The Breakthrough began its public life as a putative scandal during the 2008 presidential campaign. John McCain’s cadaverous team tried to suggest that PBS journalist Gwen Ifill could not be neutral in the debate between Republican Sarah Palin and Democrat Joe Biden, pretty much on the strength of this forthcoming book. Extracts from it (including a frothy story in the September 2008 issue of Essence) and hype from the publishers convinced the McCain team and the right-wing blogging machine that Ifill would favor Joe Biden.
What everyone seemed to worry about, it seemed to me, was that both long-winded, windy Biden and intense, insipid Palin would pale in comparison to the witty Ifill. I was excited to read the book.
Ifill is plainly thrilled with the ascent of President Barack Obama. But Obama, for her, is not an isolated example. He exemplifies something broader: a generation of mainly Black men who have risen to positions of state power. These are also men who are not restricted to districts with a majority Black population, congressional districts and cities that have been the safe boroughs of the Congressional Black Caucus and the National Conference of Black Mayors.
Review of The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama by Gwen Ifill (New York: Doubleday, 2009).
Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Newark Mayor Cory Booker and Alabama Congressman Artur Davis are the main figures whom, along with Obama, have broken through—have made it to the higher echelons of political power. It is their remarkable journey not as individuals, but as members of a generation, that Ifill hopes to chronicle in The Breakthrough.
And she also hopes to prove that the success of these three men means whites are now comfortable electing Blacks to political office.
This might ring true in the case of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick whose 2006 electoral victory was monumental: with Blacks making up only 7 percent of the population, Massachusetts can’t be seen as a “Black seat.” Patrick won the election with 56 percent of the vote, benefitting from an inept Republican challenger, a largely Democratic population fed up with a string of hapless Republican governors (Jane Swift, Mitt Romney) and a Democratic party that for once stood behind its candidate.
But Ifill’s other two choices are not unusual in the history of Black politics. Cory Booker is the mayor of a majority Black city and Artur Davis is the Congressman from a predominantly Black district (the 7th in Alabama). None of this is to lessen the enormity of each of their triumphs, but it does make it hard to establish (apart, that is, from Obama and perhaps Deval Patrick) that whites have changed on the matter of Black political candidates.
Only Deval Patrick won more than half the white vote in any election contest (but he contested in one of the most liberal states in the United States). Obama won only 43 percent of the total white vote (no Democrat has won more than 50 percent of the white vote since 1964). Obama wins, but not so much because of a plurality of whites as much as massive majorities in the ballot box from people of color (Blacks by 96 percent, Latinos by 67 percent and Asians by 63 percent).
What this says is that people of color have become a sizable bloc in certain crucial states. Ifill ignores this, preferring to suggest that the ascent of Obama and Patrick occurs mainly because whites are now comfortable voting for Black candidates. This is partly true, but it is not the whole story.
Ifill is diverted by the idea of the breakthrough, but fortunately she is also interested in another, altogether more interesting problem: which is the debate over whether these are post-racial times, and whether these are post-racial candidates.
It is quickly apparent to her that the term “post-racial” is misleading.
What is more useful, she finds, is the concept of “post-Civil Rights” (she gets this from scholar Eddie Glaude Jr.). The term “post-Civil Rights” is now in vogue but its meaning is as yet unstable. Ifill sometimes uses it to indicate that with the victory of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964-64, the Jim Crow problems have been largely superseded, so the Civil Rights movement, strictly speaking, is now over.
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