Establishment Democrats’ response to the electoral victories of candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) should be of concern to anyone invested in the future of Black politics: The strategies Black Americans utilize to make our political demands legible within a system designed to narrow and delegitimize them.
At times Black politics has taken the form of polemic, as in David Walker’s Appeal. In other moments, it has taken the form of armed abolitionist resistance. Black politics have also been peaceful, as in the now-celebrated campaigns of the nonviolent movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. When white conservative Republicans attempted to destroy the political power Black Americans gained during Reconstruction, Black politics became insurgent within the Republican Party itself. Black Americans enrolled in Union Leagues, constructed independent institutions, and formed oppositional factions within the party to protect Black political and social interests.
The DSA is practicing a similar form of insurgent Black politics. It uses the Democratic Party as a ballot-access vehicle while organizing against the party’s leadership, donors, and ideological constraints, a legion of forces sometimes openly hostile to Black political imagination and possibility. Despite sloganeering as the vanguard for Black political representation, the establishment Democratic Party is mounting an opposition to the DSA’s contemporary iteration of Black insurgent politics.
“If you hate the Democratic Party, then please don’t run for our nomination,” said Jaime Harrison, the former chair of the Democratic National Committee, after a slate of DSA-endorsed candidates defeated party incumbents to win Democratic primaries in New York. “Don’t use our resources. Don’t rely on our volunteers. Don’t use our infrastructure. Focus on building the party you actually support.”
Democratic strategist and former Clinton adviser James Carville went further, suggesting Democrats purge the caucus of democratic socialists. Among them, Darializa Avila Chevalier, a democratic socialist who defeated five-term incumbent Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th Congressional District. Speaking about Avila Chevalier’s victory, Carville argued that House Democrats “should not seat her in the caucus.” “We believe in pluralism,” Carville insisted, before declaring that Avila Chevalier was “not a Democrat.” Her views, he said, are incompatible with the Democratic Party.
The views in question are social-media posts Avila Chevalier made admonishing Black and Arab men who fetishize white women (Avila Chevalier has deleted the posts and disavowed her comments). More recently, Van Jones criticized Avila Chevalier’s calls to abolish prisons and borders, positions he called “regressive nonsense.”
Certainly, Democrats are entitled to condemn Avila Chevalier’s remarks and are free to oppose prison abolition, open borders, or dispute any other “far-left” policy proposals espoused by DSA candidates. However, to suggest that the party should deny a democratically elected Black and Dominican woman a place in the Democratic caucus after she won a primary election for a congressional district that is 50 percent Hispanic and 24 percent Black is to delegitimize her voters’ political judgment.
Avila Chevalier won a plurality of predominantly Black precincts in a majority-minority congressional district that is one of the poorest in the country. Approximately one-fourth of the population lives below the poverty line, more than double the rate in the United States, and the district has the third highest poverty rate of the 148 majority-minority congressional districts. Those are the voters Avila Chevalier represents. To oppose the will of those voters is to infer that their attempt to redress their suffering through a politics that challenges entrenched power is invalid.
The establishment’s hostility to the DSA also reveals the narrowness of the Democratic Party’s “big tent.” There might not be room inside it for defunding the police, but there is room for politicians financed by corporations that profit from mass incarceration. There may be no room for aggressive redistributions of wealth, anticapitalist rhetoric, or open antagonism with the billionaire class, but there is room for Democrats who accept money from financial institutions that plunder wealth from Black communities. There may not be room for “nutty” policies like the eradication of borders, but there is ample room for politicians who support the colonization of Palestine and the domination of Palestinians.
Instead of treating the emergence of voters’ support for DSA-endorsed candidates as evidence of legitimate dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party’s economic and foreign-policy association, prominent members of the party establishment—including members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the CBCPAC—have often treated socialist insurgency as a threat to Black Americans, even alleging the DSA is flush with white supremacy.
Citing a 2021 DSA internal survey that revealed the organization is 82 percent white, Queens Borough President Donovan Richards posted to X, “White supremacy comes in all forms.” This criticism represents a fundamental misunderstanding of Black politics. Black politics is a strategic approach to holding power in conditions of formal and socioeconomic apartheid—not a demographic exercise in individual representation. Black politics is best understood by its purposes: whether a political strategy enhances our capacity to exercise the political power to advance the material interests of Black Americans. A majority-Black institution can act against Black interests, just as a multiracial or predominantly white organization can avow policies and strategies that benefit Black communities.
Black politics has never been confined to Black-only organizations or individual Black representation. It has included alliances with labor movements, religious institutions, and multiracial coalitions to aid Black Americans’ pursuit of freedom, security, economic justice, and political independence.
“Don’t try to distract with a conversation about DSA being racist and being anti-Black,” said former representative Jamaal Bowman, “especially when America’s DNA, bone marrow, roots and foundation were built on anti-Black terror and racism and enslavement.”
