Black Elephants in the Room considers how race structures the political behavior of African American Republicans and discusses the dynamic relationship between race and political behavior in the purported “post-racial” context of US politics. Drawing on vivid first-person accounts, the book sheds light on the different ways black identity structures African Americans' membership in the Republican Party. Moving past rhetoric and politics, we begin to see the everyday people working to reconcile their commitment to black identity with their belief in Republican principles. And at the end, we learn the importance of understanding both the meanings African Americans attach to racial identity and the political contexts in which those meanings are developed and expressed.
Black Elephants in the Room considers how race structures the political behavior of African American Republicans and discusses the dynamic relationship between race and political behavior in the purported “post-racial” context of US politics. Drawing on vivid first-person accounts, the book sheds light on the different ways black identity structures African Americans' membership in the Republican Party. Moving past rhetoric and politics, we begin to see the everyday people working to reconcile their commitment to black identity with their belief in Republican principles. And at the end, we learn the importance of understanding both the meanings African Americans attach to racial identity and the political contexts in which those meanings are developed and expressed.
Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans
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Black Elephants in the Room: The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans
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Overview
Black Elephants in the Room considers how race structures the political behavior of African American Republicans and discusses the dynamic relationship between race and political behavior in the purported “post-racial” context of US politics. Drawing on vivid first-person accounts, the book sheds light on the different ways black identity structures African Americans' membership in the Republican Party. Moving past rhetoric and politics, we begin to see the everyday people working to reconcile their commitment to black identity with their belief in Republican principles. And at the end, we learn the importance of understanding both the meanings African Americans attach to racial identity and the political contexts in which those meanings are developed and expressed.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520965508 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 10/18/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Black Elephants in the Room
The Unexpected Politics of African American Republicans
By Corey D. Fields
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96550-8
CHAPTER 1
From Many to Few
In one of my first conversations during this research, Walter expressed excitement that someone was seriously studying African American Republicans. Walter and I initially connected because of his involvement with a local libertarian group, but he had a long history of involvement with both African American community groups and Republican political organizations. After our first meeting, he insisted on taking me out to a fancy lunch at the restaurant in a private club. As we chatted over impressive club sandwiches and enjoyed an even more impressive view, he told me that he loved the idea that someone was taking him and other black Republicans seriously. Still, participation in my research was bittersweet. He hoped the project would counter negative portrayals of African American Republicans, but the idea that they were worth studying because of their race and politics struck him as a problem. He couldn't help but feel that my project was, on some level, confirmation of his outsider status in the public imagination. He asked flatly, "Why is it that nobody talks about black Democrats?"
Walter's question is a penetrating one. It calls attention to the way we automatically associate Democratic partisanship with African Americans and regard any aberrations with raised eyebrows. In his own way, Walter hints at a central issue of this research: What has to happen to make a combination of identity and politics noteworthy? Of course we talk about black Democrats. But where there are debates about what role blacks should play in Democratic leadership, no one spends much time remarking on the strangeness of a black person supporting the Democratic Party. Black voters are a prominent and reliable part of the Democratic coalition. So, in Walter's parlance, no one talks about black Democrats because the Democratic Party is seen as the natural place to fulfill the political interests associated with black racial identity. I suspect that Walter recognized this, and his question was posed to push me to examine the expectations that surround black racial identity and political behavior. We talk about black Republicans because they are not what we expect. They don't fit in with our ideas about how racial identity and partisanship should go together. But this has not always been the case.
The surprise that meets contemporary African American Republicans would surely confuse an observer of nineteenth-century politics, because the current lack of support for the Republican Party among black voters marks a striking realignment. At the party's origins, African Americans were a central component of the GOP's electoral coalition. Yet today it feels like a noteworthy achievement when a Republican can manage to secure double-digit support from black voters in a presidential election. A number of forces — within the black community and within the Republican Party — aligned to fundamentally reorient black partisanship in the United States. Certainly, some of the shift in black partisanship flows from changes in what black voters want in a political party. However, the political parties have altered the landscape within which black voters make their decisions. In other words, changes in black partisanship have been heavily influenced by changes in the consideration set — the choices available to those black voters. This chapter traces the history between black voters and the Republican Party and outlines the shifts in the composition of the GOP and its policy positions that have made it an unlikely home for African American interests.
Over time, the political parties have fundamentally altered their relations to race-related issues and black voters. Where the Republican Party was once perceived as the "natural" home for black interests, the Democratic Party is now perceived as the political party most likely to help African Americans. As a consequence, the actions of GOP leaders have large implications for the way that we view African American Republicans. There are, perhaps, even larger implications for how African American Republicans themselves connect their blackness to their partisanship. The shift in status of the African American Republican — the move from standard to unexpected political actor — highlights how perceptions are a function of the wider political context.
