Straight to the point

The heroes of Black History Month are the familiar leaders of the civil-rights movement: Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Ella Baker, and, of course, Martin Luther King Jr. Every February, we celebrate these men and women for championing the self-evident: racial segregation was immoral, integration a moral imperative. Law finally caught up with morality when the “separate but equal” doctrine was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education, forcing school integration.

Yet something seems off about these pieties in 2025. Against a backdrop of broad discontent with liberalism, including among black Americans increasingly drawn to Trumpism, it’s worth returning to a provocative set of questions posed by the black writer Harold Cruse in the wake of civil rights: what if separate but equal contained a good idea, a better idea than advocating for racial integration above all else? Shouldn’t black activism focus on building the capacity of black communities, rather than looking to open up opportunities for the black elite?

While Cruse is rarely remembered today, his name was often mentioned in the same breath as those of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X in the Sixties and Seventies. As a writer and professor (who achieved his position without a college degree), he was deeply influential in establishing the field of black studies. The Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. reports that as an undergraduate in the Seventies, he was assigned Cruse’s masterpiece, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, in three separate courses. Indeed, Gates said he “received the call to be an intellectual through Harold Cruse”.

Cruse was unlike the dissenters from the civil-rights consensus we have come to expect. He harboured few fantasies about bootstrapping self-improvement in the manner promoted by black conservatives such as Thomas Sowell and Shelby Steele. Nor did he have patience for black radicals’ overheated rhetoric extolling a black separatist utopia. Rather, the problem with the civil-rights consensus for Cruse was that it advanced the interests of the black professional class over and against those of the black masses.

Middle-class professionals, black or white, push their particular material interests in the name of universal ideals. In the case of black professionals, Cruse thought, the earnestness — and thus the self-dealing — are doubly intensified. They serve at the leisure of the white middle class, which, in turn, serves those in the commanding heights of economy and society. As a result, there are very few public voices advancing the genuine interests of poor and working-class black people.

Whether or not a few more blacks are admitted to elite universities or the boardroom matters far less than ensuring that everyone has access to a safe place to live, sufficient food, playgrounds for children, and dignified work. Yet middle-class, integrationist black politics cashiered these communal goods in the bargain of more and better university placements and corporate jobs for themselves.

From Cruse’s perspective, the black middle class obfuscated the difference between morality and politics to advance its own interests. Just because policing the social boundary between the races is immoral doesn’t mean breaking down those boundaries ought to be the top political priority, as the mainstream civil-rights movement insisted. Rather, Cruse thought, the priority should be the needs of poor and working-class black people. This required strengthening local communities economically, politically, and culturally.

Cruse advocated for boycotts of businesses that were not based in his community, and he urged that businesses in his community shift to cooperative ownership. He argued for community-controlled initiatives to combat violence and drugs, with a leading role for cultural and religious organisations, not least the black church. He saw the development of community-owned media as an important complement to the new institutions of grassroots democracy he envisioned, like community planning boards.

The black history we ought to care about, Cruse argued, is the history of movements with broad popular support, even if they included regressive tendencies or eccentric personalities — and even if the black middle classes would turn up their noses at them. For Cruse, groups like the Nation of Islam, Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association, and the network of small businesses associated with Booker T. Washington reflected the interests of the black working class in a way that the NAACP and black elected officials never could. The black masses aren’t moved by get-rich-quick schemes, he showed, but by the promise of economic self-determination, especially when it is braided with political and cultural self-determination.

Yet throughout the Eighties, Nineties, and Aughts, black politics trended in the opposite direction from the one Cruse advocated. Multiculturalism reigned, and race politics was largely captured by the black professional-managerial class, including the public intellectuals who laundered that class’s narrow interests with pseudo-sophisticated affirmations of black identity and culture. The corporate ideal of “diversity” was used to legitimise existing power structures: you haven’t received a meaningful raise in a generation, but take solace, your CEO is now black. The minute policing of ordinary language substituted for material reforms.

Then came the Black Lives Matter movement. Launched as the reality of a black president, Barack Obama, grotesquely mismatched the continuing experience of racial violence, BLM broke with integration and multiculturalism, denouncing “respectability politics”. Behind that movement’s embrace of Blackness-with-a-capital-B was a radical shift in the political frame. Instead of relying on the state, communities needed to develop their capacity to care for themselves and to keep themselves safe. “Abolish the police” wasn’t a slogan meant to win elections. It was meant to fuel a long-dormant imagination about what investing in community and experimenting with new institutional forms at the local level could achieve.

In short, Cruse’s ideas were back. But just for a minute. The professional-managerial class embraced BLM in 2020. Amid the lockdowns, in between enjoying loaves of home-baked sourdough and their newfound science fetish, the professionals transformed insurgent political energy into bureaucracy and branding.

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Instead of experimenting with innovative ways for local communities to address the problems they faced, corporations, governments, and, especially, universities hired multicultural managers who knew how to parrot the slogans of black justice movements without threatening the interests of their employers. Amazon led corporate America’s BLM advocacy — even as the mega-retailer terminated a black employee, Christian Smalls, who had sought to organise his fellow warehouse workers on Staten Island, with the company’s general counsel describing Smalls as “not smart or articulate” in an internal memo.

It isn’t hard to see why there would be growing scepticism among black voters of liberal leadership, even as black voters know all too well the continuing effects of racism. As for the alternative? Moral outrage at this or that affront to “our democracy” voiced by the chattering classes — norms created by and for the wealthy and white — rings hollow among the black masses.

What does this history tell us about our present moment? The multicultural model for managing racial diversity was attacked from the Left during the Obama presidency but temporarily resuscitated by the liberal capture of BLM energy. Now an enfeebled multiculturalism is being attacked from the Right, and its prognosis is grim. From the perspective of the black poor and working class, a dramatic shift in elite discourse creates severe vulnerability, but it also opens new opportunities to put forward a vision of justice that centres the black masses.

To create space for that new paradigm, we must be unsentimental about the old paradigm, even as we guard against the barely disguised racism that motivates many of its Right-wing critics. Here again, Cruse can be instructive. His imperative to imagine what community ownership in its richest sense could entail offers a guide for our tumultuous times. Imagine local black organising efforts that call out the oligarchy’s control of our food, our homes, and our entertainment as they grow community-owned grocery stores, apartment buildings, newspapers, and sports teams.

In fairness to the early integrationists, aspects of Cruse’s position are not so different from that of MLK. After the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, King offered an expansive but localised vision of the next steps needed for his city in a hostile national political environment. Black people, King thought, needed to start a credit union, support cultural organisations, do voter outreach, and develop adult education programmes.

At another parlous moment, just after Ronald Reagan was inaugurated with a promise to enact sweeping changes to the federal government and cuts to education programmes, Harold Cruse was asked for his reaction. “There are tough times ahead, and blacks are going to have to change”, Cruse predicted. And he offered advice: instead of focusing on the noise of national politics, as objectionable as they may be, blacks must work collectively to develop local organisations that will “take more responsibility for the community in which they live”.

Professional-class aspiration, corporate “diversity”, top-down multiculturalism — all have failed us. Black Americans cannot afford to fail ourselves.

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Source: UnHerd Read the original article here: https://unherd.com/