“Pawns in a White Man’s Political Game”

The political seduction of black America, part 2

“PAWNS IN A WHITE MAN’S POLITICAL GAME”

The political seduction of black America, part 2

Glenn McNair

Editors’ note: This is the second part of a two-part essay. The first part is here.

Race and presidential politics: a brief history (continued)

The Carter presidency

Democrat Jimmy Carter was elected president in November 1976 because of the anti-Republican backlash caused by the Watergate scandal, which had forced Nixon to resign. In the popular imagination Carter is viewed as a staunch supporter of blacks and the civil rights agenda, yet he, too, succumbed to the growing conservative consensus on race. In May 1977, Carter met with Democratic congressional leaders and civil rights activists to discuss his administration’s priorities. He made clear that balancing the budget was his principal concern and that social programs would have to take the back seat because federal tax revenues had declined and deficit spending was unacceptable. In keeping with his priorities, Carter failed to vigorously support the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill, which would have guaranteed full employment. The Congressional Black Caucus and the civil rights establishment sponsored the bill; it was yet another attempt to use government to improve the socioeconomic fortunes of blacks. Carter proposed a budget that would severely cut social spending—especially in employment, child and family nutrition, and other welfare programs. Despite the opposition of black and white liberals in Congress and the civil rights establishment, Carter’s budget bill passed. It was the first time that a Democratic president had cut social spending. Presidential concern about black issues had reached its peak in the 1960s during the Johnson administration and had remained fairly consistent during the Nixon and Ford administrations; this attention began to wane during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.[i]

The Reagan and Bush presidencies

Republicans returned to the White House in 1980 with Ronald Reagan’s election and would remain there for twelve years through two Reagan terms and the single term of George H. W. Bush. Reagan and Bush actualized the Republican Party’s conservative vision of civil rights. Reagan appointed William Bradford Reynolds as assistant attorney general for civil rights. Reynolds reduced the enforcement budget for the civil rights division of the Justice Department, vigorously opposed busing and any measure that, in his view, constituted “reverse discrimination” against whites. The principle that the government was not to be used to advance the interests of groups who had suffered discrimination in the past at the expense of individuals in the present guided the Reynolds Justice Department. Blacks as a group would not benefit to the detriment of whites.[ii]

Reagan’s critics argued that he weakened the Civil Rights Commission by appointing conservative ideologues to it. He also chose black conservatives for positions in the federal bureaucracy, particularly in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Housing and Urban Development and tasked them with carrying out the conservative agenda on civil rights enforcement, affirmative action, equal employment opportunity, and other issues related to racial and social justice. Reagan also hoped that installing blacks in these positions would blunt any race-based criticisms of his administration.[iii]

During his terms in office Reagan appointed five Supreme Court justices, seventy-eight appellate judges, and 298 district court judges, fully half of the federal judiciary. These appointments represented the most significant reshaping of the federal bench since the administrations of Franklin Roosevelt. Reagan also exacerbated the existing racial imbalance on district and appellate courts. Jimmy Carter had appointed twenty-eight black judges to the federal judiciary, out of a total of 206; Reagan named just five black judges to federal courts in his eight years in office. Reagan’s judges were young, conservative, white men opposed to affirmative action and the redistributionist agenda of the civil rights establishment. Conservative judges and legal scholars believed that race-conscious remedies constituted reverse discrimination. In the conservative legal mind, the government should not privilege some individuals over others based on race or sex. Since the appointment of conservative justices during the Reagan-Bush years, the US Supreme Court has restricted affirmative action in employment and ended it in education, required stricter standards of proof in employment discrimination cases, limited the use of race in crafting congressional districts, and made the individual rather than the group the center of litigation.[iv]

The Democrats were unable to stop what they regarded as attacks on civil rights and social programs during the Reagan-Bush years; in fact, they advanced the conservative agenda in several respects. The Democrat-controlled Congress confirmed Reagan’s conservative federal judges and his appointment of black conservatives Clarence Pendleton and Samuel Pierce to the Civil Rights Commission and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, respectively. Congress also failed to press Bush to develop a national urban policy, even in the aftermath of the Los Angeles riots in 1992. Democratic congressmen did cut the budget of the Civil Rights Commission during Pendleton’s chairmanship, with the goal of limiting his ability to hamper the Commission’s efforts. (Ironically, cutting the Commission’s budget curtailed its ability to take positive action as well.) Congress was able to pass two civil rights restoration bills to offset some of the perceived negative effects of Reagan-Bush policies.[v]

