Michael Mitchell - Broadening the Contours in the Study of Black Politics: Citizenship and Popular Culture

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Broadening the Contours in the Study of Black Politics

THE NATIONAL POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEW

EDITORS

Michael Mitchell

Arizona State University

David Covin

California State University-Sacramento

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR/ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

University of California, Irvine

EDITORIAL BOARD

Georgia Persons
Georgia Institute of Technology

Duchess Harris
Macalester University

Lorenzo Morris
Howard University

K.C. Morrison
Mississippi State University

Robert Smith
San Francisco State University

Cheryl M. Miller
University of Maryland-Baltimore County

Todd Shaw
University of South Carolina

Melissa Nobles
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Lisa Aubrey
Arizona State University

Broadening the Contours in the Study of Black Politics

Citizenship and Popular Culture

National Political Science Review, Volume 17:2

Michael Mitchell David Covin , editors

First published 2016 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright 2016 by Taylor & Francis.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Notice:
Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2015024653

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mitchell, Michael, 1944- | Covin, David, 1940-

Title: Broadening the contours in the study of Black politics. Citizenship and popular

culture / Michael Mitchell and David Covin, editors.

Other titles: Citizenship and popular culture

Description: New Brunswick, New Jersey : Transaction Publishers, 2015. | Volume 17:2

of National political science review. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015024653 | ISBN 9781412862417 (acid-free paper)

Subjects: LCSH: African Americans--Politics and government. | African Americans--

Civil rights. | Citizenship--United States. | African Americans in popular culture. | Popular

culture--United States. | United States--Race relations--Political aspects. | United States--

Politics and government--1989- | Books--Reviews.

Classification: LCC E185.615.B724 2015 | DDC 323.1196/073--dc23 LC record

available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015024653

ISBN 13: 978-1-4128-6241-7 (pbk)

Contents

Daniel Robert McClure

Camisha Russell

Nadia E. Brown and Lisa Young

Major G. Coleman

Nikol G. Alexander-Floyd

David Blanding

B. DAndra Orey, Gloria J. Billingsley, and Athena M. King

Forum on Urban Black Women and the Politics of Resistance, by Zenzele Isoke

Tiffany Willoughby-Herard

Duchess Harris

Andreana Clay

Grace Kyungwon Hong

Keisha-Khan Y. Perry

Cheryl Flores

Khaalidah Sidney

Zenzele Isoke Responds

Research Articles

Who Will Survive in America?: Gil Scott-Heron, the Black Radical Tradition, and the Critique of Neoliberalism

Daniel Robert McClure
California State University, Fullerton

Which brings me back to my convictions

and being convicted for my beliefs

cause I believe these smiles

in three piece suits

with gracious, liberal demeanor

took our movement off the streets

and took us to the cleaners.

In other words, we let up the pressure

and that was all part of their plan

and every day we allow to slip through our fingers

is playing right into their hands.

Gil Scott-Heron, The New Deal (1978)

Introduction

Over a year before his untimely death in May 2011, sixty-year-old musician/poet Gil Scott-Heron released his anticipated comeback album, Im New Here: Gil Scott-Heron, after a decade of struggle with substance abuse and repeated incarceration. In Scott Herons video, the Faustian bargain unfolds as a set of images depicting a vibrant Manhattan night, with folks hurriedly walking past prosperous businesses. The pedestrians sense of purpose and apparent status contrasts sharply with shots of poverty and homelessness, making the latter appear as misplaced specters from a bygone era. Another set of ghostly characters traverse the streets as well, navigating their way through twenty-first century wealth: young skateboarders, painted up as skeletonsor figures of deathskating energetically through the concrete and steel paradox of wealth and homeless squalor. The juxtaposition of the footage and lyrics in the video for Me and the Devil Blues/Your Soul and Mine (aka The Vulture) characterizes the systemic outcome of the economic shift to neoliberalism that unfolded in tandem with Scott-Herons recording career.

The use of New York City in 2010 as the background for the video is fitting. The metropolis represents not just Scott-Herons origin as a performing artist but also a structural space where the rise of neoliberalism took root in the US in the late 1970s. Like other urban centers in the 1960s, New York City increasingly faced budget issues that arose from the effects of deindustrialization and White flight.

Alongside Nixons federal aid cuts to cities, the 19731974 recession aggravated an increasingly desperate situation; the urban crisis of the 1960s became the urban fiscal crisis of the 1970s.

The crisis of New York City provided an entry point for the adoption of what Business Week had offered in 1974 as a way out of the debt crisis. Cities and states, the home mortgage market, small business, and the consumer, will all get less than they want because the basic health of the US is based on the basic health of its corporations and banks: the biggest borrowers and the biggest lenders. This new system of neoliberalism (the dominant set of economic ideas since the decline of the Jim Crow Keynesian welfare state) took root amidst the culture wars that erupted in the wake of civil rights gains in the 1960s and the drawn-out economic crisis that came to largely define the 1970s.

Modus Operandi

This article examines the rise of neoliberalism through the recorded work of Gil Scott-Heron, particularly his spoken word pieces. Scott-Heron is an important literary figure from the Black radical tradition, as his records provide an important extension of the legacies of Black Power and the Black Arts Movement into the postcivil rights era. While the civil rights era dismantled the legislative frameworks characterizing the racial-economic evolution of US historythe Terrible Transformation, slavery, Black codes, Jim Crow, and New Deal institutional racismthe cultural impulse of anti-Blackness persisted, with the plantation remaining as a guiding specter.

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