Andy Young had run out of patience. Having spent his life working in the trenches of social change and politics—supervising Martin Luther King’s voter registration drives, organizing civil rights protests across the South, and winning his own races for Congress and then mayor of Atlanta—he was trying to help Walter Mondale’s team develop a strategy for the 1984 presidential race against Ronald Reagan. When he was elected to Congress in 1972, Young had successfully applied grassroots organizing practices that included transporting 6,000 Black voters to the polls on election day, and he repeatedly urged Mondale’s team to invest resources in registering and mobilizing voters of color, but his words were falling on deaf ears. Finally, he had had enough and his frustration boiled over at the National Association of Black Journalists convention (NABJ), where he made his now-famous comment that the campaign was being run by “a bunch of smart-ass white boys, who think they know it all."



Thirty years later, Young stood by his words. “Unfortunately, I was right,” he said at the NABJ conference in 2014. “Mondale let the experts there take over the campaign and put the money into television and did not get out the vote.”

Progressive politics are still dominated by “White boys.” White men comprise 31 percent of the American population and just 23 percent of Democratic voters but they control nearly 90 percent of what happens in Democratic politics and progressive advocacy. Whether the current crop of largely male Caucasian consultants is equally “smart-ass” as in the eighties depends on who you ask, but what is clear is that what I call Smart-Ass White Boy Syndrome continues to this day — a time when the future of the progressive movement depends on solidifying the support of the growing number of people of color in America.