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A provocative new history of modern black liberalism
Black Excellence offers a provocative new history of modern black liberalism by situating the seemingly conservative tendencies of black elected officials in the post–civil rights era within neoliberal American politics and an enduring black liberal tradition.
In the 1970s and ’80s, cities across the country elected black mayors for the first time. Just as these officials gained political power, however, their cities felt the full brunt of white flight and deindustrialization. Tasked with governing cities in crisis, black political leaders responded in seemingly conservative ways to the social problems that austerity worsened. Nowhere was this response more evident than in Atlanta. In the nation’s preeminent black urban regime, black leaders such as mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young employed the power of policing and the private sector to discipline black Atlantans, hoping they would equip vulnerable communities with the tools to manage the volatility of the era.
Danielle Wiggins shows that these punitive responses to the problems of crime, family instability, and unemployment were informed by black liberalism’s disciplinary impulse: an enduring tendency to reform behaviors believed to threaten black survival in a white supremacist nation. Forged in response to the violence of Jim Crow, the disciplinary impulse relied upon notions of pathology and its inverse, black excellence. Wiggins identifies several black liberal efforts to cultivate excellent black communities, families, and workers in the post–civil rights era, including community policing, corporate-sponsored family initiatives, and black entrepreneurship.
In embracing disciplinary strategies, however, black liberals often focused on behavior at the expense of addressing structural inequality. Consequently, their approaches dovetailed with those of the “New” Democrats, whose post–Great Society social policies were informed by urban black liberals. Black Excellence reveals thus how urban black liberals not only reshaped black politics but, as Democrats, also helped build the neoliberal Democratic Party.
"Beautifully written and wonderfully insightful, Black Excellence is a must read for anyone who wants to understand both the liberatory and disciplinary history of black liberalism in the post–civil rights era."
"This revelatory work provides a fundamentally new perspective on the forms of neoliberalism that the mainstream Democratic Party came to embrace in the 1970s and beyond to show its roots in a distinctive brand of Black politics that took shape in post–civil rights Atlanta. It is a must-read for anyone interested in the past, present, and future of liberalism and the Democrats."
"Black Excellence is a remarkable exploration of the political implications of class stratification among Black people. Danielle Wiggins’s study is an incredible contribution to the larger scholarship of post–1960s Black politics, guiding us through an urgently needed genealogy of the Black neoliberal turn in modern America."