Losing Our Innocence
For more than three decades, the staggering evidence of racial stratification in America has been met with stubborn indifference, denial or irritation. Black leaders who have raised issues of inequality in the post-civil rights era have been consistently dismissed as hucksters or paranoics, regardless of the content of their claims. Obama initially was able to avoid these kind of caricatures by downplaying divisions of any kind, and claiming to have left the conflicts of the 1960s behind. But a racially-obsessed nation combined with the statements of Obama’s afrocentric pastor have pushed him to confront a split in his own political life between the reconciling identity he represents to the country and the black nationalist political culture on Chicago’s Southside. Instead of casting off either side, he attempts to resolve the split by metaphorically merging the body politic with his own. In doing so he does not subsume black claims for justice, but rather makes them integral to a renewed national purpose.
By mapping his genetic heritage onto the national heritage in the Philadelphia speech, he can use this racial pluralism writ small to re-interpret and thus alter the negative view of the Reverend Wright.
Obama denounces Wright’s particular claims, and yet does not fully place him outside the bounds of credible political discourse. Rather, he affirms Wright’s anger and disenchantment as part of himself and, therefore, part of America. By embracing Jeremiah Wright, Obama transforms him from the media’s cartoonish image as a antiAmerican black supremacist to a biblical Jeremiah who participates in a long tradition of calling the nation to live up to its founding ideals.
Obama denounces Wright’s words to be sure, but gives ample credibility to many of his claims by highlighting the institutional history of exclusion and disenfranchisement that reverberate in black America today. This is indeed a marked shift for Obama. Recall that at his national debut the 2004 Democratic National Convention he praised the New Deal in general and the Federal Housing Authority in particular for having given his white grandparents a leg up after World War II. In the recent Philadelphia speech, however, he condemns the FHA for its racial exclusions, which foreclosed the possibility of black homeownership or the intergenerational accumulation of black wealth. This account of the racial contradictions at the heart of the New Deal has great power to explain enduring racial hierarchies in America, and yet heretofore it has been entirely absent from mainstream political discourse - particularly among liberals who lament the demise of the New Deal coalition but turn a blind eye to this central piece of the story.
Obama comes full circle at the end of the speech then by raising questions of economic class in regard to healthcare. He offers a moving story of an alliance of an older black man and younger white woman in his campaign over shared concerns, and does so with greater credibility because of his refusal to subsume the specificity of racial injustice to a larger story of interracial unity. This move itself represents an important advance in the national conversation about race. The deeply lodged problems of racial and economic inequality are inexorably tied together, and must therefore be broached together.
Obama, I should say, has not done that work. He has sided with corporate interests in the Senate on far too many occasions to list here (although no more so than Clinton). And he is quick to pathologize black culture in a manner that would make the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan swoon (indeed, there are strong elements of it in this speech). But the realities of racial inequality he reveals and the aspirations he alludes to may push him along, or even move past him. Political rhetoric can have a way of slipping the leash and opening doors to unintended consequences.
Going forward, there are many issues to address. To pick an important one though, I think there is a profound and growing de-politicization of race in the United States that has to be addressed. In particular, there are two trends that appear to travel in opposite directions and yet are mutually supportive. One is the dominance of colorblind ideology, which most recently underwrote the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to strike down school desegregation programs in Seattle, WA and Louisville, KY. This ideology represents a denial of extent racial hierarchies and their imbeddedness in American institutions and culture. The second is a dramatic re-biologization of race in the last decade. An emergent ideology of genomics, looking startlingly like the scientific racism of the late 19th century, has reintroduced racial categories to explain differences in behavior; health, both physical and mental; and yes, intelligence. Its reach stretches from the New England Journal of Medicine to Slate Magazine. As Adolph Reed Jr. has pointed out, the seductiveness of genomics is that it provides a soothing alternative to deeply entrenched political and economic problems. Together, colorblindness and racial genomics allow us to wish away entrenched racism in the political sphere only to re-locate it in DNA. The devastating political effects of colorblindness are everywhere to be seen. The political implications of racial genomics are chilling to contemplate.
