“Where are the radical thinkers?”
That was the question Harry Belafonte asked in 2013, when the legendary musician and activist was speaking at a Ford Foundation forum in New York. Participating in the events that day was Charles Blow, the New York Times op-ed columnist and frequent cable news pundit. The question stuck with Blow, who admits to being more of an “institutionalist” and a “newspaperman” at heart rather than an activist, but he nonetheless found in Belafonte’s query the encouragement to take an intellectual swing for the fences.
“I would like to say I didn’t settle on this idea, this idea settled on me,” Blow told Blue Tent in a recent phone interview from his living room in Atlanta, Georgia. Blow described being struck by the idea one day, spending the better part of the next week rarely sleeping or eating as he put together the proposal for his second book, “The Devil You Know: A Black Power Manifesto.”
His idea is simple, if provocative: Black Americans should move en masse to southern states with already high Black populations, reversing the Great Migration with the explicit goal of building Black political power.
“I realize that I am proposing nothing short of the most audacious power play by Black America in the history of the country,” Blow writes in the book’s opening chapter.
But as he points out, the reverse migration is already happening, and already having influence: In Georgia, where the Black share of the population has grown to nearly one-third, Sens. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were elected by a majority Black coalition. This was Blow’s vision of Black political power in its most straightforward form: having the ability to sway elections, either to elect those one favors or to deny victory to those one disfavors. Writing in an excerpt from the book, Blow describes the Georgia Senate elections as “a momentous flex of Black power.”
The push to leave the North behind
The First and Second Great Migrations, as Blow points out, were about both push and pull. The push from the south was a combination of white terror, economic degradation and political repression. The pull north was the promise of better jobs, integration and civic participation. True as the horrors of the South were, Blacks living beyond the Mason Dixon line experienced much of the same violence, discrimination and economic hardship, just in different forms. In Malcolm X’s evaluation, southern white conservatives were indeed wolves baring their fangs, but northern liberals were cunning foxes, luring in their prey with a toothy smile as they ran from the wolves.
Much of Blow’s polemic is spent making a similar case about the present. His evaluations of northern failure and hostility to Black freedom and prosperity are indisputable: Many of the country’s most segregated neighborhoods and school systems are in northern cities like Chicago and New York, while extreme racial disparities in wealth, income, incarceration and police violence are near-universal. As a matter of craft, many of Blow’s best paragraphs and sentences also come in his depictions of the North, especially those passages where he allows his reporting and narration to take center stage, including a heart-wrenching profile of Samaria Rice, whose 12-year-old son Tamir was murdered by police.
It is in Blow’s sunny views of the new South that he loses the plot somewhat. One can forgive his grab-bag compilations of data, historical facts and anecdotes as he describes the dismal North, but the same rhetorical strategy and writing style becomes distracting as he tries to make the more complicated, affirmative case for his homeland. His reasoning is at times porous and cherry-picked, often relying on whatever useful evidence he can find, even when quite flimsy.
Take, for example, Blow’s discussion of the economic improvements awaiting in the South. He points to a recent study of a handful of cities comparing wage growth, which showed “somewhat” improved wages for non-college-educated Black workers in the South compared to the North. But economic conditions in the South, especially for low-wage workers, lag far behind the rest of the country. The minimum wage is considerably lower in southern states, even when adjusted for cost of living, which also holds true for median income. In other words, even though many southern states are among the cheapest places to live, a move south for many lower-income Black Americans could lead to a sizable drop in their standards of living.
The pull to move south is a push for a brighter future
Two other issues Blow does not touch in “The Devil You Know” are the South’s tightening abortion restrictions and lack of LGBTQ protections, issues that directly impact more than half of all Black Americans. When asked about the omission, Blow pointed instead to the possible future of the South—progressive, inclusive and kinder to the poor—which remains his strongest argument in favor of his plan.
“Part of the mission is personal, and part of it for you as a person is to gain power for yourself and for your children,” Blow said. “But part of it is altruistic, to help break people out of oppressive conditions by taking over a state.”
The aim of Blow’s project is not simply to make Georgia and Louisiana more like California and New York. He foresees a different kind of political calculus when Black voters decide elections. Through their control of politics, Black Americans could wield the power of state government to “eradicate” white supremacy, from dismantling mass incarceration to changing history curricula in public schools. The major difference between Black voters and the median Democrat, experts often point out, is that Black voters are more socially conservative; however, Black Americans are often considerably more progressive on economics. Black political power could therefore also mean expansions of the welfare state and social services at the state level, and more representatives and senators advocating for the same in congress.
Republican officials in Georgia, Blow’s new home, are already at work to claw back their losses from 2020 and 2021, seeking to restrict the voting power of the state’s newly ascendant Black political base, which now makes up about a third of the population. But Blow can still visualize a not-so-distant future where that same base, which narrowly tipped the scales to Democrats this year, grows even larger, exercising a level of political power for Black Americans never before seen in American life.
“You can make a big impact never even reaching 50% [of a state’s total population],” Blow told Blue Tent. “Imagine what happens if you actually do reach it.”