The Clinton presidency

After the crushing defeat of their presidential nominee, Walter Mondale, in 1984, a group of Democrats led by Al Fromm hoped to improve their party’s political fortunes by creating the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) in 1985. Its members were convinced that Americans viewed the Democratic Party as the party of special interests, of blacks, gays, and other minority groups. If the party ever hoped to regain the presidency and to govern effectively it had to shed that image. To do so, it had to downplay the party’s historic commitment to the poor, working class, and minorities, and move to the political right on welfare, crime, affirmative action, and economic policy. The council eschewed race-based social programs, opposed racial quotas, and supported business, free trade, and lower taxes.[vi]

By the time of its nominating convention in 1992, the conservative elements within the Democratic Party were firmly in control. The Democrats of the DLC realized that to retake the White House they would have to have Southerners on their tickets; the only Democratic presidents since Harry Truman—Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter—had been Southerners. In 1992, the Democrats chose the Arkansan Bill Clinton, who was also head of the DLC, as its standard-bearer and Al Gore of Tennessee as his running mate. Clinton selected New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, Georgia Governor Zell Miller, and black congresswoman Barbara Jordan, all supporters of the DLC, as his keynote speakers at the Democratic National Convention. Clinton took the lead role in drafting the party platform and placed civil rights near the bottom of its list of priorities. Jesse Jackson and black delegates put up token resistance but were unable to secure greater emphasis on civil rights or to stop the rightward swing of the party.[vii]

Clinton took several steps during the 1992 campaign to put distance between himself, blacks, and the civil rights establishment. The day before delivering a speech at Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition in January 1992, he authorized the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally challenged black man in Arkansas. Several months later, Jackson invited Clinton to appear before the Rainbow Coalition again; this time Clinton castigated the rapper Sister Souljah for suggesting that rap lyrics should include the murder of whites, since such lyrics regularly described the murder of blacks. Clinton also pledged to “end welfare as we know it.” Through these actions Clinton demonstrated to the white electorate that he was not soft on black crime, was a defender of mainstream cultural values, opposed to social welfare programs, and did not kowtow to Jesse Jackson, the leader of the civil rights establishment and the left wing of the Democratic Party.[viii]

Clinton knew that disassociating himself from civil rights leaders might cost him black votes, but he believed this loss would be offset by gains among whites, and that is what happened. Fewer blacks went to the polls than in 1988, but Clinton picked up more votes than he lost—especially among white Southerners and Reagan Democrats. He won the 1992 presidential election, capturing 43 percent of the popular vote to George H.W. Bush’s 37 percent and the independent Ross Perot’s 19 percent.[ix] The 1992 election was a watershed in recent political history because none of the candidates supported the traditional civil rights agenda.

To appease blacks after largely ignoring their issues during the campaign, Clinton appointed four blacks to cabinet posts, Ron Brown at the Commerce Department, Hazel O’Leary at the Energy Department, Mike Espy at Agriculture, and Jesse Brown at the Department of Veterans Affairs. Clinton also chose Drew Days as solicitor general and Jocelyn Elders as surgeon general. These appointments represented the largest number of black cabinet appointees in history, but none of the departments is responsible for addressing problems unique to black communities and their secretaries would play no role in strengthening civil rights and social programs.[x]

After these conciliatory appointments, Clinton went back to showing America that blacks would not hold him hostage to their interests or perceptions. In 1993, he nominated the black law professor Lani Guinier as assistant attorney general for civil rights. Conservatives immediately began to attack Guinier as a left-wing radical for her scholarly writings on proportional representation in voting and commitment to strong civil rights enforcement. In the face of growing criticism, Clinton claimed not to have read Guinier’s writings and—despite her sterling credentials—withdrew her nomination before the Senate Judiciary Committee could even consider it. Similarly, Clinton cashiered his surgeon general, Jocelyn Elders, when conservatives launched a campaign against her for her support of condom distribution in schools and discussion of masturbation in sex education classes. Clinton selected another black, Henry Foster, to replace Elders, but the Senate never confirmed him and Clinton did not press the issue.[xi]