The obstacles to a meaningful conversation about race are numerous. The biggest, I think, is a profoundly distorted historical understanding of race in this country, which has had the effect of shifting race from a set of political concerns to a set of cultural, social and penal ones. As Obama’s speech suggests, a meaningful conversation about race – whether it concerns education, segregation, affirmative action, poverty, welfare, imprisonment, or anything else – will require a thoroughgoing re-examination of US politics since from the end of World War II to the present.
Contemporary questions about racial inequality must first account for the ways that people of color were shut out of the basic New Deal provisions and entitlements that kept white America afloat in the wake of the Great Depression. Scholars such as Michael Brown, Thomas Sugrue, Daniel Kryder, Ira Katznelson and others have pursued these questions, but there has been little popular discussion of this as of yet. Our understanding of the post-civil rights era and the rise of conservatism in particular requires much closer scrutiny as well. The myth of racial backlash, or the story that whites were inevitably driven into the arms of the Republican party by excesses of black politics and crime the 1960s must also be deconstructed. That story has authorized not only racist antistatism on the right in the last three decades, but also the racially-inflected imperatives of the Democratic Leadership Council since the early 1990s. Naomi Murakawa, Nikhil Singh, and others have taken up this question. It is central to my own work as well.
Ultimately, our ability to make progress in racial politics will require that white Americans begin to challenge themselves to think honestly about race. James Baldwin once said that steadfast belief in your own innocence can make you a monster. Let’s hope that Obama’s extraordinary speech in Philadelphia can help America lose a little innocence.
The points made here are not too clear, a bit too much jargon for the short time span of thirty years.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan benign neglect and Truman's ending of segregation in the military and the New Deal privisions are not enough.
If you started with DuBois and Washington and attached them to Myrdal with a pinch of C Wright Mills, you would have my undivided attention. A bit of Nakruma and Kenyatta would not be too bad either, Fanon had a few interesting thing to say also. For a taste of the creative try Ellison, Baldwin and Achebe. Of course their are others , but have not thought about these in thirty plus years; i.e., I see little new here.
It seems to me you have touched the surface a bit; collectively, their was never any innocence to loose.
March 31, 2008 6:07 PM | Reply | Permalink
. . . a meaningful conversation about race . . . will require a thoroughgoing re-examination of US politics since from the end of World War II to the present.
In 1980 the youngest Boomers were 16 years old; the time frame is, thus, ancient history, a political period for which today's voters cannot (will not allow themselves to?) be held responsible for. Voters aren't about to pay reparations. So ---
What of U.S. racial politics over the last 25 years or so must be reexamined and which regulations and enactments must be revised?
March 31, 2008 8:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Ellen,
You believe that going back to World War II (let alone the Civil War!) for context and understanding of race in America is unreasonable because it is "ancient history." Part of the problem with this country is its unwillingness to have a memory longer than one generation. Oddly, it is also one of its strengths. The fact that so few Americans have enough familiarity with our relatively recent history is a scandal.
Clearly, it is possible to have too long a memory, but the most shocking example of what I'm talking about came earlier this year when the White House Communications Director (! ! !) admitted to not knowing what happened during the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is 15 years more recent than WWII!
Since, as a people, we don't remember where we've been, we're not bound by it. That can be a plus. Not remembering or referencing the past lets us psychologically "turn on a dime" as a nation. On the other hand, national amnesia has two HUGE minuses. First, we don't remember our past mistakes, so we can't avoid repeating them, and second, if we don't how the U.S. of the present day came about over time, we are more vulnerable to people who will fill in the blanks with demagoguery.
A good example was all of the Bush references to our role in World War II during the lead-up to Iraq. The Bushies were always going on about how we took a valiant stand against Hitler, and it was the same thing all over again with Saddam. How many people in this country even know that before we got into the Second World War, Hitler and his allies had conquered Czechoslovakia, Norway, Holland, Greece, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Yugoslavia, Poland, Luxumburg, Belgium, and France, and had waged an air war against England? THEN we got into the war, AFTER Germany declared war on us. But to hear Bush tell it five years ago, we were out front all the way in defeating Hitler, right from the start. That was part of his rationale for going after Iraq. Who called him on it?
March 31, 2008 9:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
. . . and most of western Russia.
