Obama’s big silence: the race question
Has the president turned his back on black America?
The following is an excerpt:
“Americans began the summer still celebrating the dawn of a “post-racial” era. They are ending it under no such illusion. The summer of 2009 was all about race, beginning with Republican claims that Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama‘s nominee to the US Supreme Court, was “racist” against whites. Then, just as that scandal was dying down, up popped “the Gates controversy”, the furore over the president’s response to the arrest of African American academic Henry Louis Gates Jr in his own home. Obama’s remark that the police had acted “stupidly” was evidence, according to massively popular Fox News host Glenn Beck, that the president “has a deep-seated hatred for white people”.
Obama’s supposed racism gave a jolt of energy to the fringe movement that claims he has been carrying out a lifelong conspiracy to cover up his (fictional) African birth. Then Fox News gleefully discovered Van Jones, White House special adviser on green jobs. After weeks of being denounced as “a black nationalist who is also an avowed communist”, Jones resigned last Sunday.
The undercurrent of all these attacks was that Obama, far from being the colour-blind moderate he posed as during the presidential campaign, is actually obsessed with race, in particular with redistributing white wealth into the hands of African Americans and undocumented Mexican workers. At town hall meetings across the US in August, these bizarre claims coalesced into something resembling an uprising to “take our country back”. Henry D Rose, chair of Blacks For Social Justice, recently compared the overwhelmingly white, often armed, anti-Obama crowds to the campaign of “massive resistance” launched in the late 50s – a last-ditch attempt by white southerners to block the racial integration of their schools and protect other Jim Crow laws. Today’s “new era of ‘massive resistance’,” writes Rose, “is also a white racial project.”
. . .
All this is being met with mounting despair among inequality experts. Extending unemployment benefits and job retraining mainly help people who’ve just lost their jobs. Reaching those who have never had formal employment – many of whom have criminal records – requires a far more complex strategy that takes down multiple barriers simultaneously. “Treating people who are situated differently as if they were the same can result in much greater inequalities,” Powell warns. It will be difficult to measure whether this is the case because the White House’s budget office is so far refusing even to keep statistics on how its programmes affect women and minorities.
Many of Obama’s defenders responded angrily: his silence was a mere electoral strategy, they said. He was doing what it took to make racist white people comfortable voting for a black man. All that would change, of course, when Obama took office. What Obama’s decision to boycott Durban demonstrated definitively was that the campaign strategy is also the governing strategy.
Two weeks after the close of the Durban Review Conference, Rush Limbaugh sprang a new theory on his estimated 14 million listeners. Obama, Limbaugh claimed, was deliberately trashing the economy so he could give more handouts to black people. “The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state. The objective is to take the nation’s wealth and return it to the nation’s ‘rightful owners’. Think reparations. Think forced reparations here, if you want to understand what actually is going on.”
It was nonsense, of course, but the outburst was instructive. No matter how race-neutral Obama tries to be, his actions will be viewed by a large part of the country through the lens of its racial obsessions. So, since even his most modest, Band-Aid measures are going to be greeted as if he is waging a full-on race war, Obama has little to lose by using this brief political window actually to heal a few of the country’s racial wounds. “
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/sep/12/barack-obama-the-race-question-naomi-klein/printhttp://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/09/obamas-big-silence-race-question
What is tantalising (and maddening) about Obama is that he has the skills to persuade a great many Americans of the justice of such an endeavour. The one time he gave a major campaign address on race, prompted by controversy over the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, he told a story about the historical legacies of slavery and legalised discrimination that have structurally prevented African Americans from achieving full equality, a story not so different from the one activists such as Wareham tell in arguing for reparations. Obama’s speech was delivered six months before Wall Street collapsed, but the same forces he described go a long way toward explaining why the crash happened in the first place: “Legalised discrimination… meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations,” Obama said, which is precisely why many turned to risky sub-prime mortgages. In Obama’s home city of Chicago, black families were four times more likely than whites to get a sub-prime mortgage.
The crisis in African American wealth has only been deepened by the larger economic crisis. In New York City, for instance, the unemployment rate has increased four times faster among blacks than among whites. According to the New York Times, home “defaults occur three times as often in mostly minority census tracts as in mostly white ones”. If Obama traced the Wall Street collapse back to the policies of redlining and Jim Crow, all the way to the betrayed promise of 40 acres and a mule for freed slaves, a broad sector of the American public might well be convinced that finally eliminating the structural barriers to full equality is in the interests not just of minorities but of everyone who wants a more stable economy.
