Your Black World: Is Obama Really Change? -- Shannon Joyce Prince

Hope and Wisdom

By: Shannon Joyce Prince

Remember back seven years ago to the aftermath of September 11^th, when the world was divided into the good and the axis of evil, those who had democracy and those whose envy of it drove them to murderous fundamentalism? Remember the charge of the extreme right – that anybody who didn't support the ‘War on Terror’ or didn't show the appropriate level of ambivalence towards Islam or Middle Easterners, or paused to quibble over whether or not “enemy countries” had weapons of mass destruction, was unpatriotic and insufficiently American? Remember how the left, the middle, and the moderate right took issue with that kind of Manichean thinking while the war hawks said it didn't matter if those who were leading us to war were honest or which Middle Eastern country we bombed, because we were representing the concepts of freedom and democracy, thus the nitty-gritty about reality and truth weren't important?

I've been stunned to hear that same kind of rhetoric from the left. Either you support President-elect Obama or you're a too cool for school revolutionary snob, a Gloomy Gus, or someone too idealistic, unrealistic, or cynical to be pragmatic or useful. It doesn't matter who Obama is, what he does, says, or stands for - he represents hope and change and that's good enough. The left is currently doing what the right once did: conflating concepts with reality. The right said supporting democracy and freedom and supporting the ‘War on Terror’ were one and the same. The left says supporting hope and change and supporting Barack Obama are one and the same -- and their elision is just as dangerous. Just as by employing the words freedom, equality, and justice the Founding Fathers were able to hide a white, male, propertied oligarchy in the guise and language of democracy, Obama is hiding imperialism, neo-liberalism, and corporatism behind the language of progressivism.

See, there's nothing wrong with hope – as long as the person enjoining you to hope isn't also demanding that you abandon your critical thinking skills. Believe it or not, those of us who criticize Obama are not grumps who enjoy telling children there is no Santa Claus, while merrily kicking puppies. I don't begrudge anyone their elation at this time. When my Creole grandfather, a man who had to leave school in the fifth grade to pick sugarcane, called me nearly in tears that Obama had won the election, I shared his joyful moment with him. I didn't seize that moment to explain that Jason Furhman was heading up Obama's economics team; that as a senator, Obama repeatedly voted to increase funding for the war in Iraq, or tell him about the horrible things Obama has said about black fathers, such as my wonderful grandfather. The problem, however, is that my grandfather supports Obama because he doesn't know those things. Many of the people dancing in the streets right now haven't taken the time to do any research on Obama – so part of their euphoria is based on ignorance. Another significantly large population - much of the black community - supports Obama based on the belief that he is secretly not what he has presented himself to be - that once he has sneaked his way into office he's going to rip apart his button down shirt, revealing a bright Superman "S" and suddenly become Martin Luther King's ideological heir. I've heard another significant faction of people say that it doesn't matter what Obama does or doesn't do, because now little black boys can see a black president and know that they can grow up to be president, too. But that's just it – those little black boys are going to grow up. They're going to analyze and think critically (one hopes) and be affected by Obama's rhetoric and his policies. They're going to need substance, not a symbol. And they deserve better than Obama.

People who say Obama is dangerous, perhaps as dangerous as McCain, aren't crazy. What we realize is that while Obama might, and that's a big might, give in to leftist pressure and pass the kinds of positive legislation he didn't as senator, the benefits of progressive policies he instates risk being undermined by the racist ideology he uses. It's one thing for masses of white people to assume that racism is 90% over. It's another for a black man, Obama, to tell them this is so. Fostering those kinds of illusions is fatal. I've heard it said that Obama is obviously less racist than McCain, and his rural white sycophants, because McCain uses racial slurs and Obama doesn't. That doesn't make Obama less racist – just savvier. It reminds me of how aristocratic slave-owners had a hypocritical disgust for poorer, cruder slave traders, or how you read in many slave-owner narratives that genteel slave-owners proudly called their slaves "servants," instead of slaves. That didn't make the slaves any freer, however. Obama might not call blacks the "n" word, but his descriptions of blacks have depicted them as exactly that. Conversely, Obama may never call Afghans r*gh**ds, but if he starts a war in Afghanistan, Afghan civilians won't be any less dead, and Obama's ability to start a war with Afghanistan might be aided by his genteel language.

You see racists, be they black or white, aren't all as stupid as McCain. As Nancy MacLean noted in her book, Freedom is Not Enough, many racists have gotten hip to equality sounding language. That's why Ward Connerly's anti-affirmative action bill was called the California ‘Civil Rights Initiative.’ That's why one racist, nativist, anti-immigration group calls itself Vietnamese for Fair Immigration (though it's run by a white man). Time after time Obama has treated blacks, Muslims, and Middle Easterners with contempt. No matter how beautiful Obama is when he smiles, poised when he debates, or eloquent when he speaks, he is still racist; and his racism, his willingness to undermine minority concerns, his eagerness to appease whites, his enthusiastic obscuring of both past and present issues of justice and equality are perhaps as dangerous to America as anything McCain could do.