Knowing history's moral errors generates no impetus to the correction thereof. For that one looks only to one's personal "history" -- and occasionally, to the "history" of one's cohort for which one may feel a certain responsibility. But that's the extent of moral responsibility! Only God dare punish the seventh generation!
And if we want to talk about societal fairness -- poverty, education, health, physical safety and financial security -- as we should, we don't need to talk about "history".
April 1, 2008 12:02 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think this a great post and am grateful that TPM is sponsoring this conversation.
I especially love the James Baldwin quote about belief in one’s own innocence. A false sense of innocence around race has really held back the conversation.
I think that false innocence has helped sustain the myth of the white backlash: “White voters, liberal politicians, and an ebullient media cheered along the Civil Rights Movement as it confronted a few backward white southerners. Then came black power movement with it’s in-your-face rhetoric and whites turned against the movement.” But the opposition to the civil rights movement was wide and deep all along. What look like laughably temperate positions today were greeted with scorn and finger wagging—‘You’re moving too fast!’—back then. The white backlash began long before 1968. (For anyone interested in getting a sense of the broader white response to the MLK and the Civil Rights Movment, I recommend Taylor Branch’s Parting the Waters and Harvard Sitkoff’s recent King: Pilgrimage to the Mountaintop.)
As for Senator Obama, I have qualms about aspects of his voting record and various positions (as I do about Senator Clinton). Nevertheless, his speech on race was substantive enough to persuade me that voting for him represents a great opportunity.
April 1, 2008 10:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Before assessing Obama's compromises as a candidate on the campaign trail, it's a good idea to acknowledge that the New Deal and even some elements of LBJ's Great Society were borne of political compromises with racists reminiscent of the U.S. Constitution's original compromise with slavery.
In all of these cases, powerful Southerners had to be placated if any Constitutional provision or statutory legislation was to pass. As a Democrat, FDR had to play ball with "the solid [Democratic] South," whose senators and representatives chaired many of the important committees. The hope was that at least New Deal programs would draw together, in a kind of public solidiary, the fractious white-ethnic camps (which were still called "races," as in the Slavic race, the Hebrew race, etc.) that, in those days, were suspicious of one another and united only against blacks. Well into the 1950s, Senator Jack Kennedy courted and compromised with segregationists; it was Richard Nixon, a member of the "Party of Lincoln," who was a card-carrying member of the NAACP.
To understand better just what kind of compromises the political situation required of politicians who hoped to survive in it and to deflect it somewhat toward better ends -- in other words, to to distinguish wise strategies from a futile politics of moral or ideological posturing -- some American historians might benefit from the perspectives of the British historian Anthony J. Badger,
http://www.amazon.com/New-Deal-South-Anthony-Badger, who studies the New Deal and the early civil-rights movement. /dp/1557288445/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1206021400&sr=1-1
Badger doesn't succumb to the apolitical Marxist simplifcations that have crippled so much well-intentioned anti-racism and sent it down to defeat after defeat, as in the over-racialization of congressional districting, a blunder I chronicled in Liberal Racism.
Another such blunder, which I chronicled in The Closest of Strangers, came in the 1970s, when the Federal Housing Administration abruptly introduced to inner-city neighborhoods the same mortgage guarantees it had offered to whites in suburbia. Inner-city speculators knew what to do: Like the predatory lenders of our own time, they deliberately sold housing to poor, naive minority buyers, bribing FHA inspectors to certify their creditworthiness.
The sooner default came, the better; the speculator would collect his mortgage insurance from the government, which would foreclose on and board up the property. That would induce remaining white homeonwers to sell for a song to speculators whose songs were scary, indeed -- warnings of impending decay and total loss if the owner didn't sell now. Then the price would be jacked up for more federally insured sales to unqualified newcomers.
The problem wasn't just that FHA inspectors were corrupt. It was also that the decay -- the soaring crime, and the soaring foreclosures -- were real. Liberal elected officials and, in cities like New York, ideologically driven leftist activists, often encouraged and even accelerated these drastic shifts by virtually shipping welfare families into nearby apartment buildings in the name of integration, even giving awards to the speculators who welcomed them in order to hasten the abandonment of their buildings in order to collect the insurance.
There were investigations and convictions, but ther real sentences were meted out to the neighborhoods. By the mid-1970s, some of them were burning, becoming virtual prisons of traumatized welfare recipients, reeling in rage and despair.
