the civil-rights movement was that it was a quest for democracy led by organizations that frequently failed to function democratically. W. E. B. Du Bois, in his 1903 essay “The Talented Tenth,” wrote that “the Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men,” and the traditional narrative of the battle for the rights of African-Americans has tended to read like a great-black-man theory of history. But, starting a generation ago, civil-rights historians concluded that their field had focussed too heavily on the movement’s leaders. New scholarship began charting the contributions of women, local activists, and small organizations—the lesser-known elements that enabled the grand moments we associate with the civil-rights era. In particular, the career of Ella Baker, who was a director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and who oversaw the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, came to be seen as a counter-model to the careers of leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr. Baker was emphatically averse to the spotlight. Barbara Ransby, a professor of history and gender studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who wrote a biography of Baker, told me that, during the nineteen-forties, when Baker was a director of branches for the N.A.A.C.P., “she would go into small towns and say, ‘Whom are you reaching out to?’ And she’d tell them that if you’re not reaching out to the town drunk you’re not really working for the rights of black people. The folk who were getting rounded up and thrown in jail had to be included.”

Cullors says, “The consequence of focussing on a leader is that you develop a necessity for that leader to be the one who’s the spokesperson and the organizer, who tells the masses where to go, rather than the masses understanding that we can catalyze a movement in our own community.” Or, as Garza put it, “The model of the black preacher leading people to the promised land isn’t working right now.” Jesse Jackson—a former aide to King and a two-time Presidential candidate, who won seven primaries and four caucuses in 1988—was booed when he tried to address young protesters in Ferguson, who saw him as an interloper. That response was seen as indicative of a generational divide. But the divide was as much philosophical as it was generational, and one that was visible half a century earlier.

Garza, Cullors, and Tometi advocate a horizontal ethic of organizing, which favors democratic inclusion at the grassroots level. Black Lives Matter emerged as a modern extension of Ella Baker’s thinking—a preference for ten thousand candles rather than a single spotlight. In a way, they created the context and the movement created itself. “Really, the genesis of the organization was the people who organized in their cities for the ride to Ferguson,” Garza told me in her office. Those people, she said, “pushed us to create a chapter structure. They wanted to continue to do this work together, and be connected to activists and organizers from across the country.” There are now more than thirty Black Lives Matter chapters in the United States, and one in Toronto. They vary in structure and emphasis, and operate with a great deal of latitude, particularly when it comes to choosing what “actions” to stage. But prospective chapters must submit to a rigorous assessment, by a coördinator, of the kinds of activism that members have previously engaged in, and they must commit to the organization’s guiding principles. These are laid out in a thirteen-point statement written by the women and Darnell Moore, which calls for, in part, an ideal of unapologetic blackness. “In affirming that black lives matter, we need not qualify our position,” the statement reads.

Yet, although the movement initially addressed the killing of unarmed young black men, the women were equally committed to the rights of working people and to gender and sexual equality. So the statement also espouses inclusivity, because “to love and desire freedom and justice for ourselves is a necessary prerequisite for wanting the same for others.” Garza’s argument for inclusivity is informed by the fact that she—a black queer female married to a trans male—would likely have found herself marginalized not only in the society she hopes to change but also in many of the organizations that are dedicated to changing it. She also dismisses the kind of liberalism that finds honor in nonchalance. “We want to make sure that people are not saying, ‘Well, whatever you are, I don’t care,’ ” she said. “No, I want you to care. I want you to see all of me.”

Black activists have organized in response to police brutality for decades, but part of the reason for the visibility of the current movement is the fact that such problems have persisted—and, from the public’s perspective, at least, have seemed to escalate—during the first African-American Presidency. Obama’s election was seen as the culmination of years of grassroots activism that built the political power of black Americans, but the naïve dream of a post-racial nation foundered even before he was sworn into office. As Garza put it, “Conditions have shifted, so our institutions have shifted to meet those conditions. Barack Obama comes out after Trayvon is murdered and does this weird, half-ass thing where he’s, like, ‘That could’ve been my son,’ and at the same time he starts scolding young black men.” In short, all this would seem to suggest, until there was a black Presidency it was impossible to conceive of the limitations of one. Obama, as a young community organizer in Chicago, determined that he could bring about change more effectively through electoral politics; Garza is of a generation of activists who have surveyed the circumstances of his Presidency and drawn the opposite conclusion.

