Seven Reasons Not to Get Overly Excited About the Fact That Obama is Black
by Paul Street
"Superpower needs new clothes and Obama is just the man to model them."
Recently I had a conversation with a radical intellectual and activist who agrees with me that the Democratic Party's centrist presidential nominee Barack Obama is a corporate and militarist politician who can be expected to instantly and coldly betray his democratic campaign promises when and if he becomes president.
The radical in question acknowledges all this and more but still thinks I should be excited about the fact that the corporate-sponsored Obama might be president. .
The main reason he gives for thinking this is quite simply that Obama is black.
The fact that the nation is ready to elect a black guy, my correspondent thinks, is a sign of real progress in the United States.
But is it? In and of itself, it is of course an outwardly positive development that droves of whites are willing to embrace a black presidential candidate. Forty one years ago, as the United States entered the racially turbulent summer of 1967 and the movie "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" disturbed conventional racial norms by portraying a black doctor (played by Sidney Poitier) dating a white woman (Joanna Drayton), it would have been impossible for a black politician to become a viable presidential contender. Nothing a black candidate could have done or said would have prevented him from being excluded simply on the basis of the color of his or her skin. The fact that this is no longer true is a sign of some racial progress more than fifty years after the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.
"In 1967 it would have been impossible for a black politician to become a viable presidential contender."
Too bad much of this is countered and I think overwhelmed by the following seven interrelated reasons NOT to get very excited - from a Left perspective, including (as any decent Left perspective would) a racial justice perspective - about the fact that Barack Obama happens to be black.
(1) He's Not All that Black.
A significant part of Obama's appeal to white America has to do with the widespread Caucasian sense that Obama "isn't all that black." Many whites who roll their eyes at the mention of the names of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton - former presidential candidates who behave in ways that many whites find too African-American - are calmed and "impressed" by the cool, underplayed blackness and ponderous, quasi-academic tone of the half-white, Harvard-educated Obama. Obama doesn't shout, chant, holler or drawl. He doesn't rail against injustice, bring the parishioners to their feet and threaten delicate white suburban and middle-class sensibilities. He stays away from catchy slogans like Jackson's "Keep Hope Alive" and from emotive "truth"-speaking confrontations with power.
To use Joe Biden's unfortunate terminology, Obama strikes many whites as "clean" and "articulate" - something different from their unfortunately persistent image of blacks as dirty, dangerous, irrational and unintelligible. "Among the factors contributing to Obama's rise,"
Washington Post writer Liz Mundy noted in the summer of 2007, was the interesting fact that "his appearance, his voice, and his life story are particularly well suited to attract white votes." "We'd probably like it better if he talked like Jesse Jackson," the black political commentator Debra Dickerson told Mundy, "but ya'll wouldn't" (Liza Mundy, "A Series of Fortunate Events: Barack Obama Needed More Than Talent and Ambition to Rocket From Obscure State Senator to Presidential Contender in Three Years,"
Washington Post Magazine (August 12, 2007).
Obama has no moral or political obligation to shed his biracial identity, "multicultural" background and elite, private-school education to "act [more classically and stereotypically] black." But whites' racial attitudes are less progressive than might be assumed when their willingness to embrace a black candidate is conditioned by their requirement that his or her "blackness" be qualified.
"Obama strikes many whites as ‘clean' and ‘articulate.'"
When ingrained gender sensibilities lead you (all other things equal) to prefer your "straight-acting" gay uncle over your outwardly "effeminate" gay nephew, your tolerance for non-traditional sexual orientations might be less enlightened than you think.
The perceptive mixed-race journalist Don Terry was understandably perturbed when a middle-aged white filmmaker said to the following to him in early 2004: "I love Barack. He's smart. He's handsome. He's charismatic...I don't think of him as black" (Don Terry, "The Skin Game: Do White Voters Like Barack Obama Because ‘He's Not Really Black?,"
Chicago Tribune Magazine [October 24, 2004], p.16).
(2) "Race Neutral" Obama
Thanks in part to the fact that his technical blackness triggers white racial fears and animosities, Obama has been if anything more conservative on racial justice than Hillary Clinton and John Edwards. Terrible racist attitudes and dread relating to the stereotype of the "angry black man" make it particularly difficult for a black politician or officeholder to function as a fighter for people on the wrong sides of the nation's overlapping structures of race, class, gender, and ethnicity. Eagerly accommodating mainstream white attitudes, the "deeply conservative" (according to Larissa MacFarquhar) Obama (
Larissa MacFarquhar, "The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?," The New Yorker, May 7, 2007) has gone to extraordinary lengths to distance himself from the cause of equality. He has run a remarkably "race neutral" campaign that accepts dominant false American concepts proclaiming the essentially "past" nature of racial oppression and blacks' personal and cultural responsibility for their disproportionate presence at the bottom of the nation's institutional hierarchies.
