African Americans, Women, Workers: Barack Obama in the public imagination
Wellington, Darryl Lorenzo
BY THE TIME this article sees print, our eyes will have blurred from reading that Barack Obama, the first African American to win the presidential nomination of a major party, has accomplished a...
...Whether he wins or not, the campaign for the office of the presidency is symbolic in itself, and the issue of race heightened the Obama campaign's emotional and symbolic resonance...
...Earl Ofari Hutchinson also praised Edwards's antipoverty agenda while disparaging Obama's lack thereof in the Nation...
...Would this simple change in his biography have painted him as a Harvard-educated elitist with too few minority ties...
...Though the Obama campaign did experience consistent problems attracting white workingclass men, Bill Clinton and John Kerry had the same problems...
...He placed Wright's comments in the context of the history of racist oppression...
...But isn't the larger problem the fact that they come from a subculture in which nothing serious or difficult is asked of anyone...
...President Dilman acts purely on principle...
...The differences lay in the tenor of the times, the nature of their messages, and their respective levels of success...
...His extremely liberal (sometimes radical) platform included slavery reparations, ratification of a feminist-supported Equal Rights Amendment, and a prohibition against nuclear first strikes...
...His Harvard education was often mentioned to show innercity youth that higher education was not only for the Caucasian side of the racial fault line...
...His "change" message emphasizes the dream that America can transcend race and calls for a shift (partially generational) away from the old mind-set of divisiveness (black/white, red state/blue state) and toward a new consensus that will unite (to quote from Obama's South Carolina victory speech) "the most diverse coalition of Americans we've seen in a long, long time...
...To what extent is blackness a historical identity, a social identity, or a media construct...
...Perhaps Obama is attempting to build bridges, but the bridge evaporates in a fog...
...His other major act in office in this cold war-era novel is to defend a small, politically disposable African nation against Soviet aggression...
...Wright's innuendo that the government was responsible for spreading the AIDS virus in black communities is a radical chestnut from the 1980s...
...Could he be black...
...Obama] thinks of the many fatherless young black males on the South Side of Chicago and sees their last best hope in school reform...
...Obama's attempt to put Wright's paranoia within DECISION ' 08 the framework of history, oppression, and the general nihilism that has infiltrated American life was honest and admirable...
...However, his own campaign easily eschewed a heavily ideological "protest" tone...
...Minority poverty is the rationale behind racialized politics...
...he criticized the frustration and disappointment that can lead to what Cornel West has called "black nihilism...
...Legalized discrimination—where black homeowners 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 32 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 to future generations...
...The country heals...
...A More Perfect Union" is a benchmark in the Obama campaign, a guidepost to its generally liberalizing influence and its potentially lasting resonances...
...If you are a former president, you've got chips out there...
...Jeremiah Wright The biggest challenge that Obama faced during the primary season was undoubtedly the controversy over videotaped sermons of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright...
...Comparing left and right perspectives accentuates a point that Obama's campaign rhetoric skillfully (or guilefully) eludes...
...The story broke in March 2008, when several television news programs (most notoriously Fox news) began airing controversial tapes of Reverend Wright emoting conspiracy theories and damning the United States...
...He seems sympathetic to global trade agreements...
...Yet A Bound Man also draws so heavily from Steele's own experiences as a biracial man growing up in America that it blurs the two personalities...
...Certainly Obama has thus far "transcended" race by attracting large numbers of white voters and possibly overcoming the Bradley effect—the statistically shown reluctance of whites to vote for black candidates...
...The mild economic stimulus proposals mentioned in The Audacity of Hope—higher minimum wage and tax credits for education—hardly resolve the contradiction...
...The cynicism behind such claims shocked pundits, professional columnists, and Washington insiders...
...Such a putdown may or may not have been Clinton's intention, but Obama himself has referred to Jackson's campaigns as "a historic precedent for an African American running for president...
...BY THE TIME this article sees print, our eyes will have blurred from reading that Barack Obama, the first African American to win the presidential nomination of a major party, has accomplished a feat that many Americans would not have believed possible in their lifetime...
...Funds for his first campaign were largely collected from African American churches...
...His personal egotism was often remarked upon, and his infamous "Hymietown" remark would leave doubts that he was the right man to lead a genuinely all-inclusive Rainbow Coalition...
...The effect is a book that reads like Barack Obama as His Life Would Have Been Experienced by Shelby Steele...
...According to the article, "Let a Thousand Posters Bloom," Obama has inspired more iconography than any other politician in recent memory...
...How can Obama not have a minority empowerment agenda at least comparable to Edwards's...