VIDEO FROM THE NEW YORKER

Unearthing Black History at the Freedom Lots

Imet up with Garza in downtown San Francisco last August, on an afternoon when the icy winds felt like a rebuke to summer. A lively crowd of several hundred people had gathered in United Nations Plaza for Trans Liberation Tuesday, an event that was being held in twenty cities across the country. A transgender opera singer sang “Amazing Grace.” Then Janetta Johnson, a black trans activist, said, “We’ve been in the street for Oscar Grant, for Trayvon Martin, for Eric Garner. It’s time for our community to show up for trans women.”

The names of Grant, Martin, and Garner—who died in 2014, after being put in a choke hold by police on Staten Island—are now part of the canon of the wrongfully dead. The point of Trans Liberation Tuesday was to draw attention to the fact that there are others, such as Ashton O’Hara and Amber Monroe, black trans people who were killed just weeks apart in Detroit last year, whose names may not be known to the public but who are no less emblematic of a broader social concern. According to a report by the Human Rights Campaign, between 2013 and 2015 there were fifty-three known murders of transgender people; thirty-nine of the victims were African-American.

Garza addressed the crowd for just four minutes; she is not given to soaring rhetoric, but speaks with clarity and confidence. She began with a roll call of the underrepresented: “We understand that, in our communities, black trans folk, gender-nonconforming folk, black queer folk, black women, black disabled folk—we have been leading movements for a long time, but we have been erased from the official narrative.” Yet, over all, her comments were more concerned with the internal dynamics of race. For Garza, the assurance that black lives matter is as much a reminder directed at black people as it is a revelation aimed at whites. The message of Trans Liberation Tuesday was that, as society at large has devalued black lives, the African-American community is guilty of devaluing lives based on gender and sexuality.

The kind of ecumenical activism that Garza espouses has deep roots in the Bay Area. In 1966, in Oakland, Huey P. Newton co-founded the Black Panther Party, which was practically defined by hyperbolic masculinity. Four years later, he made a statement whose message was, at the time, rare for the left, not to mention the broader culture. In a Party newsletter, he wrote:

We have not said much about the homosexual at all, but we must relate to the homosexual movement because it is a real thing. And I know through reading, and through my life experience and observations, that homosexuals are not given freedom and liberty by anyone in the society. They might be the most oppressed people in the society.

The movement remained steadfastly masculinist, but by the nineteen-eighties Newton’s words had begun to appear prescient. When I asked Garza about the most common misperception of Black Lives Matter, she pointed to a frequent social-media dig that it is “a gay movement masquerading as a black one.” But the organization’s fundamental point has been to challenge the assumption that those two things are mutually exclusive. In 1989, the race-theory and legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw introduced the principle of “intersectionality,” by which multiple identities coexist and complicate the ways in which we typically think of class, race, gender, and sexuality as social problems. “Our work is heavily influenced by Crenshaw’s theory,” Garza told me. “People think that we’re engaged with identity politics. The truth is that we’re doing what the labor movement has always done—organizing people who are at the bottom.”

As was the case during the civil-rights movement, there are no neat distinctions between the activities of formal organizations and those incited by an atmosphere of social unrest. That ambiguity can be an asset when it inspires entry-level activism among people who had never attended a protest, as happened in Ferguson. But it can be a serious liability when actions contrary to the principles of the movement are associated with it. In December, 2014, video surfaced of a march in New York City, called in response to the deaths of Eric Garner and others, where some protesters chanted that they wanted to see “dead cops.” The event was part of the Millions March, which was led by a coalition of organizations, but the chant was attributed to Black Lives Matter. Several months later, the footage provoked controversy. “For four weeks, Bill O’Reilly was flashing my picture on the screen and saying we’re a hate group,” Garza said.

A week after the march, a troubled drifter named Ismaaiyl Brinsley fatally shot two New York City police officers, Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu, as they sat in their patrol car, before killing himself. Some observers argued that, although Brinsley had not identified with any group, his actions were the result of an anti-police climate created by Black Lives Matter. Last summer, not long after Dylann Roof killed nine African-Americans at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church, South Carolina’s governor, Nikki Haley, implied that the movement had so intimidated police officers that they were unable to do their jobs, thereby putting more black lives at risk. All of this was accompanied by an increasing skepticism, across the political spectrum, about whether Black Lives Matter could move beyond reacting to outrages and begin proactively shaping public policy.

