From Ferguson, Missouri to Charlotte, North Carolina, recent years have seen the United States of America roiled by black-led protest. Black Lives Matter spokespeople have spoken of their efforts as a “new civil rights movement” even as critics argued they failed to measure up to the mythical standard set by Martin Luther King Jr.
This tendency to measure black protest by a 1960s yardstick, whether affirmative or negative, is the target of this timely and often brilliant short book. In Black America in the Shadow of the Sixties, the University of Kansas historian Clarence Lang calls for a reconsideration of “the persistence of the sixties in our analytical and political framing,” proposing that we discard that template in favour of “formulations more closely aligned with our needs today in a context of neoliberalism” (xi).
As a black professional imbued with an ethic of social commitment disquieted by his distance from both the so-called underclass and narrowly careerist professional colleagues, Lang meditates in registers personal and political. He expresses the weariness of a historian at the platitudes of Black History Month, frustration at the race-neutral proclivities and neoliberal policies of the first black president, and worry over a celebratory history of the black freedom movement that elides and obscures fundamental differences within its various currents, inhibiting vitally needed debate over strategy and tactics today.
At the heart of Lang's analysis is the proposition that race cannot be disentangled from class, that the loss of manufacturing employment and decline of labor unionism in the United States since the 1970s, combined with the rise of market-celebratory politics and a conservative turn in both major parties, has produced both mass black poverty and a “post-civil rights” black professional class, and has seen black elected officials in urban areas constrained to do much more than manage austerity. Far from a “postracial” world, the same United States that elected Barack Obama (and then Donald J. Trump, although that was still on the horizon when this book was published) is a place of deeply inscribed racial apartheid pervading everything from residence and education to economic inequality, with a neoliberal state producing mass incarceration even as it guts social spending.
Implicitly the solution is a revived left-wing politics forging coalitions of disadvantaged groups to reorient social priorities. Lang offers original insights into why such alliances have been difficult to build, observing, for example, that perhaps Occupy Wall Street was so largely white because African Americans are wary of placing themselves at risk of arrest given their experience with a racial-carceral state. At moments, Lang's imagined audience shrinks unduly to a conversation within academic black studies, as in an anguished essay on his experience as a leader of a black historical association at the time of its decision to hold its conference in Florida despite calls for boycott after the verdict freeing George Zimmerman from responsibility for murdering Trayvon Martin. Nevertheless, Lang shows a moral probity and level of acuity in his social thought that one is tempted to say reflects the best of the 1960s legacy, were it not that such a claim would miss his point.
