Everything about this thread has pissed me off, from the way Doug framed the question yesterday, which among other things called upon my and Jonathan's previous polemics about race as a way to "liven things up", which, aside from anything else, this list has never needed. Some propositions:
(1) The only people who ask the question "what about the black church?" are, implicitly, by asking, claiming that the obvious answers are not true. So let me list the obvious answers, which I happen to think are true, and then explore the reasons why someone might pretend they're not. As a middle class led personalist community organization of black, the church is likely to split the interests of black people down the middle, tending towards those issues that are genuinely communal (civil rights) and not towards those which split the community (labor, gender). Second, because blacks in the US are unusually likely to be working class, the black church will tend to have larger labor tendencies than other similar organizations in the US. Third, because consciousness of discriminations really do overlap, black church members will be statistically more likely than white church members to produce not only anti-racisms, but also anti-sexisms and (though not in large numbers) anti-homophobias. None of this should, however, imply that that the black church is overwhelmingly socialist, anti-sexist, or anti-homophobic; and to the extent it is, it will tend toward the tepid versions of these positions.
(2) The reasons these rather obvious ideas are challenged are: (a) because a given individual (generally black middle class, though it includes a cross-section of the white left) needs to imagine that black people are by definition good, as opposed to white people, and therefore the black church must be more revolutionary than meets the eye; (b) because a given individual (generally white marxist, though Adolph Reed's idiocy goes here too) needs to imagine that the church is a specifically reactionary force by virtue of the essence of being a church, rather than an agglomeration of tendencies that cross the cross the middle of black culture.
(3) Past movements of black people have been facilitated - not originated, and not squashed - by the black church.
(4) No revolution in the US can happen without a large segment of the black church, or for that matter a large segment of the white church. This is not because the leadership of those churches will suddenly become "like" us, or because we (whoever we are) should compromise our positions for them, but because if there is to be a revolution it will because the left will have somehow, in the process of hegemonic formation, brought them with us on the issues we understand to be uncompromisable. We have no choice but to want both sides of that - we must want to work with them, we must want to insist on our positions as better than theirs.
(5) Charisma and Jesse Jackson: this is where in my interest in (bourgeois?) psychoanalysis I most part company with my old friend and sparring partner Rakesh. My interest here, R., is not whether your use of the concept of charisma is appropriate for thinking the Jesse Jackson phenomenon; its why you think charisma is going to just fade away in a movement. Charisma is a fact of psychology in capitalism, triply bad in its mass-mediated version, of which Weber had not seen the worst. There is no mass movement, and no pedagogy, without it. I am not saying that this is "human nature" - I'm as interested as anyone in the possibility of a socialist culture without charisma. But in the present, as any good teacher knows, the goal is Nietszchean (and this is the one thing Nietzsche got right in his whole life): you must be the charismatic teacher, the one who succeeds via the provocation of desire; and then you must undo it, help people to see that the directionality of their desire can only be reached not by listening to you, but by developing their own (relative) autonomy - ie becoming charismatic themselves.
In the case of Jackson, this means that the question is not yes/no, whether you work for a campaign like his, its how you work for a campaign like his. You go into it knowing that whatever gains can be made are ultimately in mass education, not in getting Jackson himself into the spotlight. You do it because you don't have a mass media outlet of your own, you ride his coattails into the media. And what you try to teach - there is nothing simple about this, I'm certainly not claiming that the left succeeded in doing this in 1988 or anything, but we can learn I hope - is that Jackson is worth listening to because he says some true things, he reaches out to a lot of people, voting for him is a reasonable thing to do in its tiny little local meaning, but the ultimate solution for changing the world has nothing to do with voting for Jackson, it has to do with everyone of us becoming Jackson, and becoming better than Jackson. That's a radical political practice.
Kenny
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