The City on the Hill From Below: The Crisis of Prophetic Black Politics

Conclusion: Prophetic Political Critique in the Age of the Joshua Generation

Conclusion Prophetic Political Critique in the Age of the Joshua Generation T he tradition of prophetic political critique has come on hard times. The once organic relation between black communities and prophetic political intellectuals has been strained, if not severed. The illuminative powers of the tradition have been vigorously contested by insightful internal critics, who have laid bare aspects of the tradition’s blindness and excess. Located within a culture dominated by a political imaginary inspired by John Winthrop that continues to appeal to American exceptionalism, the prophetic critical tradition remains perennially liable to cooptation. As the second decade of the twenty-first century begins, prophetic political critique has been both co-opted and muted by the resurgent respectability of black aspirations to the City on the Hill. The resonant oppositional consciousness that has characterized the political vocabulary of black prophetic critique seems to have given way to a messianic rhetoric of fulfillment circulating around the figure of President Barack Obama. This rhetoric is closer in spirit to President Ronald Reagan’s incantation of Winthropian purposes than the critical interrogation and re-formulation of these purposes advanced by David Walker, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and James Baldwin.1 At the same time, an intense dispute rages inside and outside of black America over the consequences of affluence. Some argue that the spectacular changes across the most important registers of material well-being for many African Americans in the post–civil rights era obviate the fundamental rationale for the tradition, while others insist that there are compelling reasons to believe that the legacies of slavery and white supremacy 170 conclusion persist in the contemporary United States. Arguments for the continuing need for prophetic political critique are drawn from the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans (and Latinos) in both state and private, profit-driven penal institutions; the continuing structural dislocation of disproportionate numbers of African Americans outside or near the bottom of the global capitalist economy; massive and growing racial inequalities in wealth and income; and the unabated concentration of black and brown children in multiple systems of underdevelopment. Given the pervasiveness of these indicators, the transformative possibilities of black prophetic political critique seem to be needed but are nearly exhausted.2 Prophetic political critique appears to have been silenced despite the prolonged afterlife of slavery and Jim Crow that continues to thrive in the vulnerability of black women and men to police brutality, racial profiling, and discrepant sentencing.3 Prophetic voices have seldom been heard to address the acute vulnerability of gays and lesbians of color to violence, violation, marginalization, and exclusion from communities of color as well as from white gay and lesbian communities. In the face of resurgent racial animosity and an ambivalent, complacent, and sometimes uncomprehending polity, prophetic political critique seems incapable of mustering a morally vigorous and intellectually robust opposition. If this once vital tradition inaugurated and sustained what Eddie Glaude has called an “exodus politics,” a politics marked by its oppositional nature, it has been eclipsed by a politics of “the Joshua Generation,” the nonoppositional, post–civil rights era black politics discussed by presidential candidate Barack Obama on the fortieth anniversary of the bloody civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery.4 In the midst of intense debates over the status and well-being of black Americans, the meaning and legacy of the African American prophetic tradition are less clear than ever. For increasing numbers of Americans—black and white, Right and Left, young and old—it is unclear what work, if any, remains to be done within this political tradition. This chapter explores the legacy of the prophetic tradition of political thought and examines the constellation of political relations and historical developments that have contributed to its eclipse. The Political Inheritance of Prophetic Political Critique The tradition of prophetic political critique has had many significant accomplishments , which, far too often, remain unsung. Prophetic political critique generated techniques of personal discipline that sought to coordinate indi- conclusion 171 vidual transformation (personal overcoming) with collective political action (public engagement). Walker inaugurated this programmatic agenda, articulating a vision of black insurgency that linked the need for self-interrogation of “the slave within” to a political-theological obligation that called blacks to recognize and build on nascent prepolitical competences already extant within black America on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. As Walker argued, these competences were rooted in what the ancient civic...