The current Presidential campaign has presented the movement with a crucial opportunity to address that question. Last summer, at the annual Netroots Nation conference of progressive activists, in Phoenix, Martin O’Malley made his candidacy a slightly longer shot when he responded to a comment about Black Lives Matter by asserting that all lives matter—an evasion of the specificity of black concerns, which elicited a chorus of boos. At the same event, activists interrupted Bernie Sanders. The Sanders campaign made overtures to the movement following the incident, but three weeks later, on the eve of the first anniversary of Michael Brown’s death, two protesters identifying themselves as Black Lives Matter activists—Marissa Johnson and Mara Willaford—disrupted a Sanders rally in Seattle, preventing the Senator from addressing several thousand people who had gathered to hear him. The women were booed by the largely white crowd, but the dissent wasn’t limited to whites. This was the kind of freestyle disruption that caused even some African-Americans to wonder how the movement was choosing its targets. At the time, it did seem odd to have gone after Sanders twice, given that he is the most progressive candidate in the race, and that none of the Republican candidates had been disrupted in their campaigns.

Garza argues that the strategy has been to leverage influence among the Democrats, since ninety per cent of African-Americans vote Democratic. She says that it will be uncomfortable for voters if “the person that you are supporting hasn’t actually done what they need to be doing, in terms of addressing the real concern of people under this broad banner.” She defended the Seattle action, saying that it was “part of a very localized dynamic, but an important one,” and added that “without being disrupted Sanders wouldn’t have released a platform on racial justice.” Afterward, Sanders hired Symone Sanders, an African-American woman, to be his national press secretary. He also released a statement on civil rights that prominently featured the names of African-American victims of police violence, and he began frequently referring to Black Lives Matter on the campaign trail. He subsequently won the support of many younger black activists, including Eric Garner’s daughter.

An attempt to disrupt a Hillary Clinton rally early in the campaign, in New Hampshire, failed when the protesters arrived too late to get into the hall. But Clinton met with them privately afterward, and engaged in a debate about mass incarceration. She has met with members of the movement on other occasions, too. Clinton has the support of older generations of black leaders and activists—including Eric Garner’s mother—and she decisively carried the black vote in Super Tuesday primaries across the South. But she has been repeatedly criticized by other activists for her support of President Bill Clinton’s 1994 crime bill, and, particularly, for comments that she made, in the nineties, about “superpredators” and the need “to bring them to heel.” Two weeks ago, Ashley Williams, a twenty-three-year-old who describes herself as an “independent organizer for the movement for black lives,” interrupted a private fund-raising event in Charleston, where Clinton was speaking, to demand an apology. The next day, Clinton told the Washington Post, “Looking back, I shouldn’t have used those words, and I wouldn’t use them today.”

If Black Lives Matter has been an object lesson in the power of social media, it has also revealed the medium’s pitfalls. Just as the movement was enjoying newfound influence among the Democratic Presidential contenders, it was also gaining attention for a series of febrile Twitter exchanges. In one, DeRay Mckesson and Johnetta Elzie got into a dispute with Shaun King, a writer for the Daily News, over fund-raising for a social-justice group. The conservative Web site Breitbart ran a picture of Mckesson and King with the headline “black lives matter leaders just excommunicated shaun king.”

Last month, it was announced that Garza would speak at Webster University, in St. Louis, which prompted an acrimonious social-media response from people in the area who are caught up in the debate over the movement’s origins. Elzie tweeted, “Thousands of ppl without platforms who have no clue who the ‘three’ are, and their work/sacrifice gets erased,” and said that the idea that Garza is a founder of the movement is a “lie.” Garza released a statement saying that she had cancelled the event “due to threats and online attacks on our organization and us as individuals from local activists with whom we have made an effort to have meaningful dialogue.” She continued, “We all lose when bullying and personal attacks become a substitute for genuine conversation and principled disagreement.”

There’s nothing novel about personality conflicts arising among activists, but to older organizers, who had watched as federal surveillance and infiltration programs sowed discord that all but wrecked the Black Power movement, the public airing of grievances seemed particularly amateurish. “Movements are destroyed by conflicts over money, power, and credit,” Garza said, a week after the cancellation. “We have to take seriously the impact of not being able to have principled disagreement, or we’re not going to be around very long.”

Almost from the outset, Black Lives Matter has been compared to the Occupy movement. Occupy was similarly associated with a single issue—income inequality—which it transformed into a movement through social media. Its focus on the one per cent played a key role in the 2012 election, and it likely contributed to the unexpected support for Bernie Sanders’s campaign. To the movement’s critics, however, its achievements fell short of its promise. Its dissipation seemed to prove that, while the Internet can foster the creation of a new movement, it can just as easily threaten its survival.