The African American Republican activists I spoke with were quick to remind me that the current state of relations between blacks and the Republican Party represents a stark departure from the GOP's historical origins. For those outside of the party who question their politics, they present Republican history as proof that Republican politics can be compatible with black identity. For those within the party, history is used by today's black Republicans to make claims on material and symbolic resources by recalling a time when blacks were a key constituency and the party was committed to having blacks as full-fledged participants in charting the direction of the GOP. Empirically, knowledge of the realignment of black voters away from the Republican Party is important because today's African American Republicans draw on this history when making claims to legitimacy, both within and outside the party.
The evolution of black voters' relationship to the Republican Party also sheds light on broader questions about the expressions of black political behavior more generally. African Americans' partisan choices, though often organized around "black interests" (however they are defined), can only be understood within the framework of broader changes in each political party's ideologies and electoral coalitions. A broad sweep of African American partisanship must, admittedly, only provide general trends. Yet, to understand the image, attitudes, and experiences of contemporary African American Republicans, it is important to situate them within the broader historical patterns.
Today African Americans' estrangement from the Republican Party feels long-standing and, often, intractable. Upon closer reflection, it becomes clear that the estrangement that makes contemporary African American Republicans so unique is largely a function of an electoral calculus that has shifted the party away from them. We soon see the utility of political scientist Hanes Walton's insistence that "black political behavior is best understood as the result of individual, community, systemic, and structural factors, which over the years have all acted together in a complex, changing fashion."
REPUBLICAN ROOTS
Any discussion of black partisanship has to begin with slavery. As a group, African Americans held very little electoral power; the overwhelming majority were enslaved and denied the vote. However, there were pockets of black enfranchisement. Most of these were located in the North, but there were other spaces in the country where enforcement of black disenfranchisement was lax and blacks participated in local elections. For free blacks in the North, political engagement focused on efforts to achieve legal equality, a theme present throughout the course of black political engagement in the United States. Consequently, free blacks evaluated their partisan choices through the lens of abolition. On this account, initial relations with the Republican Party were tentative.
Abolition was central to the origins of the Republican Party, founded in 1854. Many of the original Republicans were antislavery advocates and members of explicit abolitionist parties, and the leadership of the new party was eager to expand its potential coalition of voters. Given its abolitionist roots, Republican leaders thought that free blacks were likely to be an easy and immediate source of support additional support. Initial Republican appeals to the black electorate were grounded in opposition to slavery and played on frustration with the limited existing political options. Central to this strategy was positioning the new party as the best of the available options for blacks. Yet black opinion leaders and politicians were slow to return the Republican embrace.
The Republican Party presented a platform that called for preventing the expansion of slavery in new U.S. territories, while leaving the institution intact where it already existed. Frederick Douglass, arguably the most prominent black political figure of the time, found this hedged stance on slavery unacceptable. Writing in his widely read newspaper, Frederick Douglass' Paper, he argued that "the Black community couldn't accept the abolitionists' invitation to join the Republican Party because, due to its position on slavery, it does not go far enough in the right direction." Instead, the new party must, if it were to claim black men's allegiance, "take a higher position, make no concessions to the slave power, strike at slavery everywhere in the country." Douglass was joined by other black political leaders in his skepticism about the party's partial commitment to abolition, but the Republican position on the slavery issue was much closer to that of free blacks than the Democratic alternative. Blacks offered tentative support for the Republican Party in the 1856 presidential election and more substantial support of Lincoln in 1860. Walton describes the pre-Civil War political environment and the constraints facing black voters:
Although there was some Black criticism and denunciation of the Republican party, Blacks formed Republican clubs and strongly supported the party in 1860. Black Republicanism before the Civil War was largely the result of a lack of effective alternatives in the existing political system The emergence of Black Republicanism was firmly rooted, in the final analysis, in the desire of Blacks to destroy the slavery institution, and a large factor was the lack of verbal commitment or actions toward this goal among other political parties.
From the start of the Civil War through Reconstruction, black support for the Republican Party shifted in numbers and intensity. The war, and the enfranchisement that followed, created a sizable new voting constituency. Black support for the Republican Party solidified after Lincoln's assassination — it was seen, by blacks, as a tribute to Lincoln. More consequentially, Republicans were the only party to make any concession to black interests or to open their party leadership to black politicians. The Republican Party endorsed a range of symbolic and substantive positions designed to satisfy black voters, and four black delegates were included in the 1868 Republican National Convention (a first for any party's convention). The Republican Party went on to vigorously support legislative acts and three constitutional amendments (the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth) that were interpreted as substantive instances of the Republican Party attending to black interests.
