Under the Rainbow

In a rare moment of insight, one of the million-dollar television pundits recently said, "When the history of the 1984 presidential campaign is written, the name that will be remembered is that of Rev. Jesse Jackson." What the pundit undoubtedly had in mind was that Jackson would be remembered as the first black presidential candidate to be taken seriously by the white establishment. That fact alone is probably enough to get Jackson into the history books. And as the Jackie Robinson of presidential politics, Jackson has also rightly become a source of renewed pride and hope for millions of black Americans who haven't seen much to be hopeful about for a long time.

If all Jesse Jackson accomplished this year was to bring black America's demand for equality into the political mainstream, at least for a while, then his campaign would still count as a historic effort. But from the very beginning Jackson has insisted that his was not only a black campaign. Instead Jackson sought to call together a rainbow coalition around basic demands for social and economic justice and a new vision of America's role in the world.

The building of a nationwide rainbow coalition was a pretty ambitious project for a campaign with little money, an inexperienced staff, and a late start. While the Jackson campaign occasionally made significant breakthroughs among Hispanic voters, especially in New York, and consistently scored a small but measurable percentage of the white vote, for the most part the multiracial "coalition of the locked-out" failed to materialize.

This failure was partly the result of flaws in the candidate and his campaign, the most obvious being Jackson's "Hymietown" remarks and his even more damaging equivocation about his association with Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam. The "Hymietown" statement, crude and insensitive at best, was made rashly in an "off-the-record" conversation with a reporter. It became news because the press was looking for new angles on the "blacks vs. Jews" story. But Jackson compounded his share of the blame by trying to stonewall the entire issue for several days before finally making a suitable apology.

The Farrakhan mess was even sloppier and more troubling. Even before Farrakhan's last round of bizarre utterances hit the news in June, it had become clear that the man harbors virulent anti-Jewish attitudes. Jackson's reluctance to denounce Farrakhan can partly be understood as a reluctance to disassociate himself from the black nationalist tradition that the Nation of Islam represents. Still Jackson tolerated Farrakhan's bigotry for too long and in so doing damaged himself and his movement.

But the limited appeal of the Jackson campaign was not entirely, or even mainly, the candidate's fault. The campaign also suffered from the conscious and unconscious racism that still distorts white perceptions of black people. In the final analysis, racism is at least part of the reason why white liberals, who have never hesitated to back long shot "protest" candidates in the past, failed to support Jackson, despite the fact that he spoke strongly for their positions on intervention in Central America, the nuclear arms race, women's rights, and the domestic economy.

With no money for advertising, Jackson was largely dependent on the news media to get his message out. As a result, public perception of his campaign was filtered through the media's subtle racism and willful ignorance of black politics and culture.

Thinly disguised racism was evident in little things like reporters' frequently expressed surprise that a black candidate could handle tough economic and foreign policy questions as well as Jackson did. Even the constant "only in America" comments about the racial progress the Jackson candidacy supposedly represented carried the implication that now even a black man can run for president.

It is also true that Jesse Jackson is persistently identified as a "black leader," when we have yet to hear Walter Mondale tagged as a Norwegian leader. Almost every primary election night, reporters would grill Jackson about his failure to attract many white voters, but I never heard anyone ask Gary Hart why he wasn't able to get any black votes.

Probably the most important contribution Jackson made to the primary campaign was to bring into that sterile arena a very different perception of American reality and a very different vision of America's future. He gave voice to the perceptions of the poor and oppressed of the United States and the world. This was especially evident in his statements about U.S. foreign policy where he called for new directions that would cause the United States to be "respected rather than feared."

Jackson's statements on Third World concerns from apartheid to intervention in Central America and the Middle East to human rights in the Philippines showed him to be the only candidate who understood that the United States has placed itself "on the wrong side of history." That he was rewarded with accusations of disloyalty from official opinion-makers like Joseph Kraft, George Will, and Marvin Kalb is evidence of the truth and importance of Jackson's stance.

With his vision of a rainbow coalition uniting workers, blacks and other Third World people, poor people, women, peace activists, and all the other locked-out forces in America, Jackson has helped point the way for social change movements in the 1980s. His vision is of course only a slight rewording of the one Jackson's mentor, Martin Luther King Jr., was holding forth when he was killed. But Jesse Jackson is not Martin Luther King. Judging from his campaign, it would be fairest to say that he is an exceptional politician who tries as much as possible to apply King's insights to the cutthroat electoral arena.

To say that Jackson is ultimately a politician is not to insult his role. The electoral arena is one important place to carry on the struggle for justice, and Jackson has demonstrated his effectiveness there. But finally the rainbow coalition that is needed to turn this country away from racism, greed, and war will not emerge from electoral politics alone, much less from the career of one very charismatic politician.

Such a movement must be grounded in the shared values, deep commitment, and mutual respect that can only emerge from day-to-day struggle. Jackson's campaign may not have delivered the rainbow, but it has helped rekindle that vision, and has altered the political atmosphere in ways that open up genuinely new possibilities for the future. And it has been a long time since that could be said of any presidential candidate.

Danny Collum was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.