Stilted academic exhortations to "deconstruct" descriptions like mine don't help us to understand how ideologically and self-righteously motivated people wound up collaborating with opportunists in the real-estate industry who fanned racist fears for short-term, government-subsidized gain. Market forces are amoral, and the social currents they ride and accelerate are so swift and deep that it is folly to challenge them simply by shouting about racism. Especially now, when capitalism is proving more subtle and protean vis a vis racism and sexism than even its conservative defenders ever expected.
The constraints Obama faces as he struggles to position himself amid these crosscurrents have to be understood against this backdrop of past blunders. How and when to confront racism matters a great deal: Moral witness, organized protest, and court fiats are indispensible elements of a broad strategy, but if they are brandished in the midst of a campaign like this one, they fail. For Obama, de-politicizing race is not only a necessity but a big tactical step forward toward racial justice.
April 1, 2008 10:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
But didn't the ideology of colorblindness itself come out of the civil rights movement? It seems to me that a lot of whites had the impression up until about the late 80s that the civil rights movement was about treating everyone the same regardless of color.
I don't think this is necessarily true. It represents a denial of the notion that the social construct of race is so deeply embedded that it cannot in some future time be removed from our society. And I think most whites accept this as valid goal for our country and are willing to look at racial hierarchies and the embeddedness of racism as a means toward moving to that goal.
But it's unclear from a lot of the statements of the African American community that the goal of eliminating the social construct of race is one shared by blacks. The argument seems to be for maintaining the separateness of the black community rather than allowing the long-delayed process of assimilation take place.
And that I think is the crux of the current "racial stalemate," that Obama refers to.
Genomics is not an ideology. It's a field of study examining the human genome, and I think your characterization gets the science wrong. Just because it determines that there may be genomes associated with intelligences doesn't mean that it determines that those genes are exclusive to people of a particular skin color or ethnic background. The science of this is a great deal more nuanced on these subjects than has perhaps been expressed in popular media. But the fact that the press may draw conclusions where science would not should not be used to tarnish a whole field of study.
What's ironic is that you couple this genomics argument with what you call the colorblind ideology even though your characterization of genomics (not the actual science) is in fact a challenge to the colorblind ideology because it challenges the notion that color shouldn't matter.
April 1, 2008 11:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Civil Rights was never about color blindness -- it was about taking a clear-eyed look at what our society had done in the name of racism. It was about recognizing that it takes more talent and ambition to obtain the same SAT score if you have obtained it going through a slum school and dodging drive-by shootings and drug dealers than does obtaining the same SAT score as a coddled upper class white American without the emotional impact of such challenges in the struggle merely to survive and tutored where needed.
It is about recognizing that Condi Rice's grandfather who had more talent, ambition and character than most others of his generation -- black or white -- could not have competed for a slot in college on the basis of his attainments. Instead he was given a slot restricted to blacks -- segregated colleges amounted to set aside slots. The problem was that the education they provided was not equal.
When we can say with a straight face that we provide equal resources to both races, then we can start constructing a color blind society. But until we can send out the same resume with both black and white photes and obtain the same results we have no business claiming that we are or can be colorblind.
I look forward to a society in which skin color is as vital as hair color and ethnic background is of interest in the same way Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm's Swedish background is of interest.
But until that future Utotpia is reached the pretense of color-blindness is to enforce the tragic legacy of inequality in this country.
April 2, 2008 9:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
Actually, if you look at the rhetoric being used in court cases and in other public venues in the early 1960s, what you will see is that colorblindness was not uniformly and exclusively used by those seeking to destroy segregation. In fact, segregationists as early as 1961 or so were enthusiastically calling for colorblindness to prevent proactive policies by the states and federal government to address the concrete policy-based legacies of decades of Jim Crow governance.
The source of the idea, at least in legal doctrine, goes back to the briefs in Plessy v. Ferguson, but the authors of those briefs were attacking policies precisely for their targeted and denigrating messages. Both they and John Harlan, the Supreme Court justice who brought the phrase into our lexicon, tied it to the demand that the state open its eyes to the insidious historical legacy of badges of slavery, not the prospective dream of a blind state.