So the foundation of black support for the Republican Party lay in the humanitarian policies it supported through 1870. Support for pro-black policies was driven by political expediency and ideological commitment. While these policies certainly empowered the oppressed, they also worked to secure a solid voting bloc and to undermine Democratic opponents. Democratic intransigence, too, strengthened black support for Republicans. When contemporary African American Republicans talk about the GOP's positive history with black voters, this is the period they most often reference. Democrats are cast as the party of racism, firmly rooted in the Ku Klux Klan and other domestic terrorist groups intent on disenfranchising black voters after the Civil War. By contrast, the "Party of Lincoln" narrative presents Republicans as the party rooted in black civil rights. This account, to be sure, ignores the half-hearted nature of even early Republican support for abolition and the fact that any mutually beneficial relationship between blacks and the party during the Civil War and Reconstruction was short-lived.
Much of Republicans' ability to engage in pro-black legislating was contingent on their national dominance and the relative weakness of the postwar Democratic Party. After a failed secession, white southerners were politically weak, and the absence of political competition freed Republicans to address concerns of black voters. Once the political environment became competitive again, the relationship between black voters and the Republican Party became strained. By then, blacks represented just one component of an unstable electoral coalition.
By 1870 the southern Republican coalition consisted of three groups: Scalawags, Carpetbaggers, and Black and Tans, a group consisting of black Republicans and their allies. It was a fragile coalition, with key elements committed to anti-black positions. Ultimately, the coalition fractured as key elements of the party played to anti-black sentiment in an effort to remain competitive in southern states. However, with voting restrictions on southern white men lifted, Democrats — drawing on support from white southern politicians — reclaimed control over political and governing institutions at the state level. Black and Tan Republicans faced a particularly difficult political context after Reconstruction. Blacks were systematically terrorized and removed from the voter rolls. This left the Black and Tans without a voting constituency and, as the Democratic Party regained strength in the South, the Republican Party was marginalized on the local and state levels.
Though the post-Reconstruction political environment was not amenable to issues of racial justice, different factions within the party hurled charges of racism and made claims to black support. These had little bearing on elections. The reinfranchisement of southern white men coupled with the disenfranchisement of black men meant that Republicans were practically powerless in local and state politics. The various factions of the party vied for control over Republican state conventions, lobbying to be the southern representatives for the national presidential nominating convention. Because southern Republicans were most able to exert their influence in presidential nominating politics, the party's factions needed to marshal support. In this context, all the factions of the Republican Party wanted at least the appearance of black support.
V. O. Key argues that, at this point, southern Republicans focused their efforts on exerting influence at the national level. Recognizing they had no realistic hope of securing state offices, national party players took advantage of the situation and played the splintered southern Republican Party's factions against each other. With black voters disenfranchised, they gained little, if anything, from the bargaining, vote buying, and alliance building prompted by the nominating conventions. Some black politicians were able to leverage personal political and material gains, given that all the southern factions desired the symbolic representation of all possible political constituencies. However, by the election of Herbert Hoover in 1928, even the minor spoils of patronage were unavailable to Black and Tan Republicans and, by extension, to the black Republican leaders who made up a sizable portion of that faction's constituency: "Lily-whiteism not only depleted what few followers the Republicans had in the Black community; it also made it difficult for younger Blacks to join. The result is that in nearly every southern state today, there are very few Blacks in the Republican party."
Despite its start as a relatively pro-black party in the South, disenfranchisement after Reconstruction all but eliminated the black voter from participation in Republican politics. The machinations of Republican presidential politics further marginalized black political leaders. As Walton notes of the Republican Party's origins, "In the beginning it had Black support in the South, then deliberately subordinated those supporters and finally eliminated them." Where blacks could vote, they still supported the Republican Party in national elections. Republicans could be cynical and manipulative on racial issues, and, often, black voters saw very little material benefit flowing from their support of Republican candidates. Indeed, outside of some small spoils of political patronage and the occasional position as a party functionary, blacks — particularly southern blacks — saw very few benefits from their post-Reconstruction support. Yet, given the available options, the Republican Party was more amenable to black interests than the Democratic Party for most of the time between the Civil War and the early 1900s. With the New Deal, black leaders and voters saw potential allies in the Democrats, and their allegiance to the Party of Lincoln began to erode.
A STEADY SHIFT
By the early 1900s, black participation in the party had been marginalized as Republicans were focused on trying to secure white votes in the South. Their efforts bore little fruit: the Democratic Party had a stranglehold on southern politics, and Republican outreach to whites resulted in few positive results. Instead, the party sacrificed its black voting base and any southern sway, while retaining national-level power. Deep loyalty to the legacy of Lincoln and a lack of partisan alternatives led black voters and political leaders to align themselves with the GOP well into the twentieth century. By the 1920s, both of these factors would lose force in black political behavior.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Black Elephants in the Room by Corey D. Fields. Copyright © 2016 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
1. From Many to Few
2. Beyond Uncle Tom
3. Race Doesn’t Matter
4. Black Power through Conservative Principles
5. Like Crabs in a Barrel
6. Whither the Republican Party
Conclusion
Methodological Appendix
Notes
References
Index