...IF, IRST, WHILE remaining within the confines of an Obama-style positive message, he located the source of the present-day income gap between blacks and whites in the discriminatory practices of the mid-twentieth century...
...His popularity with Latino voters is still in doubt...
...The first paragraph nods approvingly at Clinton's welfare reform and seems to suggest that it has been successful...
...A Democrat with a transcendent message, Obama clearly does not reject that tradition...
...It peaks among voters below the age of thirty...
...Fathers are not expected to be fathers in any sense of the word beyond procreation itself...
...Nothing...
...The academic community was more responsive— mostly positive, again, with the exception of a few leftists who maintained that Obama was framing a discussion, rather than proposing correctives, as a presidential candidate should...
...Barack Obama is not the first black politician to project a less prophetic aura than Jesse Jackson...
...This is his Achilles' heel...
...But in the postsegregation era, blackness has become a heavily politicized identity within a culture of victimization and irresponsibility...
...He has my vote,' the Rev...
...The general public may still find Obama particularly striking given that the two most recent black political figures of national prominence—Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice—were Bush administration Republicans, whose party preference seemed a rejection of the civil rights protest tradition...
...American jingoism is a product of white male arrogance...
...If Obama had married a white rather than a black woman, would he have forfeited a degree of blackness, his ability to speak comfortably to black audiences...
...Vanguard black elder statesmen and former civil rights movement leaders like Andrew Young and John Lewis endorsed Hillary...
...They are black and white...
...Two decades later, Jackson's idea of participation in the democratic process still invariably finds expression in some form of protest...
...They are Democrats from Des Moines and Independents from Concord...
...he rhymed, rapped, and delivered speeches that resembled sermons...
...Obama's tone— always expressive of unity—privileges equanimity to the point that it gives up purposefulness...
...This is at once alarming and surprising...
...DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 29 DECISION ' 08 The intensely powerful symbolism of unity—particularly powerful when promoted by a black candidate—has resulted in a print deluge...
...The Blackness Debates It's difficult to believe now, but not long ago it was less than certain that Barack Obama would dominate the black vote...
...While Hutchinson mildly complimented Obama as "a good liberal," the insinuation was that his conventional liberalism eschewed the truth-to-power of black protest movements...
...The dogs bark, and the caravan passes on," goes the Arab proverb...
...It shares the company of "change" and "unity" The word that contrasts with his vision of transcendence, and which he regularly uses to refer to whatever truly displeases him, is "divisive...
...The first black American president, he believes, cannot be "bound to the anti-responsibility of the political left," as Obama is...
...Could he understand black oppression...
...I will, however, highlight two elements of the speech that received less public attention than they should have...
...This statement helps give substance to his calls for a multiracial coalition emphasizing non–race-specific or racially targeted reforms...
...Whether or not one chooses to see the campaign as a yardstick to measure the progress of race relations in America, the issue of race is woven into the candidate's message— and it will play a significant role in this (admittedly) opinionated overview of Obama's primary campaign...
...Obama responded to Andrew Young, "I think a lot of folks have long-standing relationships with Bill Clinton...
...Steele's conservative screed barely conceals his substantial personal investment in the symbolism of the first black or biracial president...
...And what are the rules in the contemporary construction of blackness...
...The May 26, 2008, Weekly Standard ran a six-page story devoted to reproductions of posters of Obama...
...That failure was due to the biases of the times—and also in part to Jackson's less appealing attributes...
...He generally adds a caveat along the lines of "But that was twenty years ago...
...Obama Perspectives In Obama's speeches, race, or "the racial politics of the past," often serves as a kind of metaphor for all ideological conflict...
...The speech received considerable commentary from pundits—mostly positive, albeit in many cases a little bewildered...
...The Man depicts a 30 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 fantasy too silly to swallow...
...Speculation over his popularity with black voters generated a plethora of articles asking, "Is Barack Obama Black Enough...
...But 2007 polls of black voters still showed Obama's popularity standing roughly equal to Hillary Clinton's...
...But he touches audiences with a liberal, unifying message, and he passes on...
...He must be a man willing to break the cycle of white guilt and black irresponsibility by preaching the gospel of black self-help...
...He must defend (or at least seem sympathetic to) government handouts and affirmative action...
...The Obama campaign was helped by the luck of timing...
...When Bill Clinton proffered the analogy, Obama advocates accused him of DECISION '08 playing race politics by associating Obama with a political has-been who was never a genuine contender for presidential office...
...Jackson said...
...it too subsides...
...Democratic candidates are talking about healthcare and raising the minimum wage, but [other than Edwards] they aren't talking about the separate and stark realities facing African Americans...