But the larger question I have for folks who buy into dual claims of innocence and history's not mattering is the following: at what precise date and time do you identify the end of history? 1954 with Brown? 1965 with the Voting Rights Act? The Nixon Administration's embrace of affirmative action? Clinton's signing PRWORA in 1996?
April 1, 2008 12:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
One can go to great lengths to understand Mr. Obama's racial plurality by hearing and absorbing Mr. Obama's Philadelphia speech. Or one can listen to the words of Obama's long-time pastor, "important mentor" and (until recently) member of the Obama campaign's religious advisory council that made that speech necessary. One can hear sound bites of Jeremiah Wright, followed by sound bites of Obama saying he could no more renounce Wright than renounce his own grandmother (whom he later described as a "typical white person") whose racist remarks make him cringe. Or one can attempt to be swayed by a thirty-seven minute speech aimed at voters and superdelegates in an attempt to extinguish a political firestorm. What do Americans tend to do most often? Engage in deep philosophical analysis, or go for the obvious?
April 1, 2008 1:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
All this talk of "reexamination" and having a conversation about race, etc... is getting pretty old and worn out and it accomplishes nothing. I'm sick of hearing people preach about various prescriptions for "racial inequality" and so on.
Naturally, the intellectual approach requires lots of flowery discussion of ideas, origins and meaning, etc... in order to truly worthy of an essay of great import so what I've got to say won't qualify but here goes...
Racism exists and has existed in America since before we became independent. While the extent and degree of racism has changed, it is still a profound negative influence in the lives of all black people in the United States. Having money or a good job does not completely exempt black Americans from experiencing the ongoing outrages of racism, but those things are a start. For those black Americans who are poor, the continuing violence of racism and it's long history in our country is an actively malignant force that must be put to an end with every possible effort by our government and those of our people who are not racists themselves.
The number one thing we can do is to support those policies at the federal, state, and local level that are designed to eliminate poverty and provide support for those with low incomes. Racism's most pernicious effect is to keep so many human beings trapped in poverty which is a corrosive and harmful state.
The sort of programs we need to fight poverty would include social services of course, but also a national minimum income, increasing the earned income tax credit by expanding eligibility to include people who don't have minor children but are working and poor and making the benefit bigger. It would include a guaranteed job for anyone willing to work. Yes, that would, at least in part, mean jobs programs like those that worked so very well during the New Deal. Raising the minimum wage to a a livable level nationally and indexing the minimum wage to inflation and the cost of living so increases are automatic and we never again see Congress neglect the needs of people who depend upon the minimum wage as we saw for so long during Republican control of Congress. This will also put mild upward pressure on all other wages which helps the working class people. Strengthen the ability of organized labor to organize workers and form unions so that working people have a real voice in the workplace. Fully fund the educational needs of the low income families nationwide and institute a national class size policy that keeps the student/teacher ratio in every classroom low enough to optimize the education children receive. Dramatically cut the obscene military budget of the United States which now exceeds the annual military spending of all the other nations on earth combined. These military cuts would provide all the funding we need for the kinds of programs mentioned above and more. Develop and pursue housing policies that provide affordable housing in all communities so that the poor are not zoned out of "nicer" and safer communities where schools are better and amenities like parks, day care, camps, and so on are more accessible.
These sorts of things would be a good start (and I emphaasize the word start) to addressing the problems racism continues to cause in the United States. Once we've provided decent education and jobs for all and guaranteed that no American will live below a certain standard of living we can worry about the conversation. For now, let's focus on getting something done for those who need help. They don't want sympathy, they want relief from oppression.
Of course, that's just my opinion. Others, I'm sure will think differently.
April 1, 2008 1:38 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oleeb, while I agree that a much more meaningful commitment to an anti-poverty policy agenda is crucial, I am reading your post to suggest that 1) "winning" LBJ's "war on poverty" would also mostly eradicate racism and 2) we don't really need to worry about past history to figure this out. Surely, class and race are deeply intertwined in America, as social science research has shown. But race is simply not reducible to class.
