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. When faced with the challenge he cast off either side and subsume black claims for justice rather than make them integral to a renewed national purpose.
By mapping his genetic heritage onto the national heritage in the Philadelphia speech, he could have used 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 places him outside the bounds of credible political discourse. By embracing Jeremiah Wright, Obama would have transformed him from the media’s cartoonish image as a antiAmerican black supremacist to one 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 and denied the ample credibility to many of his claims by highlighting the institutional history of exclusion and disenfranchisement that reverberate in black America today. Is this 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. He had however momentarily condemned 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 and then raised White supremacy for decades after to the extent that outstripped anything since the end of slavery- and had far greater and lasting reprecussions than even Jim Crowism.
A few scholars 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.
White Americans have other pressures in our modern post industrial, debt burdened and corporate elite dominated economy and political structure. In the lack of leadership and the denial of insight it is probable that whites will be given- or lead, to shifting blame to blacks and other minorities.
Blacks will have reached the final point in their political nightmare, the arrival on the national stage of the black demagogue who has twisted black hopes and energies towards personal and corporate political ends.
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.
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