Clinton delivered a speech to a group of black Memphis ministers in 1993. The speech was supposed to have been a commemoration of the life of Martin Luther King Jr. King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968 after coming to the city to lead a protest on behalf of black sanitation workers, as part of his new emphasis on economic justice. Clinton took the opportunity to lecture the ministers on the true causes of, and solutions to, black poverty. Clinton asserted that the government could not, and should not, act to end economic inequality. Racism was not the cause of black poverty; rather, the cause was a lack of personal responsibility and high levels of violence among Blacks. He concluded by saying that high rates of teen pregnancy, illegitimacy, broken families, and crime were products of black abuse of the freedoms for which King had fought and died.[xii]

Conservative Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994, the first time in fifty years, largely because Americans believed Clinton had abandoned his centrist campaign posture and was governing as a leftist. In the 1996 presidential election, white voters slightly favored the Republican Bob Dole, 45 percent to 44 percent. White men overwhelmingly supported Dole, 48 percent to 38 percent. White women, on the other hand, gave their votes to Clinton, 49 percent to 42 percent. The votes that assured Clinton’s victory came from Blacks and Hispanics, who gave 84 and 73 percent of their votes, respectively, to the incumbent Democrat, despite his having done very little to advance or protect their interests.[xiii]

In his second term, Clinton aligned himself with, or co-opted, conservative positions. He increased defense spending, supported stricter crime control legislation and the death penalty, cut social service benefits, reduced spending on welfare, and favored school choice programs and inner-city enterprise zones. Ironically, Ronald Reagan had championed all these initiatives in the 1980s, but the Democrats had opposed them. Clinton resorted to symbolic politics to appease blacks. He endorsed a reformed affirmative action, advocated support for historically black colleges, encouraged black business formation, and paid much more attention to Africa than had recent Republican administrations. He authorized a modest increase in funding for civil rights enforcement and sponsored a national conversation on race. The Presidential Initiative on Race, headed by the eminent black historian John Hope Franklin, accomplished little; it issued a report on the state of race in September 1998 that included few proposals for substantive action. This lack of action items was exactly what Clinton had intended; it allowed him to appear concerned about race without risking political losses.[xiv]

Even though he chose not to use the power of his office to improve their lives, Bill Clinton enjoyed the overwhelming support of black Americans; his approval rating with them averaged over 90 percent for the eight years of his presidency. Clinton’s black approval rating reached its lowest point in 1993, after he abandoned Lani Guinier, but even then it was over 50 percent. In 1998, a poll done by a black research group revealed that Clinton’s approval rating among blacks was even higher than that of Jesse Jackson, 93 percent to 89 percent. When the House of Representatives voted to impeach Clinton his approval rating among whites was 70 percent, among blacks, 91 percent. Just days before Clinton left office in 2001, only 62 percent of whites approved of the job he was doing, but his approval rating among blacks stood at 93 percent.[xv]

To explain Clinton’s popularity, in 2002 the black journalist DeWayne Wickham conducted several dozen interviews with prominent blacks. What emerged from these conversations was the fact that blacks loved Clinton not for his policy positions, but for his symbolic gestures, his appearing to truly care about the plight of black people. The late Harvard psychiatry professor Alvin Poussaint’s observations were representative. Blacks liked Clinton because he was the “first president to have a Black man, Vernon Jordan, as his best friend and golfing buddy.” Clinton seemed “culturally in tune to the Black community. He went to Black churches. He sang Black hymns. When he came to power he appointed a lot of Blacks.” He “also was very close early in his administration to the Black figures who are greatly admired, like Marian Wright Edelman.” Poussaint noted, “a lot of Black people will say how easy he seems, how warm he is toward them.” Clinton also had a personal style that Blacks appreciated: “A lot of Black people think Clinton is hip. He plays the saxophone and he likes jazz and he wears sunglasses.”[xvi] For most Blacks then, personal style won out over political substance.