(3) Burying Institutional Racism Deeper
Obama's ascendancy - like the earlier and related ones of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Oprah Winfrey - reinforces the widespread majority white post-Civil Rights sentiment that racism no longer poses serious barriers to black advancement and equality. The other night on the Conan O'Brien Show, the white-pleasing black comedienne Wanda Sykes received uproarious laughter and applause from a predominantly white studio audience when she said that Obama being in the White House would mean that black people have no more "excuses" for their inferior status and would now have to take personal responsibility for being disproportionately locked up in the nation's prisons. No joke.
"Conservative" commentators like George Will and William Bennett have long been applauding the Obama phenomenon for putting an end to "obsolete" complaints about the "over" problem of racism.
"Obama accepts dominant false American concepts proclaiming the essentially ‘past' nature of racial oppression."
Last March the "liberal" white
Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter voiced an interesting racist pinion on what he called "the Obama Dividend. While "Obama's unique assets" [a reference to the Senator's blackness and multiculturalism, P.S.] have been viewed in international terms," Alter argued, the presidential candidate's "most exciting potential for moral leadership could be in the African-American community." Alter praised Obama for being a potentially "important president" simply on the grounds that the Senator would tell and inspire "black adults and children" to behave better and thereby to stop sabotaging themselves and alienating culturally superior whites. Obama could mishandle U.S. Foreign or economic policy, and fail in his tepid efforts to address social problems at home, but he would leave a powerful and important legacy, Alter argued, if he could just get "black adults and children" - a category that technically includes every single African-American human being - to think and act in a more positive and productive fashion (Jonathan Alter, "The Obama Dividend,"
Newsweek, March 31, 2008, p. 37).
The problem with such commentaries -widely emblematic of mainstream white sentiment in the post-Civil Rights Era (PCRE) - is that institutional racism remains alive and well in every area of American society, providing the essential explanation (the supposed "excuse") for a savage racial wealth gap that grants the median black household seven cents on the white median household dollar. More than merely persisting into the PCRE, the deeper structures and practices of institutional white supremacy are cloaked by regular rituals of Caucasian self-congratulations over white America's increased willingness to embrace "good" and bourgeois, business and power-elite-approved and
not all that blacks like the corporate mass-marketing icon Oprah Winfrey and the mendacious imperialists and Iraq War agents Colin Powell, Condi Rice, and Obama.
(4) Race and the Progressive Illusion
The fact that the "deeply conservative" Obama is black has helped deepen his appeal to certain vaguely progressive voters by making him seem more left than he really is. According to researchers studying the political psychology of race, voters asked to compare a black and a white candidate with similar political positions will tend to see the black candidate as "more liberal."
"Many voters were identifying Obama as more liberal at least in part because of his race."
During the recently concluded primary race, Obama did much better than the also centrist and militarist Hillary Clinton with Democratic primary voters who identified themselves as "very liberal." Clinton, by contrast, did better with the large number and percentage of Democrats who called themselves "moderates." Since Obama's actual policy agenda was generally no more liberal than Clinton's - and his health care plan was considerably more conservative - it seems likely that many voters were identifying Obama as more liberal at least in part because of his race.There were other factors besides race in that identification (the Iraq War especially), but the simple fact of his skin color has given Obama no small measure of deceptive rebel's clothing he does not deserve given his clear presence (documented at some length in my forthcoming book "Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics") on the wrong/right-wing side of each of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Called "the triple evils that are interrelated:" racism (deeply understood); economic exploitation (capitalism), and militarism/imperialism.
(5) Resistance Will Be Inhibited
The fact that the (not-so) "progressive" Obama is black will inhibit certain left-leaning Americans from engaging in the sorts of action that will be required to pressure the White House to behave decently if he wins the election. John Pilger recently wrote something that rings very true with me on the basis of numerous discussions I have had with "progressive" youth and activists in recent months: "By offering a ‘new,' young and apparently progressive face of the Democratic Party - with the bonus of being a member of the black elite - he can blunt and divert real opposition. That was Colin Powell's role as Bush's secretary of state. An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US antiwar and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent." (
John Pilger, "After Bobby Kennedy (There Was Barack Obama)," Common Dreams (May 31, 2008.)
(6) The Emperor Gets A Chage of Clothes
Obama's race and ethno-cultural nomenclature - his full name is Barack Hussein Obama help make him useful to the architects of an American Empire that Obama strongly and openly supports. These attributes have enhanced his attractiveness to a considerable section of Superpower's foreign policy elite, who sense a need for the U.S. To
seem to be dramatically changing the face of power in the wake of George W. Bush's shockingly clumsy, provocative, and (by the way) richly racist imperialism. As Meg Hirshberg, an influential New Hampshire political donor, told Mundy last year, "His election would do more to restore peoples' faith and belief in the U.S. Around the world. Can you imagine [Barack and Michelle Obama] being president and first lady? It knocks me out as far as what we would be saying to ourselves and the world. He's not a descendant of slaves, but Michelle is. I think it would be a remarkable moment in history." Obama's technically Muslim name and his three years living as a young boy in Indonesia hold special promise, many U.S. Foreign policy elites hope, in the oil-rich Middle East and across the Muslim world - areas of special concern and danger for U.S. Globalists. By Mundy's account, "in the wake of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo...part of Obama's appeal is the opportunity to send the world a different message about racial tolerance at a moment when this seems more important than ever."