As Derrick Bell, the first African American tenured Harvard law professor and one of America's most brilliant legal minds has pointed out, whites tend to allow non-whites to achieve symbolic racial landmarks only when it meets white interests more than black interests; and often by using black figureheads. As blacks place their faith in slow, but sure, racial progress, whites convert old oppressions into more covert forms. Only when blacks are aware of this strategy can they fight for meaningful victories. Interestingly enough, those who criticize Bell tend to do so not because his work is inaccurate, but because it's "depressing." I'm sorry, but my concern isn't being the life of the party -- it's seeking liberation for all people. Those who castigate Americans for not being appropriately jubilant at Obama's election are insisting that blacks content themselves, in perpetuity, with symbolism instead of real change. All those who don't know what Obama stands for, or think he will exhibit qualities contrary to the way he has voted in the Senate and spoken in his speeches, or expect him to be loyal to issues he's flip flopped on, are entitled to do so.

However, it is irresponsible for those of us who believe that hope is only positive when wisely invested, to not use all the research we can gather and all the thought power we can employ, to fight for all people.

Shannon J. Prince is a creative writing major and junior at Dartmouth College. In addition to writing, she is an activist for indigenous and African issues, a ceramics maker, and a travel addict. She has been published in Frodo's Notebook, Falcon Wings, KUHF magazine, Imprint, Rice University's Writers in the Schools Magazine, Illogical Muse, Damn Good Writing, Lost Beat Poetry, Haggard and Halloo, Houston Literary Review, Words on Paper, Bewildering Stories, The Smoking Poet, Muscadine Lines, Ragand, Prick of the Spindle, International Zeitschrift, Conceit Magazine, Snow Monkey, Paradigm, Words Myth, and The Green Muse. She also won Dartmouth's Thomas Ralston Prize for creative writing. Click to e-mail Ms. Prince: Shannon J. Prince

Your Black Scholar: The Illusion of Post-Racial America

The Illusion of Post-Racial America

By: Aman Gill

An Obama Victory Would be a Milestone, but Could Stall Struggles Against Racism

Forty-one years ago, racial tensions — festering since slave times — burst into the Long Hot Summer in the tristate area. Thirty-four died in Newark, but the most dramatic upheaval came from Plainfield, N.J., a quiet suburb 30 miles from New York City. Amid minor but widespread skirmishes spreading across the region, a lone police officer beat and shot a black youth in the boy’s neighborhood. The boy survived, but the cop, quickly surrounded by enraged community members, did not make it out of the neighborhood alive.

Ashanti Alston, a political prisoner activist with the Jericho Movement and former Black Panther who was a teenager in Plainfield at the time, traced the escalating plot for The Indypendent. “The thing about Plainfield that stood out from all the other rebellions was that folks made their way to a gun manufacturing place right outside of the city,” Alston says. “They came back to the community with rifles and it was a whole different ball game. It wasn’t until the National Guard came that they were able to retake the black community.”

Today, decades later, why does racial conflict no longer generate the same kind of heat? Not for lack of ignition. In Queens in November 2006, an undercover vice operation turned into an execution. A 50- shot cop fusillade killed Sean Bell, a young black man heading home on his final night as an unmarried man, and injured two of his friends, all unarmed. The murder won state sanction in April 2008, when a New York State Supreme Court judge accepted at face value the officers’ contention that they feared for their lives, making their killing fully legal.

The verdict generated both outrage and despair. Hundreds of people marched that afternoon and “Justice for Sean Bell” signs sprang up throughout the boroughs. But an Al Sharpton-led civil disobedience action in June that might have been the first in a line of battles instead turned out to be the denouement. Things died down.

It’s increasingly popular to argue that the fuel for unrest has disappeared because the problem of racism has receded into America’s past. This idea has long held sway on the right, but, paradoxically, it’s taken Barack Obama’s candidacy to elevate this persistent right-wing myth into conventional wisdom.

CIVIL RIGHTS UNFULFILLED
“The history he [Obama] needs to know is the history he rejects,” says Lenore Daniels, editorial board member of the Black Commentator, a weekly online magazine. “He rejects the whole Black Power movement: ‘Just the civil rights were fine, we’ll leave it at that, there was progress.’ [But] the Black Power movement is still relevant. That was a movement talking about economic equality, where King left off.”