“DSA is not the problem,” continued Bowman. “White supremacy is the problem and capitalism has been used as a weapon of white supremacy.” The larger critique Bowman is making is not about whether racism exists in any one organization. In an anti-Black country, racism can be found everywhere, and while no purely ideological crusade is likely to rid America of white supremacy, there is no element of racism in socialism or the DSA that does not already exist in capitalism or the Democratic Party.
“The DSA challenges dogma, and I want change,” said Bowman. “I want to end poverty in America—not just for Black kids, for all kids. I want affordable housing for everyone. I think healthcare is a human right. We should have universal child care. I think we should take the tax breaks we give to billionaires and the money we put toward the military and pay for that stuff. If that makes me a socialist, so be it.”
The DSA endorsed Bowman during both his congressional bids, but Bowman’s time in Congress was cut short due to AIPAC’s record-breaking spending to unseat him. In his post-congressional life, Bowman has endorsed DSA candidates like Avila Chevalier and Melat Kiros, an Ethiopian woman who defeated Diana DeGette in the Democratic primary to represent Colorado’s first congressional district. Bowman is not alone in his support of DSA-endorsed candidates. Progressive members of the CBC have also backed DSA-endorsed candidates including Summer Lee, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley.
The difference in endorsements between progressive CBC members and the CBC establishment class reveals a welcomed rupture within the CBC. Progressive CBC members, particularly those affiliated with the Congressional Progressive Caucus, have been more willing to endorse DSA candidates, while establishment CBC leaders and the CBCPAC have endorsed their opponents. Several of those candidates have received endorsements, fundraising support, or independent spending from AIPAC’s political network—those affiliations, along with incumbency, can transcend race-based solidarity with CBC leadership.
When Bernie Sanders ran as a democratic socialist during the 2016 Democratic presidential primary, the CBCPAC endorsed Hillary Clinton. To explain their endorsement for Clinton, members of the CBC misled Black voters on Bernie Sanders’s civil rights record, ignoring his leadership in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), and his participation in a sit-in to protest housing discrimination. Instead, the CBCPAC lamented Sanders for voting in favor of the controversial 1994 Crime Bill without acknowledging 24 members of the Congressional Black Caucus also voted for the bill. (Sanders voted for the measure only because it was attached to the Violence Against Women Act.)
Ten years later, the CBCPAC is recycling the same ploy, launching a disingenuous smear campaign against William Lawrence, a white progressive candidate running for the Democratic nomination to represent Michigan’s Seventh Congressional District. During a 2024 episode of Lawrence’s podcast, Lawrence spoke with Black anti-war organizer Khury Petersen-Smith about how the Democratic establishment’s support for Israel has diminished the moral authority of the Black Freedom Struggle—a moral authority that the CBC fails to harness yet claims to represent. In asking Smith about the implications of endangering the credibility of the Black Freedom Struggle, Lawrence criticized older Black political leadership:
“The extent to which the older generation of Black political leadership are such a pillar, frankly, for establishment, capitalist, imperialist American power through their role as this kind of traditionalist, establishment-ist pillar of the Democratic Party, it’s a big problem,” Lawrence said. “It’s a big problem for left politics in this country. And it gets us every single time. It really defangs the white left and puts us in impossible positions, really.”
The CBCPAC called Lawrence’s comments “hateful,” and urged Lawrence’s supporters to denounce him and withdraw their support. “[Lawrence] really showed his ignorance and his racism,” CBC chair Yvette Clarke (D-NY) said. “The CBC is the heart and soul of this country, the conscience of the Congress,” Representative Greg Meeks (D-NY), who leads the CBC PAC, said.
I spoke to Lawrence, who expressed regret and remorse for framing his comments around the “white left.” “What I believe in is building a multiracial movement and a multiracial democracy to live up to our country’s best ideals,” said Lawrence.
“We’ve got a strong Black community, especially in Lansing. I’ve done organizing in Lansing, especially around the issue of housing,” Lawrence said. Lawrence is a cofounder of Lansing Rent Is Too Damn High, a local tenants union, organizing around four state policy goals: rent control, housing first, social housing, and a renter’s Bill of Rights. “That’s the work I’ve been doing for the last five years.”
Following the CBCPAC’s attempts to manufacture outrage, Black leaders in Michigan and elsewhere came to Lawrence’s defense. “It’s time for all the mudslinging to stop,” said former state Board of Education member Barbara Roberts Mason, the first Black woman elected to statewide office in Michigan history. “It’s quite disappointing that the Black community is being used as pawns in various races in Michigan,” wrote Denzel McCampbell, a Detroit city councillor, on Facebook. “I listened to the actual [Lawrence] conversation and it’s one that we’ve been having constantly about establishment leaders selling our communities short.”
One of Lawrence’s political endorsements came from Representative Chris Rabb, a Black DSA-endorsed candidate who won the Democratic nomination for Philadelphia’s congressional district 3. Rabb said the CBCPAC’s attempt to smear Lawrence was a “cynical move.”
