August 28, 2012
Fear of a Black President
As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.
Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic:
The irony of President Barack Obama is best captured in his comments on the death of Trayvon Martin, and the ensuing fray. Obama has pitched his presidency as a monument to moderation. He peppers his speeches with nods to ideas originally held by conservatives. He routinely cites Ronald Reagan. He effusively praises the enduring wisdom of the American people, and believes that the height of insight lies in the town square. Despite his sloganeering for change and progress, Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere is his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravity—race.
Part of that conservatism about race has been reflected in his reticence: for most of his term in office, Obama has declined to talk about the ways in which race complicates the American present and, in particular, his own presidency. But then, last February, George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old insurance underwriter, shot and killed a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman, armed with a 9 mm handgun, believed himself to be tracking the movements of a possible intruder. The possible intruder turned out to be a boy in a hoodie, bearing nothing but candy and iced tea. The local authorities at first declined to make an arrest, citing Zimmerman’s claim of self-defense. Protests exploded nationally. Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea assumed totemic power. Celebrities—the actor Jamie Foxx, the former Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm, members of the Miami Heat—were photographed wearing hoodies. When Representative Bobby Rush of Chicago took to the House floor to denounce racial profiling, he was removed from the chamber after donning a hoodie mid-speech.
More here.
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 09:31 AM | Permalink
Comments
I really liked the piece by Coates.
One of his fellow columnists wrote "The Startling Accuracy of Referring to Politicians as 'Psychopaths'" (The Peak of Sanity - 5).
Posted by: Dredd | Aug 28, 2012 9:57:14 AM
What's Jesse Jackson doing in the picture?
Read:
Shakedown: Exposing the real Jesse Jackson.
Posted by: Félix E. F. Larocca, MD | Aug 28, 2012 12:14:45 PM
I would cut Obama a lot more slack on this. I'm confident that his deeper feelings reflect more traditional black activist ideals, and one day he may be in a better position to express himself honestly on these issues. But he is the first black man in America to have made it to the inner sanctum. Look at the veiled racist attacks he is already facing, and try to imagine how much worse they would be if he had been taking clear positions on racial issues over the past 4 years. No black activist has ever been in this position and been forced to make these kinds of political decisions.
The author writes, "whatever the [racial] politics, a total submission to them is a disservice to the country." I submit that it would be a greater disservice to the country, and to the black community, to allow himself to become a one-term president regarded as a failure or a mistake.
Posted by: Eli | Aug 28, 2012 12:36:12 PM
I didn't see where Coates was being particularly hard on Obama, more pointing out the reasons why the president would be so reticent.
Coates does an excellent job documenting how much, and how recently, being recognized as a contributor to the American conversation has involved being non-black. When tea party activists say they want their country back, we know what they mean.
Posted by: Ken Pidcock | Aug 28, 2012 4:59:17 PM
These lines strike me as very moving...
...Any black person who’s worked in the professional world is well acquainted with this trick. But never has it been practiced at such a high level, and never have its limits been so obviously exposed. This need to talk in dulcet tones, to never be angry regardless of the offense, bespeaks a strange and compromised integration indeed, revealing a country so infantile that it can countenance white acceptance of blacks only when they meet an Al Roker standard. And yet this is the uncertain foundation of Obama’s historic victory—a victory that I, and my community, hold in the highest esteem....
Coates' article insures that the issue of race will not be left out of the conversation. This is a preemptive blow at that "you're playing the race card" trope. Damn right. That line is the new "some of my best friends" argument meant to change the subject. But write this down: the subject will not be changed in our lifetime. Anyone thinking otherwise needs to get over it.
Posted by: John Ballard | Aug 28, 2012 5:30:34 PM
I would go further, John. I would say many whites are quite comfortable with remarks about the president "not cutting it." I think whites have other idioms for giving a negative evaluation to whites. The suggestion that a black person "is just out of his depth" is a special form of racism.
