By John McWhorter Attending the Left Forum in New York yesterday, I listened to a panel on black politics peopled by Cornel West, Amiri Baraka, Columbia historian Manning Marable, and New Orleans civil rights veteran Curtis Muhummad. A guiding theme was that black America must "get behind" a certain "black agenda" at its peril (the panel agreed at the closing that the alternative was fascism). The idea that there even exists such a thing as a unitary black agenda is so deeply woven into the thought of black leftists, especially ones in the academy, that it is rarely spelled out. In the sixties and even seventies it did not need to be. But I fear that the correspondence between the term and modern reality is hardly as close as it was back in the day. The idea that a black agenda is going unaddressed carries an implied call for a second civil rights revolution. However, the civil rights revolution was enabled by a combination not only of hard work by our heroes, but the cold war with Russia, the novel impact of seeing racist brutality on television, and the lesser number of immigrants before the Immigration Act of 1965. That constellation can never occur again. More to the point, to the extent that the black agenda is ever spelled out, it neglects the very policies that have improved black lives over the past ten years without transformations as seismic as the revolution leftists often assume black America needs. The reform of welfare in 1996 came up not once yesterday, even though black child poverty dipped significantly as soon as it was enacted (it had sagged some in 1993, but after 1996 there was a sharp downturn). In Florida and Ohio, public schools threatened with depopulation by voucher programs have improved. The panel deplored the elimination of racial preference policies at universities. But what about the University of California, San Diego, where the year before preferences were banned there was exactly one freshman honors student, but by 1999, when black students who would have been admitted to Berkeley or UCLA were now admitted to UCSD or UC Santa Cruz, one in five black freshmen made honors? A black agenda that treats things like this as somehow beside the point is increasingly irrelevant to life as it is actually lived. Friedrich Hayek told us that "It seems to be almost a law of human nature that it is easier for people to agree on a negative program--on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off--than on any positive task." Is this us-versus-them tendency behind the idea that the black agenda is a matter of, as Professor Harris-Lacewell put it in her post, "falling in line"? There is danger--albeit not as stark as fascism--in retaining a conception of a black agenda that summons the triumphs of another time but misses the opportunities in this one. The panelists, for example, did not share Harris-Lacewell's enthusiasm about Barack Obama, dismissing him, albeit very politely, as not a "genuine" black politician because he was--and perhaps will again be--elected mostly by whites, and thus will not be answerable to a black agenda. But Obama is hardly numb to black concerns. He did serious activist work in Chicago. He has mentioned the problem that too many black teens think studying is "acting white," hardly a racist canard, now confirmed by academic studies. In the Senate he has been behind the Responsible Fatherhood and Healthy Families Act, which would assist low-income fathers with job placement and getting tax credits. That bill, while not explicitly race-targeted, was not written with white men in mind. If Obama is elected, it is unlikely that he will spearhead a black agenda of the sort that the Left Forum panel would recognize. Nor is it likely that such a black agenda will ever come to be. However, there are ways of making people's lives better within the system that we are stuck with. The legions of black people nationwide doing just this would be surprised to be told that this is a "conservative" effort.