If you want to win a "war on poverty," I think you have a better chance if you understand why previous efforts to ameliorate poverty have succeeded . . . and failed. To give just one example, there isn't nearly as much abject poverty among the elderly in America as there was in 1925. Yet poverty that is linked to race in complex (as well as simple) ways, like poverty among urban public housing dwellers and single mothers, persists. I don't see how you untangle this dynamic enough to intervene productively without considering the racialized history of anti-poverty (and other) policies in the US.
April 1, 2008 2:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
The responses to my initial posts have given me a lot to chew on: and more than I have time to comment on at the moment. But briefly:
As for the question that Ellen raises about history: without recourse to it, we’re stuck with other explanations for race and class inequality that obscure the nature of the problem. For some commentators, genetics comes to the fore to explain these differences. For others, cultural pathology in poor communities is the answer. We are left with a collective shoulder-shrugging that says the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts fully addressed the legacy of racism long ago – what more could anyone want? But if as Julie Novkov suggests, we look at the way that political institutions and actors have wittingly (and often unwittingly) promoted patterns of segregation, urban poverty, unequal schooling, racialized imprisonment rates, etc., we will be in far better shape to confront these problems.
As for Jim Sleeper’s comments: you are right that the New Deal’s racial exclusions were largely the result of compromises made with Southern Democrats, and that this was the set of contradictions LBJ had thrust upon him. I take this up at great length in my book “From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the southern Origins of Modern Conservatism.” I don’t criticize Obama for avoiding race – indeed I commend him in my post for having taken it up in such an incredible way in the Philadelphia speech. My criticism of him is that he has yet to confront questions of class or corporate power in meaningful ways (yet), because as I said these questions have to be taken up together.
But nevertheless, I think that there has been a strong belief among certain liberals and leftists that black radicalism destroyed an otherwise great New Deal coalition, and thereby opened the door to Reaganism. It wasn’t black radicals who caused the crisis, it was the problematic nature of that coalition itself. Yes, we can understand the compromises made by liberal democrats in those years, but surely it is wrong to lay the rise of conservatism at the feet of those who pushed hard for racial justice. Indeed, conservatives had been hard at work framing a political language that linked racism to economic conservatism long before the 1960s, as Monoxidil says in her or his post. As I said before, it is this belief in the inevitability of white backlash in the ‘60s that helped not only the rise of the right, but the rise of the DLC, and all the harsh law-and-order, anti-welfare and pro-corporate policies that this group of conservative democrats made happen.
Finally, I think that Oleeb is absolutely correct that we have to begin dealing more much more seriously with questions of wages, of fully funded education, affordable housing and the like, but these alone won’t ameliorate the deeply structural and cultural forms of racial stratification in US society. More is required.
April 1, 2008 4:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
I appreciate Lowndes's analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of Obama's speech, which I think is one of the best speeches on race from a politician in years. Lowndes usefully points to welfare liberalism's complicity with the racial order in the U.S., and how the problem can't all be fobbed off on (take your pick) racist conservatives, bleeding heart "liberal racists" who have nurtured Black pathologies, resentful Reagan Democrats, or angry Black men. Rather, our racial problem stems primarily from the everyday operations of the normal agencies of a liberal society: schools, bureaucracies, courts, and markets.
But what has struck me is how little decent discussion there has been about Wright's comments, which I think had a lot of truth to them. Following a long line of Black nationalist thinkers from Delaney to Crummell to Garvey to Du Bois to Malcolm X, he sharply (and largely accurately) notes just how central white supremacy has been in shaping American political and social life, and how whites' continued interest in and expectation of favored treatment continues to distort American politics, particularly attempts to create strong working class movements. (For contemporary examples, witness the significant white support for Ward Connerly's anti-affirmative action referenda and for anti-immigrant nativism, as well as general white indifference to the racial ramifications of Hurricane Katrina.) Even when Wright veers into conspiracy theory or outright error, his is still a voice that needs to be listened to rather than denounced and distorted. It's to Obama's credit that he didn't do that in his speech.
If we really want to talk race in this country, then it can't just be a debate among liberals and conservatives. Black nationalist and other critical perspectives on race have a long tradition in the U.S., and they need to be included in any such conversation.
April 1, 2008 7:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
The initial post by Lowndes and subsequent responses has made for a rich discussion, a provocative pleasure to read.
