[The Issue Is Not Race or Class, but Rather Race and Class.]
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WHY REVEREND JESSE JACKSON WAS RIGHT. THE ISSUE IS NOT RACE OR CLASS,
BUT RATHER RACE AND CLASS.  
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Vincente Navarro
August 7, 2023
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_ The Issue Is Not Race or Class, but Rather Race and Class. _

Reverend Jesse Jackson spoke at the UN today for the International
Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. , U.S. Mission photo
by Eric Bridiers

 

I congratulate David Masciotra [Jesse Jackson: The 2024 Presidential
Race
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] on his excellent piece on Jesse Jackson's legacy article and his
immense contributions to the liberation of African Americans as well
as to the well-being and quality of life of the majority of the
population of this country (xxxxxx, August 1, 2023). It accurately
describes the importance that Jackson's interventions in the 1980's
had in shaping the nature of the political debate in the U.S. on
issues of tremendous importance. There is one dimension of these
interventions that merits special attention because it touches on key
components of a strategy needed to achieve liberation for all the
excluded in this country, which is the majority of the working
population of the U.S.

I was Jesse Jackson's senior health policy advisor in that period,
both in the 1984 and 1988 primary elections in the Democratic Party
for the Presidency of the U.S., and I could see firsthand. A very dear
friend of mine Dr. Quentin Young, the personal physician of Jesse
Jackson and a major progressive voice in the rather conservative
medical community of the U.S., asked me to help Jesse Jackson. I met
the Reverend, and I was extremely impressed and fully agreed with his
well-defined strategy. I have advised many governments in my life and
met remarkably interesting personalities. Jesse Jackson was one of the
most interesting ones. And from the very beginning I thought that his
views were essential for the development of a progressive movement in
the U.S. This country is characterized by a large variety of social
movements and at the same time by a lack of progressive parties,
consequences of the class-based design of its democracy  It was clear
to me after speaking with Jesse Jackson that his strategy was
precisely aimed at changing that.

The first stage was to break with the horrible discrimination and
exploitation of the black sector of the population. And to break with
discrimination meant to fight for their integration in the
institutions of power, including the political ones. The slogan for
the 1984 primary elections campaign "Our Time Has Come" said it very
clearly. And the consequence of that was a significant increase in the
number of African Americans in municipal and state institutions,
particularly in the South.

But the growth of this dimension had to be accompanied by another one,
fully developed with the establishment of the National Rainbow
Coalition aimed at developing a strategy to unite the different
discriminated and exploited groups to build up a collective response
to achieve the liberation of all of them –without diluting or
disappearing their own personalities and interests—through a common
cause. As Jesse Jackson said many times, "when you add the blacks, the
browns, the yellows, and many other colors, you soon realize that you
are speaking of the majority of people in the U.S."   That was the
origin of the Rainbow Coalition, which had a huge impact that shaped
the nature of the political debate in the 1990s. There was a need to
develop programs aimed at all. That is, universal programs that will
unite people rather than divide them.

There is an element that unites such a diverse population. It is
called social class. Contrary to conventional wisdom, most of the
population in the United States is working class. And class experience
and class interest could be an important mobilizing point for the
different sectors of that class. Jesse Jackson put it quite clearly in
his answer to a journalist on CBS in Baltimore. This city, which was
the typical industrial city until recently, is characterized by the
clear differentiation of neighborhoods by race and by class. And
looking at the differences in the number of years people lived by
neighborhoods, one can see that the difference in life expectancy
between the black and white working-class neighborhoods is much
smaller than the difference in the life expectancy between them and
the upper-class neighborhoods. To the predictable question made by the
CBS journalist to Jesse Jackson "How are you going to get the support
of the white steelworker of Dandock? The largest white steelworker
neighborhood" he responded, "by making him aware that he has more in
common with the Black steelworker because they both are workers than
with the boss because they are white." The evidence of this is
overwhelming, but there is little talk about it.