The George W. Bush presidency

In 2000, George W. Bush defeated Al Gore in perhaps the most contentious presidential election since 1876, when another Republican, Rutherford B. Hayes, ascended to the presidency after conflict over contested Electoral College votes. Bush governed in an era when overtly race-conscious policymaking was widely viewed as politically untenable. Accordingly, his administration emphasized inclusion, opportunity, and individual responsibility, often framing African Americans as beneficiaries of universal reforms rather than as subjects of targeted redress. Nowhere was this clearer than in education policy. The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 required states to disaggregate test scores by race, income, and other categories, dramatically increasing the visibility of black–white achievement gaps.[xvii]

The consequences were paradoxical. While black students saw modest gains in early elementary mathematics, schools in predominantly African-American communities were disproportionately labeled as failing and subjected to staff turnover, closure, or restructuring—outcomes that did little to address deeper inequalities rooted in segregation and school finance.[xviii] In this sense, Bush-era education policy exemplified a broader pattern: racial disparities were measured and acknowledged, but not structurally confronted.

In criminal justice, the Bush administration largely maintained the punitive framework inherited from the late twentieth century. Mandatory minimum sentencing and the crack-powder cocaine disparity remained in place, and African Americans continued to be vastly overrepresented in federal drug prosecutions.[xix] The Second Chance Act of 2007, which funded reentry programs for formerly incarcerated individuals, represented a limited acknowledgment of the social costs of mass incarceration, but did not alter sentencing policy itself.[xx]

Bush’s economic and housing policies similarly illustrate the racial consequences of formally race-neutral governance. Tax cuts enacted in 2001 and 2003 disproportionately benefited higher-income Americans with significant assets, leaving African Americans—who held far less wealth on average—with comparatively little gain.[xxi] At the same time, Bush’s promotion of an “ownership society” encouraged minority homeownership without meaningful regulation of subprime lending. Black borrowers were frequently steered into high-cost loans, even when they qualified for conventional mortgages, and the resulting foreclosure crisis erased decades of black wealth accumulation.[xxii] Taken together, Bush’s approach reflected a governing philosophy in which racial inequality was understood as a problem best addressed indirectly through markets, accountability, and individual opportunity, which was in keeping with Republican ideological and policy positions since the Reagan era. The result, however, was a set of policies that were race-neutral in intent but racially unequal in effect.

The Obama presidency

In 2008, because of the collapse of the US economy, two failed wars, and a disastrous response to Hurricane Katriana in 2005, Americans rejected the Republican John McCain and elected Barrack Obama, the nation’s first African-American president. If ever there was a moment to prove—once and for all—that politics could produce socioeconomic equality for blacks, this was it. Obama entered the presidency with a markedly different understanding of the relationships among race, law, and politics than George W. Bush. In speeches both before and during his presidency, Obama repeatedly emphasized that racial progress in the United States had depended on the deliberate transformation of law and public policy. Speaking at the NAACP Centennial Convention in 2009, he reminded his audience that civil rights activists “understood that unjust laws needed to be overturned; that legislation needed to be passed; and that Presidents needed to be pressured into action.”[xxiii]

Obama consistently linked black advancement to the dismantling of legal barriers. “Because Jim Crow laws were overturned,” he argued, “black CEOs today run Fortune 500 companies,” and “because civil rights laws were passed, black mayors, black governors, and members of Congress serve in places where they might once have been unable.”[xxiv] These statements encapsulated a core premise of his presidency: racial inequality was not merely a legacy of past discrimination, but a condition that required ongoing governmental intervention.

This philosophy shaped Obama’s policy agenda, particularly in response to the Great Recession. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 targeted unemployment and economic collapse in communities hit hardest by the downturn. Black unemployment peaked in 2010 and then declined steadily in subsequent years, while poverty among African Americans fell sharply by the middle of the decade.[xxv] Expansions of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit increased after-tax income for millions of low-income working families, disproportionately benefiting blacks.[xxvi]

Health-care reform produced some of the most measurable racial outcomes. The Affordable Care Act cut the uninsured rate for black adults under sixty-five by more than half by 2016, while black life expectancy reached record highs and teen birth rates declined significantly.[xxvii] In criminal justice, the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 reduced the crack-powder cocaine sentencing disparity from 100:1 to 18:1 and eliminated mandatory minimum sentences for simple possession, directly addressing a long-standing source of racial inequality in federal sentencing.[xxviii]