Any reader over 30 may not be individually guilty of making this connection of thought and language, but they will not live long enough to see the end of it. My father, a lawyer in Texas who tried to get far beyond the thinking of his era, and who died young in the 1960s, used to say there might be a black president by the year 2000, but that people would elect him more easily than they would tolerate him presiding.
That Romney, who was in his 30s by the time his hate-filled church elders decided blacks could be priests, and so was born and raised a racist in a bigger way than many of us, should play on this is behavior hideous beyond describing, and fully worthy of the kind of sneer he himself reserves for, say, a gay teenager whom he throws to the ground, whose long hair he shears off.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Aug 28, 2012 6:15:55 PM
Amen.
And it is no accident that he selected Paul Ryan to join him as VP. Both are shackled by what I call toxic vows, born and reared in a bubble and constitutionally unable to break out. Win or lose I feel bad for both of them.
http://newhogarchive.blogspot.com/2012/08/poisonous-vows.html
Posted by: John Ballard | Aug 28, 2012 8:49:58 PM
The reaction to the tragedy was, at first, trans-partisan. Conservatives either said nothing or offered tepid support for a full investigation…The moment Obama spoke, the case of Trayvon Martin passed out of its national-mourning phase and lapsed into something darker and more familiar—racialized political fodder. The illusion of consensus crumbled.
Meh. That initial consensus started fraying quite rapidly, not in some special and fateful moment. The idea that people tepidly or otherwise paid lip-service to Martin's cause, then all hell broke loose once Obama got in, this is plain silly. Obama was asked to comment on a local police issue once it had already become a national controversy. This idea that the consensus crumbled because a black president spoke up falsifies what we know. And the original consensus frayed in significant measure because the liberal side overreached, doctored Zimmerman quotes and 'white hispanic' being the most obvious examples. The fact that Zimmerman killing Trayvon was immediately construed in the media as being about a white man lynching a black boy, instead of as a local judge saving his son from prosecution, already to me suggests there was plenty of blame to go around for the escalation of acrimony on the case.
Also, there's lots of tea party talk. But everyone on the left offers what Coates would call "tepid" acknowledgement of the fact that Herman Cain nearly did become GOP nominee drawing from a tea party base. But then promptly ignores that and charges right on. I notice that Coates, in a several thousand word piece about race in the age of Obama, didn't even see fit to refer to Cain.
Posted by: prasad | Aug 28, 2012 10:01:38 PM
...used to say there might be a black president by the year 2000, but that people would elect him more easily than they would tolerate him presiding.
You had a very astute father, Elatia. That scenario is much closer to the truth than even many liberals who voted for him in 2008 would be willing to admit.
Posted by: Ruchira | Aug 28, 2012 11:26:33 PM
Ruchira, being Southern, John Ballard and I learned to look at our own programming for these nasty bugs very early. For my part, I assume an attitude with a racist whiff IS racist until I can prove otherwise. Very disappointingly, sometimes that attitude belongs to me. Unlike a lot of Easterners and those in the Far West, I have had a chance to push through this hideous material to the other side. There are indeed many liberals who don't know themselves that well, because these were not the problems that plagued the society they grew up in. Also, there are quite a few young adults that do not understand this aspect of growing up in the 60s -- they think because they don't personally have the problem it cannot be as powerful a force as it is. As long as people 40 and up are still here, young adults ought to try to understand us, for they will become us.
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Aug 29, 2012 2:08:42 AM
As a Millenial, growing up in Oakland not all that long ago, I was always struck by how little overt racism there was in the Bay Area. I thought that my mother didn't have an intolerant bone in her body. She was your typical upperish-middle class, white, SFBay Area liberal, always talking a good game and often even willing to pay for it by voting to increase her own taxes to help public schools. Of course she sent us all to private schools for much of that period but it seemed to be despite the point at the time. We couldn't receive a good enough education at Oakland Unified, the explanation went, and in many ways she may have been right.
Fast forward to the end of high school, when I got kicked out of the private school for disciplinary reasons, ended up at a public school where I was suddenly the minority, and. . .I bring home an African American girlfriend.