John Kerry, who ran for the presidency four years earlier largely on the claim that he would be a more effective manager of Empire (and the Iraq War) than Bush II, was certainly thinking of these critical imperial "soft power" assets when he recently praised Obama as someone who could "reinvent America's image abroad." So was Obama himself when he said the following to reporters abroad his campaign plane in the fall of 2007:
"If I am the face of American foreign policy and American power, as long as we are making prudent strategic decisions, handling emergences, crises, and opportunities in the world in an intelligent and sober way....I think that if you can tell people, ‘We have a president in the White House who still has a grandmother living in a hut on the shores of Lake Victoria and has a sister who's half-Indonesian, married to a Chinese-Canadian,' then they're going to think that he may have a better sense of what's going on in our lives and country. And they'd be right."
Obama's distinctive ethno-cultural and geographic biography is one of his great attractions to the foreign policy elite in a majority non-white world that has been deeply alienated by U.S. Behavior (and truthfully before) the post-9/11 era. Call it "the identity politics of foreign policy." Superpower needs new clothes and Obama is just the man to model them."
"What better gift to the empire than JFK in sepia?"
The black Seattle-based Left poet and activist Michael Hureax is on solid ground when he says that an Obama would be about "restor[ing] faith in the imperial project" by putting an eloquent black leader at its nominal head, to function as a "JFK in sepia." As Hureaux observed in the comments section attached to a haunting
Dissident Voice essay by Juan Santos, titled "Barack Obama and the End of Racism" (
Dissident Voice, February 13, 2008): .
I'm watching all kinds of people who I'd previously thought had some critical thinking skills cave under this Obamania business. I had a hunch this was coming when I watched his speech at the convention four years ago, my wife and I both sat and took it in and looked at each other and said, almost word for word, "He's good
, he's very good." The rakish JFK style jabs, the clearly studied rhetorical grace. What better gift to the empire than JFK in sepia? All last year, numerous discussions with people from the old new left who told us, "He'll never get a shot at it because of racist US etc.," to which we maintained, "But what better figure to have out there than one to restore faith in the imperial project, but someone with a black face? They managed to live with Powell and Rice, why not Obama?"
(7) An Opportunity for the Proto-Fascist GOP.
The fact that Obama is black may contribute to the extremist and dangerously messianic-militaristic and arch-plutocratic, proto-fascistic Republican Party keeping the White House. Obama's claim to reporters last April that "if I lose, it would not be because of race but because of mistakes I made on the campaign trail," was certainly largely incorrect. If he fails to defeat Republican John McCain despite critical trends favoring a Democratic candidate (economic recession, rising prices, and a failed foreign policy in Iraq, above all) in November, 2008, it will be largely and perhaps mainly
because of race. As John Judis noted in
The New Republic at the end of May 2008, the racial voting trends are a real cause for Democratic Party concern:
"The United States has not ‘transcended race' - something that should be obvious from the exit polls."
Clearly Obama gained some votes in the early primaries from college-educated [white] Democrats who liked the idea of an African American transcending the historic conflict over race. And, if he had not been running against a popular female candidate, he might have won more support among white women. But Obama also lost voters to racial prejudice.
The percentage of voters who backed Hillary Clinton (or, earlier, John Edwards) while saying that the "race of the candidates" was "important" in deciding their vote is a fair proxy for the percentage of primary voters who were disinclined to support Obama
because he is black [emphasis added]. That number topped 9 percent in New Jersey; in Ohio and Pennsylvania, two crucial swing states, it was more than 11 percent. And that's among Democratic primary voters, who are, on average, more liberal than the Democrats who vote in general elections.
The simple fact of being African American could well cost Obama the general election votes of 15 to 20 percent of the nation's Democrats and Democrat-leaning Independents (John Judis, "The Big Race,"
The New Republic, May 28, 2008, p.24).
It's terrible and ugly that prejudice-fueled racial bloc voting - widely evident in the last two months of the primary season - is likely to be a factor in the general election, but it's also a strategic fact of American political life. Maybe Obama can overcome it. Maybe he can't. Either way, the United States has not "transcended race" - something that should be obvious from the exit polls in the last two months of the Democratic primary.
Veteran radical historian Paul Street ( paulstreet99@yahoo.comThis e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); and Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (forthcoming in summer of 2008).
06-25-2008, 04:55 PM
Seven Reasons Not to Get Overly Excited About the Fact That Obama is Black
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