Black Lives Matter would appear to face similar concerns, though in recent months the movement has tacked in new directions. In November, the Ella Baker Center received a five-hundred-thousand-dollar grant from Google, for Patrisse Cullors to further develop a program to help California residents monitor and respond to acts of police violence. Last year, Mckesson, with Elzie, Brittany Packnett, and Samuel Sinyangwe, a twenty-five-year-old data analyst with a degree from Stanford, launched Campaign Zero, a list of policing-policy recommendations that calls for, among other things, curtailing arrests for low-level crimes, reducing quotas for summonses and arrests, and demilitarizing police departments. To date, neither Clinton nor Sanders has endorsed the platform, but both have met with the activists to discuss it.

The announcement of Mckesson’s mayoral candidacy, which he made on Twitter—he has more than three hundred thousand followers—is the most dramatic break from the movement’s previous actions. (Beyoncé has more than fourteen million followers, but she follows only ten people. Mckesson is one of them.) Mckesson is a native of Baltimore and he grew up on the same side of town as Freddie Gray, whose death last year in police custody sparked protests and riots in the city—at which Mckesson was a frequent presence. His family struggled with poverty and drug addiction, but he excelled academically and went on to attend Bowdoin College, in Maine. He will be running against twenty-eight other candidates. One of them, the city councilman Nick Mosby, is married to Marilyn Mosby, the Maryland state’s attorney, who is handling the prosecution of the six police officers indicted in connection with Gray’s death.

In Baltimore, Mckesson told me that he is using his savings to fund his activist work. “It’s totally possible to have Beyoncé follow you on Twitter and still be broke,” he said. (BuzzFeed reported that a former Citibank executive would host an event at his New York City home to raise funds for Mckesson’s campaign.) He wouldn’t discuss his candidacy’s implications for the movement, but he is very serious about running. Two weeks ago, he released a twenty-six-page report detailing his platform for reforming the city’s schools, police department, and economic infrastructure. He has already been attacked for his connection to Teach for America; after he released his plan for improving Baltimore’s schools, it was dismissed as a corporatist undertaking along the lines of Michael Bloomberg’s and Rahm Emanuel’s reforms. He rejects the idea that his lack of experience in elected office should be an obstacle. When I asked how he thought he would be able to get members of the city council and the state legislature to support his ideas, he said, “I think we build relationships. That question seems to come from a place of traditional reading of politics. That says, ‘If you don’t know people already, then you cannot be successful.’ Politics as usual actually hasn’t turned into a change in outcomes here.”

Garza is tactful when she talks about Mckesson’s campaign. “I’m in favor of people getting in where they fit in. Wherever you feel you can make the greatest contribution, you should,” she said. But she doesn’t see it as her role to define the future of the movement. She told me an anecdote that illustrates the non-centrality of her role. Last month, on Martin Luther King Day, she and Malachi were driving into San Francisco, where she was scheduled to appear at a community forum, when they heard on the radio that the Bay Bridge had been shut down. Members of a coalition of organizations, including the Bay Area chapter of Black Lives Matter, had driven onto the bridge, laced chains through their car windows, and locked them to the girders, shutting down entry to the city from Oakland. Garza had known that there were plans to mark the holiday with a protest—marches and other events were called across the nation—but she was not informed of this specific activity planned in her own city. “It’s not like there’s a red button I push to make people turn up,” she said. It would have been inconceivable for, say, the S.C.L.C. to have carried out such an ambitious action without the leadership’s being aware of every detail.

In January, Garza travelled to Washington, to attend President Obama’s final State of the Union address; she had been invited by Barbara Lee, her congressional representative. (Lee, who was the sole member of Congress to vote against the authorization of military force after 9/11, has a high standing among activists who are normally skeptical of elected officials.) After the speech, as Garza stood outside in the cold, trying to hail a cab, she said that she was disappointed. The President had not driven home the need for police reform. He had spoken of economic inequality and a political system rigged to benefit the few, but had scarcely touched upon the implications of that system for African-Americans specifically. From the vantage point of black progressives, his words were a kind of all-lives-matter statement of public policy.

A year from now, Barack Obama will leave office, and with him will go a particular set of expectations of racial rapprochement. So will the sense that what happened in Sanford, Ferguson, Baltimore, Charleston, and Staten Island represents a paradox. Black Lives Matter may never have more influence than it has now. The future is not knowable, but it isn’t likely to be unfamiliar. ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated Mckesson’s age at the time.