“If you’re gonna call out white people, make it stick. Don’t come up with specious distractions from the substance. The substance is, regardless of ethnicity, if you’re an institutionalist, you’re part of the problem.”
That may be difficult for members of the Black political establishment to hear, especially when some CBC members have fought racial injustice and supported progressive policy positions such as Medicare for All, raising the minimum wage, tuition-free public college, and strengthening financial regulations. Yet these positions sit awkwardly alongside the institutionalist backing of today’s CBC—most especially the group’s electioneering ties to corporations whose interests can harm Black Americans.
“You can do good work as an establishment incumbent,” said Rabb, “but I’ve learned to sit with a harder question: For every act of help, how much of it quietly reinforces a system built on entrenched power rather than justice?”
That question was at the core of Lawrence’s comments, which are rather innocuous when one considers their veracity: The CBCPAC and the same CBC members who admonished Lawrence receive contributions from AIPAC, which is also funding Republicans’ efforts to erase majority-Black congressional districts. According to Lobbying Disclosure reports, since 2019 the Congressional Black Caucus Institute (CBCI) has received at least $150,000 from CoreCivic, Inc., one of the largest for-profit prison companies in the United States, and one of ICE’s most frequent contractors. The CBCI is a separate entity from the CBC; however, their leadership overlaps. For example, the current CBCI co-chair is the Democratic Party’s long-standing kingmaker Jim Clyburn. In 2019, CoreCivic disclosed $25,000 in honorary expense contributions to the Congressional Black Caucus Institute, citing Representative Clyburn and CBC member Representative Bennie Thompson as honorees on the CBCI’s leadership board.
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Federal Election Commission data also shows that the CBCPAC has received contributions from financial institutions, such as Citigroup, whose predatory lending schemes disproportionately harmed Black Americans during the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis.
Confronting the forces that materially undermine the CBC’s claim to be acting as the “conscience of Congress” may be more urgent than contemplating what DSA candidates’ victories mean for Black leaders in New York or the Democratic Party at large.
Here are the words of former representative William Clay, cofounder of the CBC, writing about “a new Black politics” in 1971: “Political independence is predicated on financial independence. It must be made crystal clear that a working partnership can be established with white political interests without Blacks becoming totally enslaved to those interests. Black politics must start with the premise that we have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies, just permanent interests.”
In the spirit of coalescing around common interest, in 1971 the Congressional Black Caucus sent policy recommendations to then–California Governor Ronald Reagan that are squarely in line with the positions of today’s DSA, calling for redistribution of wealth, universal healthcare, and a guaranteed income.
This is just one small but telling instance showing how the democratic socialist tradition informed the Black political project in the United States. Other key socialist organizers at the vanguard of Black politics include W.E.B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph—and even the now-venerated civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.
Over the past half-century of mounting Black influence within the Democratic establishment, much of this crucial movement history has been effaced, as leaders such as Jaime Harrison, Hakeem Jeffries, and James Clyburn have taken on the traditional role of ethnic power-brokering within a national party structure. These dynamics have produced a grim irony: the erasure of socialist leadership in Black political history has indirectly fed the bad-faith critiques of Clyburn and others that today’s socialist movement doesn’t prominently feature leaders who “look like them,” creating the ahistorical impression that socialist politics have retained a lily-white complexion throughout modern American history.
In reality, this whitewashing of the past has abetted the marginalization of actual Black socialist politicians such as Bowman and their progressive allies such as Summer Lee and Cori Bush. Broader Black movement leaders such as union organizer Chris Smalls, meanwhile, are strikingly divorced from the professional Black leadership caste in Congress—a state of things that would have been unthinkable for prior Black union figures such as Randolph and Bayard Rustin.
The same dynamic has also blinded many of us to the real state of Black establishment politics today: amid the steady chorus of pro forma plaints of congressional leaders about insurgents in and around DSA who are stealing their organizing thunder, no one pauses to note the conditions of moral inanition overtaking institutionalist bulwarks like the CBC. The caucus’s longstanding project of attempting to redirect the country’s moral compass from within the Democratic Party establishment has ossified into a familiar saga of bureaucratic and institutional self-preservation for its own sake. What began as an effort to leverage power in the service of Black politics seems more an inert instrument to extort declarations of loyalty to the party establishment.
As a result, Black voters are seeing their voice in Congress overtaken by such prerogatives. Black voters are urged to embrace a diminished and self-defeating brand of interest-group lobbying masquerading as movement politics. In this blinkered vision, the conduct of Black politics is reduced to the donor-driven pursuit of insider access, the elevation of seniority over movement organizing, and the reflexive embrace of individual Black representation as the sole measure of Black political progress. The leaders who preside over this status quo correctly surmise that Black socialists are a threat to it—but they’ve forgotten that one of the key points of American Black politics is to create and sustain such threats.
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