Histories of struggles are written by the victors. The movements of 40 years ago had winners and losers and, like any war, are remembered more ideologically than objectively. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended Jim Crow and for the first time in U.S. history granted black people formal equality before the law, but failed to transform their lives day-to-day. After 1965, all wings of the movement turned to address this gap: King turned from law and morality to economics; Malcolm X’s militancy spread despite his assassination, Black Power was born, and the movement moved north.

Obama’s view of a united, post-racial America is in the tradition of how the political establishment — Democrat and Republican — responded to heightened militancy. There was forceful repression, but also a more subtle, ideological response. The language of Jim Crow segregationism gave way to political correctness and new coded terms like “war on drugs.” Those who were never allies of the oppressed lauded King and proclaimed the end of discrimination. And black elites, once viewed with suspicion, were welcomed to the table as long as they left their baggage behind. It was unsparing market capitalism for the rest of the community.

The result, as Columbia University historian Manning Marable puts it, is that “Jim Crow no longer existed, but in its place stood a far more formidable system of racial domination, rooted within the political economy and employing a language of fairness and equality.” Racism in America may not look like all-white police forces, dogs on black men or sound like speeches by white supremacist politicians. It’s more like a termite- infested house — political correctness and black representation in business, media and politics compose a nice-looking picture on the outside. But gashes in the façade expose structural disparities as racially aligned as ever. Statistical measures on rates of poverty, housing, employment and income are not far removed from their 1960s levels.

BLACK AND WHITE
At times, Obama sounds more like Richard Nixon than someone concerned with racism. At the 1968 Republican National Convention Nixon proclaimed, “To those who say law and order is the code word for racism, here is a reply: Our goal is justice for every American.” Obama’s response to the persecution of the Jena 6 nearly 40 years later sounded a similar note: “Outrage over an injustice like the Jena 6 isn’t a matter of black and white. It’s a matter of right and wrong.”

Obama did not dwell on the marks of racism, so clear to many of us, in the demography of disaster left by Hurricane Katrina. “I do not subscribe to the notion that the painfully slow response of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security was racially based,” he said. “The ineptitude was color-blind.” And Obama did not object to the Sean Bell ruling, saying, “The judge has made his ruling, and we’re a nation of laws, so we respect the verdict that came down.”

Obama’s candidacy is seen as an indication that racial barriers no longer exist in the United States. Indeed, the election of a black president would be an undeniable milestone in American history, forcing many white Americans to confront latent fears and distrust of black people. And many see progress in the fact that a black man can run a campaign in which race is incidental. Yet it’s taken Obama’s embrace of post-racialism, and concurrent distancing from traditional civil rights-style black leadership, to lend viability to his campaign. Some activists see him as the culmination of a trend over the last 40 years of black leaders moving away from the communities they’ve traditionally served and closer to the political and corporate power that dominates the Democratic Party.

MOVEMENT POLITICS VS. ELECTORAL POLITICS
Alston feels that since the 1970s, the face of mainstream black activism has moved from a base in communities to big money and corporate sway. “No longer do you have the real radical movement folks that were coming out of grassroots movements,” Alston says. “You have people tied to money, or tied to established political power. What I look at today is that the Sharptons, the Barack Obamas, the Jesse Jacksons and even a lot of these mega-preachers now are not leaders from the grassroots. They’re system leaders that were chosen by either political forces or corporate forces.”

After attending Columbia University, Obama put in three years as a community organizer working on a range of neighborhood issues in the largely black Southside of Chicago. But his trajectory afterward — Harvard Law School and a stint as a law professor at the University of Chicago — looks more like the record of black politicians rising up in municipal politics in the 1980s and 1990s than the résumé of earlier leaders like King, Stokely Carmichael or Angela Davis. As he entered politics, he increasingly relied on allies culled from the Chicago elite — after the 2000 Census, he had his state senate district redrawn to make it, according to Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker, “wealthier, white, more Jewish, less-blue collar and better educated.” The connections he cultivated with his new well-to-do constituents were vital to his successful 2004 campaign for a U.S. Senate seat.

As Democratic dominance of national-level black politics accelerated, communities’ sense of action eroded into the passive live-with-your-fate mode that presently defines U.S. democracy. “When we go back to the 1950s and 1960s,” Alston says, “that was the period when people were not relying on the Democratic Party, the party that black folks are so tied to [today]. People were in the streets, people voted through their civil disobedience and direct action and organizing.”

The key question is whether much of the agenda in the fight against racial inequality remains unfulfilled. If so, there’s plenty to drive modern-day movements, taking outrages like the Sean Bell verdict to illuminate the living economic inequality untouched by 1960s activism. If not, then what happened to Sean Bell is just an aberration that could have happened to anyone, of any class and any race, in a country that has finally fulfilled its egalitarian ideals. That may be an America to hope for, but it’s not the one we have today.

Originally Appeared In The Indypendent