Since the economic crisis hit, John A Powell and his team at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University have been engaged in a project they call “Fair Recovery”. It lays out exactly what an economic stimulus programme would look like if eliminating the barriers to equality were its overarching idea. Powell’s plan covers everything from access to technology to community redevelopment. A few examples: rather than simply rebuilding the road system by emphasising “shovel ready” projects (as Obama’s current plan does), a “fair recovery” approach would include massive investments in public transport to address the fact that African Americans live farther away than any other group from where the jobs are. Similarly, a plan targeting inequality would focus on energy-efficient home improvements in low-income neighbourhoods and, most importantly, require that contractors hire locally. Combine all of these targeted programmes with real health and education reform and, whether or not you call it “reparations”, you have something approaching what Randall Robinson called for in The Debt: “A virtual Marshall Plan of federal resources” to close the racial divide.
In his Philadelphia “race speech”, Obama was emphatic that race was something “this nation cannot afford to ignore”; that “if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like healthcare, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American”. Yet as soon as the speech had served its purpose (saving Obama’s campaign from being engulfed by the Wright scandal), he did simply retreat. And his administration has been retreating from race ever since.
Public policy activists report that the White House is interested in hearing only about projects that are “race neutral” – nothing that specifically targets historically disadvantaged constituencies. Its housing and education programmes do not tackle the need for desegregation; indeed Obama’s enthusiasm for privately-run “charter” schools may well deepen segregation, since charters are some of the most homogenous schools in the country. When asked specific questions about what his administration is doing to address the financial crisis’s wildly disproportionate impact on African Americans and Latinos, Obama has consistently offered a variation on the line that, by fixing the economy and extending benefits, everyone will be helped, “black, brown and white”, and the vulnerable most of all.
All this is being met with mounting despair among inequality experts. Extending unemployment benefits and job retraining mainly help people who’ve just lost their jobs. Reaching those who have never had formal employment – many of whom have criminal records – requires a far more complex strategy that takes down multiple barriers simultaneously. “Treating people who are situated differently as if they were the same can result in much greater inequalities,” Powell warns. It will be difficult to measure whether this is the case because the White House’s budget office is so far refusing even to keep statistics on how its programmes affect women and minorities.
There were those who saw this coming. The late Latino activist Juan Santos wrote a much-circulated essay during the presidential campaign in which he argued that Obama’s unwillingness to talk about race (except when his campaign depended upon it) was a triumph not of post-racialism but of racism, period. Obama’s silence, he argued, was the same silence every person of colour in America lives with, understanding that they can be accepted in white society only if they agree not to be angry about racism. “We stay silent, as a rule, on the job. We stay silent, as a rule, in the white world. Barack Obama is the living symbol of our silence. He is our silence writ large. He is our Silence running for president.” Santos predicted that “with respect to Black interests, Obama would be a silenced Black ruler: A muzzled Black emperor.”
Many of Obama’s defenders responded angrily: his silence was a mere electoral strategy, they said. He was doing what it took to make racist white people comfortable voting for a black man. All that would change, of course, when Obama took office. What Obama’s decision to boycott Durban demonstrated definitively was that the campaign strategy is also the governing strategy.
Two weeks after the close of the Durban Review Conference, Rush Limbaugh sprang a new theory on his estimated 14 million listeners. Obama, Limbaugh claimed, was deliberately trashing the economy so he could give more handouts to black people. “The objective is more food stamp benefits. The objective is more unemployment benefits. The objective is an expanding welfare state. The objective is to take the nation’s wealth and return it to the nation’s ‘rightful owners’. Think reparations. Think forced reparations here, if you want to understand what actually is going on.”
It was nonsense, of course, but the outburst was instructive. No matter how race-neutral Obama tries to be, his actions will be viewed by a large part of the country through the lens of its racial obsessions. So, since even his most modest, Band-Aid measures are going to be greeted as if he is waging a full-on race war, Obama has little to lose by using this brief political window actually to heal a few of the country’s racial wounds.
• A longer version of this article appears in the September issue of Harper’s Magazine.
- guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009
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