...His healthcare reform proposals are not for universal free coverage...
...Easing race tensions reminds us we are all Americans and charts a path to a third way...
...A strong "protest" position such as his antiwar stance was common to all the 2008 Democratic primary candidates...
...Though Wallace's novel has no particular literary merit, it delineates collective visions and master narratives...
...To call for "unity" is to call for centrist policies...
...His fictive black president, Douglass Dilman, is unthreatening and, by temperament, a conciliator...
...He crafts a foreign policy that isn't based upon political strategy or gain, but upon ethics...
...even the conservative National Review and Weekly Standard are fascinated by the Obama phenomenon...
...Given that the speech has been widely televised and remains available for viewing on numerous Web sites, I will not quote from the text at length...
...Still, his angry image jarred with Obama's "unity" message...
...BlackAmericans come to accept that the minority improvement bill was a sham...
...This impression is nullified by the following paragraph...
...His speaking style occasionally recalls the oracular traditions of the black church...
...the very poor, or the young and healthy who feel no need to buy health care "at affordable rates," would fall between the cracks...
...His positions can defy traditional liberal expectations...
...Christopher Hayes wrote in the December 2006 issue of the Nation, "According to a poll conducted by Scripps News Service, one-third of Americans think the government either carried out the 9/11 attacks or intentionally allowed them to happen...
...Republicans from rural Nevada and young people across this country who've never had a reason to participate until now...
...Political fealty to the wife of Bill Clinton was very strong...
...But they are both nonplussed over the symbolism of Barack Obama...
...That history helps to explain the wealth and income gap between blacks and whites, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persist in so many of today's urban and rural communities...
...His caravan of policies— which seem an odd blend of what he strongly believes and what he feels the American public can accept—has traction...
...Posters are the medium of the young...
...A More Perfect Union" left many journalists empty-handed, lacking the tools to discuss it in terms of strategic political positioning...
...Latino and Asian...
...he may not be a needle that invariably points left or right...
...Steele's psychological Rorschach can be summarized as follows: early on, the young Obama was driven by the need to forge a racial identity...
...Conspiracy theories are less shocking to Americans outside the Washington bubble than the pundits pretend (or can afford to admit...
...Mothers are not asked to raise their children within the framework of values and expectations that might prepare them to succeed in school...
...His support increases with voters below the age of forty...
...Being a minority member himself, Dilman possesses a particularly acute understanding of oppression, poverty, and exclusion...
...his campaign foreshadowed what has become a major Democratic issue...
...African Americans have about half the average household income and less than half the household wealth...
...Obama's success has depended considerably upon his ability to make his critics look stodgy, stuck in ideologies of the past, and unable to push their hefty ideological agendas forward...
...I think he's got to be more courageous in terms of highlighting issues of the poor, issues of working people, the legacies of white supremacy that are still very real...
...he tilted toward blackness, read black literature, and attempted to see the world from a black perspective...
...The arguments over authenticity and identity raised socially significant questions with practical implications for the Obama campaign...
...Steele and Reed probably agree about little...
...His antipoverty agenda is lukewarm—as are those of most mainstream politicians, but Obama has practically mythologized his desire to overcome racial politics...
...Any strategy to reduce intergenerational poverty has to be centered on work, not welfare— not only because work provides independence and income but also because work provides order, structure, dignity and opportunity for growth in people's lives...
...Would a majority of black Americans identify with Barack Obama given his untraditional background...
...I'm hoping he begins to outprogressivise Edwards...
...DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 33...
...But The Audacity of Hope also contains passages like the following: We should acknowledge that conservatives— and Bill Clinton—were right about welfare as it was previously structured: By detaching income from work, and by making no demands on welfare recipients other than a tolerance for intrusive bureaucracy and an assurance no man lived in the same house as the mother of his children, the old program sapped people of their initiative and eroded their self respect...
...Jackson offered a universal health care plan...
...A news article from March 2007 announced, "Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson said Thursday he's backing Democrat Barack Obama in his presidential bid, giving his support to a new generation of black politicians...
...It's a significant loss, given that the absence of emphatic antipoverty advocacy remains a key distinction between the Obama campaign's "change" message and the language associated with black protest movements, the Jesse Jackson campaign, or the NAACP...
...Today, reading the dated texts, we chuckle...
...In 1988, Jackson won primaries in eleven states, succeeded in having the Democratic platform incorporate a position proposing sanctions against South Africa because of apartheid, and delivered a rousing speech at the 1988 convention...