In 1984, Jackson ran as the voice of minorities, and consequently, the
number of African-Americans in political institutions increased
Immensely. In 1988 Jackson ran as the voice of the working people, of
the majority of people, representing a rainbow coalition of social
movements, and he almost won the primaries in Atlanta. The delegates
appointed by the Democratic Party apparatus diluted the potential for
Jackson to receive a majority of elected delegates. And in the
programmatic dimension, the preference was for universal programs like
the national health program in Canada that would cover everyone and
not only the poor and the elderly. Establishing such a program would
have ended the shameful situation of the U.S. being the only developed
democracy that does not provide universal health coverage.

I was in the negotiating team representing Jesse Jackson that met the
people of the winning candidate, Governor Michael Dukakis of
Massachusetts, and we were not able to get that universal program
included in the Democratic Party Platform. But the huge mobilization
of the Rainbow Coalition and the enormous attractiveness of universal
 programs frightened the Democratic establishment and elicited
responses from Governor Clinton, U.S. Senator Al Gore and U.S.
Representative Richard Gephardt to block the rise of a more leftist
Democratic Party by establishing the conservative Democratic
Leadership Council.  As the Democratic Party apparatus has always
done, they recycled the progressive proposals of Jesse Jackson and the
Rainbow Coalition, appropriating much of the narrative but emptying
them of their content. This is what Clinton did in the 1992 campaign.
He used the slogan, narrative, and symbols of Jesse Jackson's
campaigns, calling his platform "putting people first" (the slogan
used by Jackson in 1988) and including a call for moving to a type of
universal healthcare coverage. As a perceptive Financial Times
reporter wrote, "Clinton has borrowed extensively from Jesse Jackson
1988. He sounds like a Swedish social democrat." While borrowing the
language and the symbols, however, Clinton changed the content
dramatically. While we had proposed a single-payer program similar to
Canada's, Clinton chose the opposite pole of the political spectrum,
managed competition, which meant the full control and dominance of the
health care sector of the U.S. by insurance companies.

There is no question that the issue of universal access to health care
for every citizen and resident of the U.S. was extremely popular. This
explains why Clinton used the health issue prominently in his campaign
in 1992. When he won, he appointed his wife, Hillary Clinton, to chair
the Health Care Reform Task Force. The Task Force was not planning
even to consider establishing a universal program. This is why Jesse
Jackson, with the President of the Health Care Worker Union-1199,
Dennis Rivera, and myself went to see Hillary Clinton, to insist that
the universal single-payer program be considered since it had received
broad support in the Democratic Party during Jackson's 1988 primary
campaign. Ms. Clinton invited Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition
to send an expert to join the Task Force, Jesse asked me to do it. And
this is how I was in the White House for a while and could see how
power operates. And I detected immediately that the insurance
companies had massive power not only in the health-related committees
in the House and in the Senate but also on the White House Task Force
itself. You soon realize, when you are in the White House, that the
president of the U.S. is not the most powerful person in the U.S. The
enormous limitations of U.S. democracy appear quite clearly when you
are in the center of it. And that is one of the great contributions of
Jesse Jackson. He demonstrated that there is an urgent need for all
the progressive forces to work together in a coalition that includes
all the social and protest movements attempting to force changes and
to democratize the very limited democracy that exists in the U.S. And
that will not occur unless such a broad coalition is established. The
evidence is overwhelming. In all the countries where I have helped
governments on health and social policy, I have found that the primary
force that  has created the pressure and demand for universal access
to health care has been a broad political coalition representing the
different sectors of the working population. The U.S. needs that broad
political coalition as much as the air we breathe, and Jesse Jackson
and the Rainbow Coalition was a gigantic step in this direction.

Vicente Navarro, MD, PhD
Professor Emeritus
Bloomberg School of Public Health
The Johns Hopkins University

Senior Health Advisor to Jesse Jackson (1984-1988)
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[email protected]
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* Jesse Jackson; Rainbow Coalition; Universal Health Care Coverage;
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