Education and civil rights enforcement also reflected Obama’s emphasis on structural intervention. Black high school graduation rates reached historic highs by 2013–14, and federal support for students at historically black colleges and universities increased substantially during his presidency.[xxix] Initiatives such as “My Brother’s Keeper” sought to coordinate public and private resources to improve outcomes for boys and young men of color, while the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act expanded workers’ ability to challenge pay discrimination.[xxx]

In sum, Obama’s view of the role of law and public policy in black advancement rested on the conviction that structural inequalities demand structural solutions. His presidency translated this philosophy into policy measures whose outcomes can be traced across employment, education, health, criminal justice, and economic opportunity. But he understood the social and political environment in which he operated, one in which race-specific policies to address structural inequality had little chance of passage or effective implementation; therefore, the polices that benefited blacks the most were race neutral. (On the rare occasions when he did express what might be considered the “black” perspective on an issue, as he did when speaking on the killing of Trayvon Martin and the arrest of the African-American scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., he received severe and immediate white backlash.) Obama’s policy approach achieved significant, measurable improvement in the lives of black Americans, but this did not lead to universal approbation but criticism from those who believed he had not done enough.

Perhaps the most persistent and influential Obama critic is the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates. Coates interprets Obama’s presidency through the tension between the symbolic breakthrough of his election and the limits of his political philosophy, policy choices, and use of presidential power in confronting racial inequality. Although Coates recognizes the historic significance of the first black presidency, he argues that Obama’s governing worldview rests on a conciliatory vision of American racial progress that understates the depth and persistence of structural racism and constrains the kinds of policies he pursued while in office.

A central element of Coates’s critique concerns Obama’s emphasis on personal responsibility within black communities. Coates argues that Obama frequently frames racial inequality in terms of individual behavior rather than systemic forces rooted in the nation’s history of racial exploitation. He believes that in this sense, Obama’s rhetoric echoes an older tradition of “respectability politics” that stresses discipline, work, and self-improvement as the primary path to racial advancement. Coates characterizes this message as a familiar one in American political discourse: “At the heart of Barack Obama’s message was a kind of hoary message to black people—if you work twice as hard as white people anything is possible.”[xxxi] For Coates, such arguments obscure the historical processes—slavery, segregation, housing discrimination, and mass incarceration—that have structured persistent racial inequalities.

Coates also argues that Obama’s political worldview rested on an unusually optimistic assessment of white America and the nation’s racial maturity. In his interpretation, Obama’s political success depended on projecting the belief that the United States possesses the moral capacity to overcome its racial past through civic unity and gradual progress. Coates identifies this disposition as a defining feature of his terms in office, observing that “Obama’s optimism about white people—his refusal to regard them as an obstacle—is the most surprising and most important aspect of his presidency.”[xxxii] Obama acknowledged the crimes of American history while simultaneously affirming the legitimacy and promise of the national project. To Coates, this balance proved politically effective but historically problematic because it presumed a level of racial progress that the historical record does not clearly sustain.

Beyond rhetoric, Coates also criticizes the limited extent to which Obama deployed presidential power to confront racial injustice directly. In his view, Obama governed cautiously on racial matters, pursuing broadly universal policies while avoiding initiatives that explicitly targeted racial inequality or white supremacy as structural problems. Obama came into office with no mandate to deliver broad anti-racist policy, and he governed that way. The administration’s major policy initiatives (including the economic recovery programs enacted after the financial crisis and the passage of health-care reform) operated primarily through universal frameworks rather than race-specific remedies. For Coates, this strategy reflected both political calculation and ideological commitment: Obama sought to avoid reinforcing white fears that government policy favored black Americans, but in so doing he limited the capacity of federal policy to address the historical roots of racial disparities.

