Does being black mean having nothing to trade politically?

No doubt my mother today will share a number of Christmas stories about her 37 years growing up and living in the Caribbean. I have heard them from the time I was born it seems and it has gotten to the point that, by reading a shift in the room’s energy, I can count down to the second when she will start recalling an event from her childhood in Montserrat. 

There was a time where it started to get a tad mundane. You know, where you start reciting the exact lines from the stories. As I have gotten older, I have learned to appreciate the stories. Repetitive they may be, the stories document aspects of my lineage, aspects that I can share with my own son.

Those aspects provide a mapping of our values; a history of where those values were spawned. The values define who my family is. 

Values, however, should not be a prison. They should be a guide. The individual should enjoy flexibility as she grows in and adapts to changing environments. For example, the physical and social environment found in the U.S. Virgin Islands, an American island territory of 135 square miles with approximately 87,146 residents is different from the city of Atlanta, a city of 135 square miles and 499,000 people.

Limited and expensive resources combined with limited occupational opportunities shape our different views of the world. As I got older, leaving the Virgin Islands became an issue as I matriculated high school. I always thought that I would leave for college or the Navy (in my case both) with the family back in the Virgin Islands to support me. Rather, my dad’s job loss meant that he was the first to leave “Rock City” for stateside and find work. 

It also meant that he was the first of my immediate family to be immersed in a culture that firmly placed the description of black on him.

This, of course, is not to say that people from the Caribbean were not aware of the term or did not refer to ourselves as black. St. Thomas is a major tourist destination and my dad worked in the Virgin Islands tourist industry for twenty years. Encountering whites was an everyday occurrence. The main difference, in my opinion, was the political distinction. 

By 1970, the Virgin Islands was electing its own governor, with the first being Melvin H. Evans, a black Republican. Our teachers with some exceptions were black. Government was managed by blacks. Businesses, however, were a mixed bag. Ownership of major commercial establishments was by whites. An awareness of the power structure, yes. Tension, for the most part, no (although there was a major occurrence of tension turning into violence in the 1970s that I will explore later…).

Having lived now in the United States for 43 years, my observation on the differences in “black” from an American territory in the Caribbean versus “black” from the continental United States is defined by “pain and suffering. 

Both blacks in the American Caribbean and blacks in the United States were brought to the western hemisphere as forced labor. The cruel history of slavery, however, plays a poignant role in black American politics and policy making. 

A significant number of blacks in the United States place blame for the lack of access to capital on the residual effects of slavery. The mechanisms that power white supremacy emanate from the institution of slavery and these mechanisms include laws that codified the practice of redlining, job discrimination, unequal pay, and an imbalance of wealth. American institutions, the argument goes, have been specifically designed to constantly oppress blacks based on race.

For blacks in the American Caribbean, the engagement with whites is prevalent in the lobbying for additional government resources as opposed to clashes with a majority white-run government over social policy. Political and social tensions in the American Caribbean are localized. The clash is over how government resources are distributed and that clash is usually between black and/or native Virgin Islanders. While most American Caribbean blacks empathize with the social plight of American blacks, American Caribbean blacks spend less time repeating the racial narrative expressed by American blacks.

But while both groups lack the common denominator of a pain and suffering narrative, both have in common a lack of major impact in the political markets. 

The U.S. Virgin Islands sends delegates to both the Republican and Democratic national conventions. The territory also has one non-voting delegate to Congress. The territory has no Electoral College votes meaning beyond a symbolic showing of black faces in Chicago next summer, blacks from the American Caribbean will have no sway on the presidential elections. It is not so much about not having any votes to exchange than it is about being allowed to exchange votes in the first place.

Does it bode much better for blacks living in the United States? A sweep of the following 12 states would provide a candidate 283 Electoral College votes, exceeding the minimum 270 votes needed to become President-Elect. The states, with Electoral College votes in parentheses, are:

California (55)

Texas (38)

Florida (29)

New York (29)

Illinois (20)

Pennsylvania (20)

Ohio (18)

Georgia (16)

Michigan (16)

North Carolina (15)

New Jersey (14)

Virginia (13)

Of these top states, only Georgia with its 16 Electoral College votes has a significant black population exceeding 30%. The other states with black populations exceeding 30% of total state population (Maryland (10), Louisiana (6), Mississippi (6), and Washington, DC (3)) offer a total of 25 Electoral College votes that are potentially influenced by the size of the states’ black populations.

However, influencing the political environment via the vote, for blacks at least, appears more myth than reality. Blacks do not have the numbers to influence the national political environment. They may, as in states like Alabama and South Carolina, have some numerical juice to influence state primaries, but beyond primaries, the influence of blacks on the national political environment is nil.

Will blacks have to create an alternative device for influencing American politics?

Alton Drew

25 December 2023

For more of my take on the political economy, purchase my book at amazon.com/author/altondrew.