Opinion: The Generation X, hip-hop-quoting congressman who’s taking a big step

Editor’s Note: Peniel E. Joseph is Barbara Jordan chair in ethics and political values and founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin, where he is a professor of history. He is the author of “The Third Reconstruction: America’s Struggle for Racial Justice in the Twenty-First Century.” The views expressed here are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

US Rep. Hakeem Jeffries’ election to be the first Black minority leader in American history reflects the potential, possibility and power of multiracial democracy. The 52-year-old congressman representing New York’s 8th Congressional District in Brooklyn and Queens, reflects both a generational and cultural shift from retiring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, whose legendary tenure made her a trailblazing feminist icon and an impeccably dressed breaker of glass ceilings, unafraid of tussling in public with former President Donald Trump.

When Jeffries elucidated the case for impeaching Trump on the Senate floor in 2020, he ended by dropping a gem of a quote from the late, beloved Brooklyn-based rapper, the Notorious B.I.G. — “And if you don’t know, now you know.”

That a Generation X, hip-hop-quoting congressman has become the first Black person to lead a major party, with the potential of ascending to the speaker spot depending on the 2024 elections, is all the more remarkable considering tensions within the Democratic coalition and racial divisions with which America continues to wrestle.

The May 25, 2020, murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis surfaced long simmering issues related to Black citizenship and dignity thought to have been answered during the civil rights movement’s heroic period between the Supreme Court’s school desegregation decision on May 17, 1954, and the April 4, 1968, assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

It makes sense for the face of the Democratic minority in Congress to be Black since those voters support the party more consistently than any other demographic. Yet while Blacks voted for Democrats in the midterms at well over 80%, this support shrank 4 percentage points from the 2018 midterms, according to network exit polling.

So, while Democrats did better than expected in the midterms, thanks in large part, to a surprising robust youth turnout, support from voters of color lagged behind 2018 and 2020.

As the Democratic congressional leader, Jeffries will be a cool-headed pragmatist and supporter of liberal and progressive policies who seeks to be an effective legislator. He may be able to convince the party to display a level of attentiveness and investment in Black voters often absent in favor of outreach to white suburban constituencies. Despite these efforts, nearly 60% of White voters supported Republicans, further evidence of a stark racial divide between constituents within the two major parties.

The significance of a Black man leading House Democrats in 2023 is both symbolic and substantive. Symbolically, it represents a kind of racial progress unimaginable when the Congressional Black Caucus was founded in 1971 at the beginning of the 92nd Congress to provide community for the then-record number of 13 Black members of the House of Representatives.

The first Black congressional officials were Republicans elected during the Reconstruction era in the decade after the Civil War. Their presence offering a hopeful example of the promise of multiracial democracy. This generation of Black officials helped to institutionalize what would become contemporary Democratic Party bread and butter issues, including public education, access to health care and public investments in infrastructure that helped to rebuild a physically wrecked and morally broken America in record time.

It is one of this country’s greatest ironies that arguably its greatest generation of statesman (for women still were denied the ballot and the right to hold public office) were ultimately denied equal access to the democracy they bled for in wartime and helped resuscitate during the tumultuous peace that followed.

Jeffries stands on the shoulders of these 19th century leaders, as well as 20th century congressional icons such as Texas’ Barbara Jordan, who cosponsored the 1975 Voting Rights Act extension, and Shirley Chisholm, the Brooklyn representative whose 1972 presidential campaign upended many of the rules of politics.

Like Jordan, Jeffries is at times viewed with suspicion by some figures on the Democratic left. They see him as too mainstream for the radical change they feel is necessary to right a ship of state still reeling from voter suppression, racial injustice, economic inequality and legislative efforts that have tried to censor truth teaching in public schools.

Last year, Jeffries observed, “The extreme left is obsessed with talking trash about mainstream Democrats on Twitter, when the majority of the electorate constitute mainstream Democrats at the polls.”

On this score Jeffries has helped organize a political action committee, Team Blue, to defend Democratic incumbents against being primaried from the left, a phenomenon that helped to create the progressive “Squad” led by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, the eloquent and outspoken proponent of a Green New Deal whose criticism against conservative Democrats such as Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and moderates such as President Joe Biden, gave Pelosi fits as majority leader.

Jeffries’ leadership will, of course, be judged not by its symbolic merits, although considerably historic, but on substance.

The 21st century Democratic Party traverses a perilous tightrope in a political climate riven by racial, ideological and partisan divisions. These divisions not only threaten its precarious coalition but also reflect the fragility of American democracy in the aftermath of President Barack Obama’s election, the rise of Black Lives Matter, the ascent of Trump, and the political and racial reckoning of 2020 and its fallout.

America needs political leadership that can inspire disparate constituencies and star-crossed communities to coalesce around ideas, issues and goals that transcend party loyalty. Such leadership can help us reach into the rarified stratosphere of the kind of civic nationalism that has, in the past, led the nation to innovate the New Deal, defeat fascism during World War II, envision a Great Society and elect the first Black president.

Hakeem Jeffries cannot, of course, be expected to embody this leadership on his own. But it is a testament to the national character, and the grace at times embedded within it, that the voice of the first Black leader of the Democratic minority in Congress will be seated at the head of the table as we deliberate on the future of our ongoing democratic experiment.