Coates also highlights Obama’s rejection of reparations as an example of these limitations. During his presidency Obama repeatedly argued that reparations for slavery and segregation were politically impractical and unlikely to gain broad public support. Coates interprets this position as reflecting Obama’s broader commitment to universal policy solutions rather than race-conscious remedies. For Coates, however, reparations serve not only as a potential policy proposal but also as a moral and historical framework for confronting the nation’s legacy of racial exploitation. By dismissing reparations as politically unrealistic, Obama, in Coates’s opinion, avoids a deeper national reckoning with what he elsewhere describes as the long history of American “plunder.” The disagreement between Coates and Obama therefore reflects a fundamental difference in how the two men interpret the relationship between historical injustice and contemporary policy.

Obama’s caution also shaped his broader approach to racial justice policy. Coates argues that the administration did relatively little to transform the institutional systems that sustain racial inequality, including disparities in wealth, housing, and the criminal justice system. Although the election of a black president represented a profound symbolic milestone, Coates maintains that symbolism alone cannot alter entrenched systems of racial hierarchy. According to Coates, the material conditions facing many Black Americans changed little during the Obama years, reinforcing his broader claim that structural inequality cannot be undone through representation alone.

Coates does acknowledge that Obama’s restrained use of presidential power reflected the political constraints facing the first black president. Obama often avoided direct confrontation with white racism or systemic racial power structures, a strategy Coates interprets as both understandable and limiting. He describes Obama’s electoral strategy as “perhaps the greatest race-avoidance campaign in American history,” a political necessity that required careful management of racial perceptions within a majority-white electorate.[xxxiii] The very conditions that made Obama’s presidency possible, in other words, also restricted how openly he could address the racial foundations of American society or pursue policies designed to dismantle them.

Taken all together, Coates’s critique does not primarily concern Obama’s personal leadership or political skill. Rather, it reflects a deeper disagreement about the nature of American racial history and the possibilities of liberal reform. Where Obama emphasized reconciliation, universal policy solutions, and gradual progress, Coates stresses the enduring power of historical structures rooted in racial domination. In this interpretation, the Obama presidency becomes a revealing moment in American history: a profound symbolic breakthrough that nonetheless leaves the deeper architecture of racial inequality largely intact.

The lesson for black America

In the mid-1960s blacks became convinced that civic equality and equality of opportunity alone would not be enough to radically improve their socioeconomic condition. To rise to parity with whites they turned to government and gave their near-unanimous support to the Democratic Party. This newfound faith in government was the product of blacks having secured the grudging aid of the federal government in civil rights victories from 1954 to 1965 and of Lyndon Johnson’s pledge to use the powers of government to correct centuries of racial oppression.

This black faith in government has been misplaced. The political history of the past sixty years makes it abundantly clear that neither of the political parties, nor the majority of Americans, is willing to redistribute income or use government to secure equality of condition for blacks as a race, yet blacks persist in holding out hope for such aid. In a 2022 poll conducted by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studes, 81 percent of black Americans “believe it is the federal government’s responsibility to reduce the impact of racism and discrimination on Black Americans, and 51 percent currently disapprove of the job the federal government is doing on this matter.” [xxxiv]

In the decades following the legislative breakthroughs of the Civil Rights Movement, however, Congress did pass laws that improved the lives of African Americans. Much of this legislation was formally race-neutral, but in practice addressed structural inequalities that had long disadvantaged African Americans in employment, education, housing, and the criminal justice system. (This was the same policy and legislative approach Barrack Obama took during his presidency.) Together these laws expanded the practical reach of civil rights protections and helped translate the political gains of the 1960s into material improvements in black social and economic life.

One of the most important early measures was the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, which strengthened Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by granting the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) greater enforcement authority. By allowing the EEOC to bring lawsuits against employers that violated federal anti-discrimination law, the act made it significantly easier to challenge discriminatory hiring, promotion, and pay practices. For African Americans—who had historically faced exclusion from skilled and professional employment—the strengthened enforcement provisions helped open new avenues for workplace mobility and income growth.

Congress also expanded federal oversight of discrimination in education. Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972, although primarily designed to prohibit sex discrimination in federally funded educational institutions, indirectly benefited African Americans by improving opportunities for black women and girls within educational systems that had historically marginalized them. By requiring schools and universities receiving federal funds to eliminate discriminatory practices, Title IX contributed to broader efforts to make higher education and athletics more accessible to black women in particular.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Congress further reinforced the legal architecture of civil rights protections. The Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 broadened the reach of earlier civil rights laws by requiring that institutions receiving federal funds comply with non-discrimination requirements across all their operations rather than only within specific federally funded programs. This change prevented universities, local governments, and other institutions from limiting civil rights compliance to narrow administrative areas and thereby strengthened enforcement of protections that benefited black Americans.

