We can do it ourselves, yes we can! If we go fluorescent and pull up our boots (along with our pants), we can prevent global warming, halt the cradle to prison pipeline, even outwit global capital. We are DIY. And have to be; it's clear the government won't do it for us.
Such is the rallying cry taken up, both in earnest and tongue-in-cheek, by organizers, activists, and politicians of many stripes. Such also is the rhetoric of those who preach racial uplift, among whose boosters are NPR's Tavis Smiley, black megachurches, and the iconic Bill Cosby. It's this tradition that Stand Up! The Shifting Politics of Racial Uplift i.
Bound for controversy, Stand Up! rigorously examines the re-emergence of racial uplift politics, identifying its possibilities and its paradoxes: Have the new advocates of self-help including but not limited to those championing "the politics of respectability"?been able to transcend the anti-democratic policies, class elitism, misogyny, and homophobia that have often plagued such movements? Moreover, can politics with allies like Wal-Mart truly promote social justice? How and why have corporate and governmental institutions jumped on this bandwagon? Does a politics preaching self-reliance inherently further politically and economically conservative aims?
The scholars and activists who animate this lively debate examine the re-emergence of racial uplift politics, identifying its possibilities and its pitfalls. Ultimately, Stand Up! reveals where help helps and where it hurts, so that all those invested in collective uplift can demand policies that democratize power and wealth, instead of being satisfied with black firsts and post-race millionaires.
Kenyon Farrow, the co-editor of Letters from Young Activists is a founding member of FIERCE.
Jared Sexton, author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism is a professor at University of California, Irvine.
In a world proclaimed post-racial, do black bootstrap politics defang demands for equity, or mobilize energy to attain it?