I too was impressed with Obama's speech, and for me it pointed to what I had always thought was a flawed bit of conventional wisdom about his candidacy; that Obama had to avoid addressing race directly, or politicizing race in any way, for fear of alienating most of the electorate. That he seemed to abide this seeming wisdom was one of the factors that led me to be rather ambivalent about his candidacy (the other being the compromises he has made over the years, noted already by others). But with this speech, Obama has offered a path (or at least an attempt at one) to address race directly, with more subtlety than usually occurs at the national/presidential level, based upon some degree of legitimate historical context.
The fact that at the moment his candidacy is more than viable, if anything he seems to have picked up some steam since then, may indicate that this conversation can indeed be carried forward. Still, of course, the electoral fallout is something we cannot predict now – and the predicting game has already proven to be a fraught, flawed game to this point – but what we may be seeing is an opening to have a conversation about race that tries to peel away from what I think Lowndes accurately claims is a mistaken argument about the seeming naturalness of white backlash of the 1960s and beyond. This backlash argument has been a debilitating one intellectually and politically; serving to shield the racial order from critique and provide a ready response for those who seek to repel efforts to move racial politics, critique and discussion forward. If his speech and potential candidacy starts to help us shed the weight of that historical myth then in and of itself it will have proven to be a positive development, as it will require that we then engage a less facile discussion of race, and not fear its politicization. This is no easy path, of course, but it is a better one than we have been on in the last 30-40 years by my account.
Finally, I just want to second Olson’s point about taking serious account of other critical perspectives. If this conversation about race is limited by the parameters of seemingly legitimate American political discourse (usually framed around nationalistic and classical liberal terms and presumptions) then this will place clear limitations on what we can imagine accomplishing in the effort to challenge and upset the racial order. That being said, Obama’s speech is a step in the right direction in my opinion.
April 2, 2008 10:13 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks for this considerate reply -- to all of us! One of the things I liked about Obama's Philadelhia speech was his frankness about the depredations of capital (the shuttered mills, the predatory lenders, etc.) as more worthwhile to talk about than the Rev. Wright's sermons. I think that Obama revealed a lot about himself in shifting the burden that way and that it was refreshing to see him do it.
I agree that racism is deep, ubiquitous, and grinding, even now, although I do think that there is a sea-change underway among younger Americans. It's difficult to disentangle the threads of class and race when analysing what it is that holds people down, so, in my view, there is the question of what to emphasize, and in what context, and when. Some people -- conservatives as well as "identity politics" leftists -- get stuck on race in ways that a moment's thought will show cannot be Obama's path as a candidate.
SO, yes, let's take account of critical perspectives usually excluded by the parameters of seemingly legitimate American political discourse, but let's also recognize that Obama has chosen to be not a critical theorist or activist but an elected official who has to work within the discourse as it is now, awful though it is, and to find shards of it on which to stand long enough to point beyond. It's a very different role than an historian's or a Martin Luther King's, much less a more militant historian's!
April 2, 2008 10:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
It seems to me that part of what distinguishes what we think of as great political discourse is that it does not accept the discursive frames as givens, seeking rather to generate new ways of thinking and talking about long-standing problems. This needn't be the sole province of liberal transformative efforts -- Ronald Reagan was a master. But I must disagree with the idea that elected officials cannot also be critical theorists.
Perhaps it is not Obama's aim to push the discourse this far himself. But his willingness to open the conversation may build some space in which we can move beyond a narrow and binary debate between standard liberal viewpoints on race and the prevalent conservative mode of colorblindness. And Obama, as Joel Olson points out, accomplishes something not just by speaking, but by listening.
But I wonder about the sense I get from some of the discussion that it is somehow much easier and less controversial to tackle the political and power-laden implications of poverty than race. This doesn't resonate with my understanding of American history, even setting aside the complex relationship between class and race over time. I am all for a serious political agenda that addresses the growing gap between rich and poor in the United States. But if critical analysis of power relations based on class is to be interposed as a rhetorical device to 1) divert our attention from real and irreducible structural racial inequality and 2) ultimately to serve only as a diversion and not as the foundation of a policy agenda to address structural inequality based on wealth -- which is an agenda that has not received much serious attention over the course of US history -- then I want no part in it.
April 2, 2008 5:26 PM | Reply | Permalink