Housing policy also evolved in ways that addressed persistent racial inequality. The Fair Housing Amendment Act of 1988 strengthened the original Fair Housing Act by expanding enforcement mechanisms and increasing penalties for discriminatory housing practices. Although the amendments formally added protections for families with children and people with disabilities, the strengthened enforcement tools were particularly significant for African Americans, who continued to face discriminatory lending and housing practices rooted in the earlier history of redlining and residential segregation.

The Civil Rights Act of 1991 further strengthened employment discrimination law. In response to Supreme Court decisions that had weakened earlier civil rights protections, the act restored the doctrine of “disparate impact” and allowed plaintiffs to seek compensatory and punitive damages in cases of intentional discrimination. These provisions made it easier for black workers to challenge systemic practices that disproportionately disadvantaged them in hiring, promotion, and workplace advancement.

Other policies indirectly advanced black economic opportunity by addressing structural inequalities in credit markets. The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 required lenders to report mortgage lending data by geographic area, making it possible to identify discriminatory lending patterns such as redlining. The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 required banks to meet the credit needs of all communities, including low-income urban neighborhoods that had historically been denied access to capital. Together these policies improved transparency and created pressure on financial institutions to expand lending in communities where African Americans were disproportionately concentrated.

Taken together, these measures illustrate an important feature of post-1960s civil rights policy. Rather than focusing exclusively on explicitly race-based statutes, Congress increasingly relied on broadly framed anti-discrimination laws and regulatory frameworks that addressed structural inequality across multiple domains. Because black Americans had long been disproportionately affected by discrimination in employment, education, housing, and finance, these ostensibly race-neutral policies often produced substantial benefits for black communities while reinforcing the broader legal regime established during the civil rights era.

If there is one lesson that blacks should learn, it is that they will never achieve equality by pursuing a race-based political agenda and insisting that black disadvantage is mostly a product of ongoing racial discrimination—white supremacy and systemic racism, if you will. Failure to learn this lesson will result in decades of frustration and arrested development. While continuing to fight for the vigorous enforcement of anti-discrimination laws, blacks should deemphasize redistributionist and reparationist politics and instead pursue race-neutral policies that address structural disadvantage, eliminate self-defeating cultural practices, seize available educational and economic opportunities, and turn to their own resources for individual and community empowerment. In so doing, they can achieve the socioeconomic equality they seek and rescue themselves from being “pawns in a white man’s political game.”

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Glenn McNair is a professor of history and director of African Diaspora Studies at Kenyon College. He is also the author of Criminal Injustice: Slaves and Free Blacks in Georgia’s Criminal Justice System and is also the Dr. William T. Moore Distinguished Editor of the Georgia Historical Quarterly. Prior to entering academia, he served as a police officer in Savannah, Georgia, and a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives. He wrote “The Black Panthers Were Not Revolutionaries” for the Journal of Free Black Thought. The first part of the current essay may be found here.

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[i] Ronald W. Walters, White Nationalism Black Interests: Conservative Public Policy and the Black Community (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 96–97. The Humphrey-Hawkins Bill became law but failed to bring about full-employment, largely because of its weak enforcement provisions and a lack of presidential and national interest in unemployment as an issue, and because it was perceived as a law designed to aid Blacks. For a thorough discussion of the Humphrey-Hawkins Bill, see, Hamilton and Hamilton, Dual Agenda, 198–207, and Robert C. Smith, We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post-Civil Rights Era (State University of New York Press, 1996), 205–9.

[ii] Carter, From Wallace to Gingrich, 56.

[iii] Hanes, Walton Jr., “The Political Context Variable: The Transformation of Politics of the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton Presidencies,” in African American Power and Politics: The Political Context Variable, ed. Hanes Walton, Jr. (Columbia University Press, 1997), 24–25.

