While I think Barack Obama has done a good job walking the tightrope of racial politics in America, I get the feeling that he is heavily constrained by racism and racial stereotypes. This was one of my reactions to the now famous speech–it is always important to think about what is, and is NOT being said. For the record, I think the speech was good as a political speech, but as a speech about race in American it was so heavily constrained by the politics of racism that there were some important points that Obama omitted. Furthermore, the reactions to the speech steer discussion in some unfortunate directions, which is where most of my critique lies. Now before anybody gets upset at me for saying this, I don’t blame Obama for the subsequent discussion of his speech. My critiques are not about the man as an individual, they are about racism and racial politics in America.
Let me start with some things I agreed with and liked about the speech. Obama (and the speech writers because I’m sure there were some) asserted that we don’t talk openly and honestly about race in America. I think that is true–people either tend to deny the realities of racism and or they exaggerate, stereotype, or misrepresent when it comes to our differences.
I also agree that history has created a great deal of racial baggage that we carry around with us as people. Moreover, there is an acknowledgement in the “speech on race” that these effects linger in the form of institutional racism. Check out these few paragraphs (I referenced the text from Daily Kos.):
Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.
Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.
A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.
This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.
But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.
With the exception of the comment about welfare policy, which echoes Ronald Regan, I think these are pretty bold statements for a politician to make. Of course, they are not quite as bold when they are framed as products of past discrimination rather than products of both past and present discrimination, but given the conservative nature of political discourse, I can live with it.
A Few Critiques of the Speech and Reactions to It
The comment about Obama’s white grandmother has been pulled apart and parsed by pundits, most of whom don’t have a clue about the dynamics of interracial families. Later, in discussing this speech Obama described his grandmother as the “typical white person” and the same pundits went crazy. These pundits expect people to be racially consistent and they cringe at the idea of whiteness being discussed in any way that is not exceptional1. In the pundits’ minds, people can’t change their racial views over time, and they can’t hold contradictory views. In reality, that’s exactly how people are when it comes to race. I highly suspect that Obama’s grandmother is typical of most whites in her generation–they grew up with racial segregation both legalized and informal segregation as the norm and didn’t much question it. Furthermore, intermarriage was illegal in many states during the much of his grandmother’s lifetime. Although Obama has never spoken about his white grandparents reaction to his parents marriage and his birth, we know from surveys that during the early 1970s the vast majority of whites opposed interracial marriage and this opposition was still very strong even into the 1990s, when whites were asked about a family member intermarrying. So it would be the least bit surprising if she had negative views of interracial relationships and black people. It’s pretty clear that, like many white relatives of interracial couples and biracial people, Obama’s grandmother loved him and cared for him, and she held stereotypical views of black men. That should not be hard to believe because it is the norm in many mixed race families, and in many people in general.
What bothered me about this part of the speech and the subsequent discussion of the racial dynamics of Obama’s family life is that I got the distinct impression that the underlying message Obama and some of his supporters were trying to convey was, “Hey, don’t forget; I’m/he’s white too” or “I’m/he’s not as black as you think I am/he is.” To me that was a really sad revelation about the current state of racial politics in this country.
What made this worse was when it devolved into a common stereotype of mixed race people that I have discussed in the past (here and in papers I have presented at conferences). The myth involves the belief that mixed race people are 1) signs of progress and 2) potential saviors who will somehow liberate us from racism because they understand “both worlds.” On numerous occasions, people have treated Obama in this way. They have viewed his mixed race heritage as something that bestows him with supernatural abilities, specifically the ability to transcend race and heal old racial wounds. Having a mixed race family doesn’t not necessarily give an individual a special understanding of race, and being monoracial doesn’t preclude someone from being able to united diverse groups and develop an understanding of what it is like to be from “another race.”
I don’t totally blame Obama for reminding people that his mother is white–that is politics. Obviously, his campaign thinks it will help him, and they are probably right about that. I just don’t like the handful of narratives that we have developed about interracial families and mixed race people. While the old narratives about tragic mulattos, the one drop rule, and sexually adventurous interracial couples are misguided, some of our new narratives–”the best of both worlds” and “the supernatural biracial uniter” are also misguided.
In the next post on the Obama speech, I’ll address two other problems I had with the speech and the reactions to it. The 2 critiques/points are related to the following points 1) Are white “resentments” and black “anger” really equivalents? Does the two way street anaology really work? 2) Why does “Working Class” mean white in our political discourse? And what does it say that we single out white working class resentment (racism)?
Open Thread…About the Presidential Election
from Rachel S. @ Alas, a blog 06 May 2008 12:55 pm