...A Bound Man is Steele's psychological map of Barack Obama, drawing heavily upon Obama's youthful autobiography, Dreams from My Father...
...Obama is where the movement is...
...Hutchinson and West both used language that revealed a degree of personal offense...
...DARRYL LORENZO WELLINGTON is a poet and critic living in Charleston, S.C...
...Obama freely acknowledged that Wright had been an important figure in his life, but it's arguable whether or not Wright's opinions were legitimate political DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 3 1 DECISION ' 08 fodder...
...He has on several occasions complimented Jackson's presidential runs...
...He supports merit-based pay for teachers...
...In a world of slash-and-burn politics, Obama clearly would have preferred not to break with Wright...
...Throughout the primaries, Obama supporters discouraged Obama/Jackson comparisons...
...His support among blacks was overwhelming...
...It was worthy of his campaign symbolism...
...Jackson suggested that Edwards's campaign (which included a vow to end poverty in thirty years) was the closest to a revival of the spirit of Martin Luther King...
...While the blackness debates raged, Jesse Jackson published a critique of the Democratic candidates in the November 27, 2007, Chicago Tribune that made no reference to Obama...
...He frequently cites his biracial heritage, moving audiences to tears with stories of his Kenyan father and white mother from Kansas...
...His simultaneous calls for "change" and "unity" jar with each other...
...Hutchinson described the ideal presidential candidate for African Americans as someone with the commitment to "combat the astro28 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 nomically high black unemployment rate, soaring incarceration rate for black men, the HIV/ AIDS plague, and failing public schools, as well as a plan for a drug and criminal justice system overhaul...
...Symbolism and Ideology Jesse Jackson's November 27 article implicitly referenced his own 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns...
...Obama's stance of being a "unifier" leaves him room to vacillate...
...Although they criticized policy differences, identity issues were not irrelevant to the critique...
...Jackson's campaign style was heavily indebted to the oracular traditions of the black church and black vernacular...
...But Obama won the argument over his personal "blackness quotient" hands down...
...Obama ultimately broke with Wright, but not before he delivered a speech addressing his minister's controversial anti-American pejoratives...
...It has become customary to refer to Jackson's two campaigns as "symbolic," but they were arguably no more, no less, symbolladen than Obama's 2008 campaign...
...But Steele is biracial and liberated...
...In "A More Perfect Union," delivered in Philadelphia on March 18, 2008, he reiterated his favorite theme that race is a stone wall and racial divisions a major obstacle to forward movement on matters of health care, school reform, and a living wage...
...He intends to double the funding for Bush's faith-based initiative...
...Clearly, the schools these boys attend are little better than holding pens...
...The story of Douglass Dilman is a comicbook vision of racial parity achieved in the wink of an eye, brought on in large measure by goodwill and social integration...
...But this is a fantasy not irrelevant to the push behind Barack Obama...
...For Democrats (and, I hope, a majority of independents), it's the politics of falling in love...
...So Obama the politician must perforce make a "Faustian pact" with the liberal democratic establishment...
...He puts his foot down (for the good of the country) when he vetoes a "minority improvement act" that sounds suspiciously like a slavery reparations bill...
...Jackson's candidacy was a response to the hard right-wing swing of the Reagan eighties...
...But the speech was considerably less dreamy and unspecific than his earlier addresses...
...As in any love relationship, there's the next step...
...Wright was in no way officially connected to the Obama campaign...
...Obama's appeal is in large part generational...
...But we need to admit that work alone does not insure that people can rise out of poverty...
...And I know he's got to be a politician about this, on one hand, because he's got a larger constituency, but...
...it has played a role in the reporting on his campaign, particularly during the Jeremiah Wright contretemps...
...Second, I would mention the magnanimity of the speech...
...The Harvard-educated Obama—himself the best evidence that in America hard work pays off—remains a bound man, living a lie, leading a specious unity campaign that would only have real value if it preached a conservative doctrine of personal responsibility...
...The two paragraphs may not be overtly contradictory, but they come close to it...
...Coming from a presidential frontrunner, the mere acknowledgment of the historic basis of the black/ white income gap was ground-breaking...
...They exposed the tenuousness of race and class identification in the twenty-first century...
...The candidate DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 27 DECISION ' 08 was the son of an African immigrant, not a descendent of African slaves...
...He was born in Hawaii and raised in Indonesia...
...rich and poor...
...His "Rainbow Coalition" was ideologically driven in the way that protest movements are...
...Alarming, because if tens of millions of Americans really believe their government was complicit in the murder of 3,000 of their fellow citizens, they seem remarkably sanguine about it...