[iv] Carter, From Wallace to Gingrich, 59; Walters, White Nationalism, 119, 126. For the key cases in employment discrimination and affirmative action, see, Watson v. Forth Worth Bank & Trust, 487 U.S. 977 (1988), and Richmond v. Croson. 488 U.S. 469 (1989). The most recent supreme court case on affirmative action in education is Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003). The leading case on majority minority congressional districts is Shaw v. Reno, 509 U.S. 630 (1993).

[v] Walton, “Transformation of Politics,” 23.

[vi] Walters, White Nationalism,102–3; Philip A. Klinkner, “Bill Clinton and the Politics of the New Liberalism,” in Without Justice for All: The New Liberalism and Our Retreat From Racial Equality, ed. Adolph Reed Jr. (Westview Press, 1999), 12–13.

[vii] Walton, “Transformation of Politics,” 28; Hanes Walton Jr., “African Americans and the Clinton Presidency,” in African American Power and Politics: The Political Context Variable, ed. Hanes Walton Jr. (Columbia University Press, 1997), 317–19.

[viii] Walters, White Nationalism, 105; Walton, “Transformation of Politics,” 28.

[ix] Carter, From Wallace to Gingrich, 99–100; Walters, White Nationalism, 104.

[x] Walters, White Nationalism, 105; Walton, “Clinton Presidency,” 320.

[xi] Walton, “Clinton Presidency,” 320–21; Hanes Walton, Jr., African American Power and Politics: The Political Context Variable (Columbia University Press, 1997), 312.

[xii] Klinkner, “Bill Clinton,” 21.

[xiii] Walters, White Nationalism, 109.

[xiv] Walters, White Nationalism, 114–-15; Klinkner, “Bill Clinton,” 26–27.

[xv] DeWayne Wickham, Bill Clinton and Black America (Ballantine Books, 2002), 1.

[xvi] Wickham, Bill Clinton, 125.

[xvii] U.S. Congress, No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, Pub. L. No. 107–110, 115 Stat. 1425 (2002).

[xviii] Linda Darling-Hammond, The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future (Teachers College Press, 2010), 69–98.

[xix] Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, rev. ed. (New Press, 2006), 155–78.

[xx] US Congress, Second Chance Act of 2007, Pub. L. No. 110–199, 122 Stat. 657 (2008).

[xxi] Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, “Income Inequality in the United States, 1913–1998,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 118, no. 1 (2003): 1–39; Dalton Conley, Being Black, Living in the Red (University of California Press, 1999).

[xxii] Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit (University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 137–70; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Unequal Burden (Washington, DC: HUD, 2009).

[xxiii] Barack Obama, “Remarks to the NAACP Centennial Convention,” July 16, 2009, The White House.

[xxiv] Obama, “Remarks to the NAACP Centennial Convention.”

[xxv] US Congress, American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, Pub. L. No. 111–5; U.S. Census Bureau, Income and Poverty in the United States: 2015 (US Census Bureau, 2016).

[xxvi] Executive Office of the President, Progress of the African-American Community During the Obama Administration (Executive Office of the President, 2016).

[xxvii] US Congress, Affordable Care Act, Pub. L. No. 111–148; National Center for Health Statistics, Health, United States, 2015.

[xxviii] U.S. Congress, Fair Sentencing Act of 2010, Pub. L. No. 111–220.

[xxix] US Department of Education, Funding to Historically Black Colleges and Universities, 2007–2014 (US Department of Education, 2015).

[xxx] My Brother’s Keeper Task Force, Two-Year Progress Report (The White House, 2016); US Congress, Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, Pub. L. No. 111–2.

[xxxi] Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The First White President,” The Atlantic, October 2017

[xxxii] Ta-Nehisi Coates, “My President Was Black,” The Atlantic, January/February 2017.

[xxxiii] Ta-Nehisi Coates, “Fear of a Black President,” The Atlantic, September 2012

[xxxiv] “New Poll from Joint Center Reveals Black Americans Are Deeply Concerned Regarding Direction of the Country, Economy,” Joint Center for Political and Economic Studes, February 22, 2022, https://jointcenter.org/new-poll-from-joint-center-reveals-black-americans-are-deeply-concerned-regarding-direction-of-the-country-economy/?utm_source=chatgpt.com.