Jesse Jackson's America
The civil rights dream and the systems that learned to profit from its language.
If you’ve been paying attention to my thoughts on Black America and the present moment of backlash in which we live, you’ll note that I’ve been graciously critical of institutional hierarchies and intra-racial classism that have arguably fractured unity in the Black community. I’ve written on these issues in previous essays that I’ll link to at the end of this post.
No figure embodies the weight of that burden and the troubling shift in which he was a part like Jesse Jackson. He was the face of the civil rights movement that had its leader assassinated, and its righteous anger co-opted to delegitimize its very goals. He marched with Martin Luther King Jr. and witnessed the civil rights movement transform from an intellectual capital-based movement that began as an outgrowth of the Underground Railroad to a national spectacle that put the crucible of America’s moral degeneration on TV and in newspapers for the world to behold.
But he also witnessed the civil rights movement institutionalize itself in ways that fractured its unity in favor of elite ballast and appropriation. He was not merely a witness to that shift in the civil rights movement. He was its very embodiment, because he was the public face of it at the fault line between what Black people needed in the streets and what America could stomach in public.
Perhaps one of the first instances in which we see this process in action is the shift from movement disruption to leverage negotiation, which is not just a moral indictment but a set of tactics, relationships, and institutions. Jackson’s movement into economic leverage campaigns and organizations represented a new form of leadership that turned outrage into employment and concrete stakes, requiring credibility, fundraising, media, and gatekeeping to be successful. In other words: movement fire in institutional wiring. That wiring can be a source of power or a source of confinement.
The Inheritance Effect
The “inheritance effect” was further complicated in American history when King was assassinated. America did not mourn; it negotiated. We wanted civil rights to be a done deal, something you honored but didn’t have to pay for. In that context, a figure like Jackson represents a symbol of continuity and a manager of legibility simultaneously. In a nation that punishes messiness and likes nothing more than turning internal critique into a demolition derby, being legible is the job, not just a part of it.
A great deal of commentary is made about Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns and how he paved the way for Obama’s successful campaigns. In 1984 and especially in 1988, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition became a manifestation of the changing politics in America in the mid-20th century, as Black politics went from largely working with the Republican Party to largely working with the Democratic Party. Although both parties remained options for a potential alliance, the leadership of the Democratic Party was far more representative of the Americans pushing for a more desegregated, mixed environment, though Democrats also had members who joined all-white country clubs in contemporary years.
These runs were not just symbolic. They were a show of just how far visibility could go and just how far it could not go. On one level, Jackson was opening up new possibilities by forcing a multiracial, democratic future to the forefront of party discourse. But he was also showing just how far such a future could go and how far it could not. 1988 is perhaps the most uncontroversial example. Here was a politician who actually had leverage in the machine. But leverage inside the confines of a machine that refines memory.
So, it is perhaps no surprise that he became a symbol of America grappling with its past and blazing a trail to a multi-racial, democratic future. Perhaps he would sit next to a presidential hopeful, Bill Clinton, in 1992 as he condemned the most extreme rhetoric from a political activist, Sista Soulja. But as a way to show that he was leading a new kind of civilized, gate-kept Black leadership class. That is important because it speaks to a time when America was looking for healing rhetoric and not structural change.
Jackson’s burden was to remain a symbol of the dreams of the Civil Rights movement, even as the material conditions of Black America continued to degrade decade by decade, as racism, once loud and brash, became quiet and spoke in the language of budget, zoning, and hiring. He was the broker-leader, and the timing was precisely the moment when the progress of Black people became more visible at the top, even as the conditions of those below could be managed by the very policies and systems designed to keep them in their place.
And so, Jackson is also a legibility machine, a figure who can translate the emergency into language institutions will hear, and who has as part of his task the ability to endure the White gaze’s love of messiness and its desire to translate its own critique into demolition. But this role has another side, in that it places Jackson in a sedative cycle in which America can point to its prominent Blacks and call itself redeemed, without ever confronting the structural reality and calling the backlash “normal politics.”
And then the 1990s, in which the media explosion and the permanent placement of race as a televised debate topic made Jackson function more and more as a spokesperson, as a figure in an “economy” in which a handful of recognizable faces are asked to stand in for the millions. Again, this is not a moral failing, but a structural demand. The nation wants a legible narrator of the pain of Blacks, but it does not want to pay the costs of a redistribution program for the survival of Blacks. And when the leader's task becomes media, the task of translation for outsiders can begin to compete with the task of governance for insiders.
The legitimizing framework reached its peak during the Obama years. The country can point upward to a Black family in the White House and use this as evidence of the system's fundamental fairness. And yet the ground-level reality did not magically become breathable. And so you see the full contours of the backlash in the fact of progress that can be televised, combined with a devastation that can be administratively managed.
As Black Americans occupy lead paint spaces, infested surroundings, downtrodden schools, over-policed environments, and tremendous wealth gaps, the question of whether the Civil Rights Movement succeeded or whether it was co-opted and turned into a buzzword is still up for grabs. The story of Jesse Jackson is that of an individual fighting in the fault line of hypocrisy and classic American stratification.
With one glance, he embodies the hope the mainstream American populace wants to believe in: that America is evolving, not leading toward some sort of climactic, regressive backlash that has been building for 50 years. With another glance, he is the symbol of the civil rights movement that turned into civil rights industry and therefore became co-opted in such a manner that arguably could state that it did not help the Black communities in the ground level, but merely put a legitimizing facade on a scenery that is rapidly becoming a digitized backlash that rhymes with the abuses of the Reconstruction Era.
Rest in power, Jesse Jackson, but also let this serve as an opportunity to discuss the Black experience and Black leaders in an era of quiet and pinpointed backlash that has left the Black community fragmented and, therefore, the nation as a whole.