...The article went on—like many others—to ask whether Jackson's endorsement would help Obama win black voters...
...Consistency would require a third paragraph explaining how Clinton's reform needs to be adjusted or offering a sharper plan for how these impoverished women can help themselves...
...Obama's early years abroad—not living the socalled black experience—fueled the discussion...
...His stated ambition was not to lead a campaign exclusively representing black minority interests, but rather to unite blacks and white progressives, women, youth, farmers, gay, lesbian, and other issue-oriented groups in a push against Reaganomics...
...Further proof of the intense symbolism of the Obama campaign can be found in one of the most noted—and curious—of the outpouring of Obama books, Shelby Steele's A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win...
...It's easy to scoff at Obama's inspirational influence, but in this case he rose to the occasion...
...They are young and old...
...Critics from the left—most notable among them Adolph Reed—look at the intense faith Obama-ism inspires and see a slick distraction whose amorphous rhetoric muddies the real meaning of progressive politics...
...The racial divide seals...
...he remains a polarizing figure...
...Barack Obama is the Adlai Stevenson or the Robert Kennedy of his generation...
...Obviously, I disagree with [Young and others], or I wouldn't be running...
...By grounding his positive message in historical realities, he incorporated protest into his positivism—which lent considerable weight to his calls to forgo "the old racial politics of the past...
...Too often the absence of any mention of power dynamics (or the absence of any tone of protest) can leave Obama's most inspirational speeches with a hollow center...
...or "How Black Is Obama...
...How can any program that sends mothers into the workforce unprepared, and forces them to leave their children hungry at home, deserve a thumbs up...
...A somewhat excessive rush to focus on cultural identity resulted in an excess of touchy-feely journalism rather than creating an opportunity to incisively contrast Obama and Edwards and to narrow Obama down on an antipoverty agenda...
...it has also swelled the ranks of the working poor, with women churning in and out of the labor market, locked into jobs that don't pay a living wage, forced everyday to scramble for adequate child care, affordable housing and accessible health care, only to find themselves at the end of each month wondering how they can stretch the last few dollars they have left to cover the food bill, the gas bill and the baby 's new coat...
...We're suffering twice the level of unemployment and twice the level of infant mortality...
...A1964 POTBOILER by Irving Wallace, The Man, described the administration of our first black president...
...Though his campaign performed respectably, Jackson never succeeded in convincing large numbers of the electorate that his Rainbow Coalition was more than a dandied-up protest movement...
...His elegance, his silver tongue and its poetry, his analytical acumen (at his best), and his multicultural background—it's like love...
...Across America, welfare reform has sharply reduced the number of people on the public dole...
...But he moves—emotionally and politically...
...Obama's second, more policyoriented book, The Audacity of Hope, offers a few, promising examples taken from Obama's Senate career of his ability to forge "new," that is, compromise solutions—most notably his success at passing a law that will monitor police conduct when questioning subjects...
...The poster plethora reemphasizes what the polls already show...
...Dilman's blackness both purifies and restores the American dream...
...If anything, the personal rather than political framing of the "Blackness of Obama" discussion helped the candidate by deflecting attention from the Obama/Edwards policy differences...
...Cornel West chimed in: "I'm in Obama's camp, but I think he's got to be more bold...
...Obama may not be an ideological politician...
...And the schools DECISION 08 themselves are not expected to educate...
...Though Wright's conspiracy theories are laughable, they're less uncommon than the public forum acknowledges...
...Obama simultaneously cast himself as black and postracialor, better, as a black candidate looking toward a postracial future...
...his secondary objective was to wrangle the Democratic Party into adopting elements of his platform...
...Obama is a bound man...
...In other words, Jesse Jackson was a false prophet of the eighties—not Martin Luther King come again, but a self-ordained Moses leading the people (mostly black) through a political desert...
...Yet his campaign symbolism has precedents—one in particular is interesting...
...but given that Jackson had endorsed Obama a few months earlier, it implicitly criticized him by praising candidate John Edwards's strong antipoverty agenda...
...The images inside included (unsurprisingly) a Messiah Obama...
...After the blinding dazzle, it's time for the business of getting to know the loved one— the nitty gritty, the surprises, the gray areas...
...The details of his third way are often left vague, but his tendency is to downplay ideological differences— hence the potency of a favorite word in his lexicon...
...The prospect of the election of a black messenger of "change," pushing a tepidly reformist social agenda, threatens to supplant grassroots solidarity movements and hopelessly confuse the debate over class, race, and poverty...
...Race played a role in the forging of his consensus message...
Vol. 55 • September 2008 • No. 4