You have to understand, we were taught to be colorblind in that era. I dated her because I was young and in love, and race had nothing to do with it. It wasn't even an afterthought. I couldn't possibly have expected it to be in an issue with my mother, the self styled liberal.
Within a half hour of my girlfriend's departure after meeting my mother for the first time, my mom accused me of buying from and using drugs with the girl I had just spent 3 hours studying chemistry and holding hands with. Her 'evidence': "You seem way too smiley and out of it".
After my initial shock the subtext became obvious. She was fine with racial equality when it's virtues were extolled in the OP-ED pages, but not when it was in her own house.
Forgive me for rambling, but I suppose my point is that the over the top stuff is horrible in its own right, but even the 'good ones' in the boomer generation are thoroughly poisoned.
Ironically, my redneck republican Dad defended the young woman before I even had a chance to, and he WAS occasionally overt about his prejudices.
They both voted for Obama. And will again. And by most definitions, they are both racist.
Posted by: DrunktankDan | Aug 29, 2012 5:49:28 AM
Wonderful, wonderful story! If you haven't seen Sidney Poitier, Spencer Tracey and Katherine Hepburn in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? you're in for a happy treat, as is anybody else who has yet to see it.
http://youtu.be/GXzT7od_aiI
My own parents bit their tongu more than once when I was growing up, having moved from Kentucky to Georgia when I was twelve. They hadn't been confronted with hard-core Southern prejudice until then and that's partly what vaccinated me against it. But when I was drafted and about to be sent to Korea my otherwise tolerant mother made it a point to tell me not to come back with one of those Korean girls. "We don't want any half-breed grandchildren in the family." I was shocked at her bigotry but by then had outgrown the need to be confrontational. But I never forgot.
Posted by: John Ballard | Aug 29, 2012 1:43:05 PM
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/carnegie/timeline/timeline2.html
quoted from the link above:
“1835
Carnegie born.
Andrew is born in Dunfermline, Scotland, to Margaret and Will Carnegie. Will Carnegie is a skilled weaver, and the Carnegies are one of many working-class families in Dunfermline. A younger son, Tom, is born in 1843.
1847
Steam-powered looms used in Scotland.
After steam-powered looms are introduced in Dunfermline, hundreds of hand loom workers are unemployed, including Andrew's father Will.
1848
Carnegies emigrate to US.
The Carnegies settle in Pittsburgh, and Andrew begins work as a bobbin boy in a textile mill, earning $1.20 per week. He later takes a job in a factory tending the steam engine and boiler, for $2.00 per week. He impresses his supervisor with his penmanship and is offered the chance to work as a clerk for the factory.”
Young Andrew worked for about a penny per hour. He supported the entire family because his Father never obtained work as a loom operator again even in the U.S.
In about the next 50 years Andrew Carnegie was the richest man in the world. Before his death he donated most of his vast wealth for the benefit of mankind and humanity by creating cultural institutions and libraries all over the planet. Many are still in existence and often are the most magnificent buildings in town.
This is the story of America then and now.
The time is long ov erdue for some folks to get their minds off the past and go to school and prepare themselves to make the same contributions to society the other great citizens like Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and so many others like them did, under enormous adversary and hardship too.
Everyone has a fabulous opportunity today. There is no excuse for some folks squandering their life producing more babies which others must pay for rather than producing ideas and wealth for their own benefit and the benefit of others.
Many citizens are getting tired of the lame excuses as repeated again in this worthless article.
Name a single accomplishment of our President which earned him his place? The main reason he was elected was because most folks were fed up with the Supreme Court “elected” former president Bush. They would have voted for anyone. Race had nothing to do with it.
The time is long overdue to treat all persons based on the quality of their character, not the color of their skin as Martin King suggested. Our President has had more than his share of indulgence due to his skin color and political correctness, not any great accomplishment. After all most of his background is a carefully guarded secret.
It is very unlikely you will ever read a post describing the enormous list of accomplishments of Andrew Carnegie to America on these prejudiced blogs.
Posted by: w.j.abbe | Aug 29, 2012 3:18:05 PM
@w.j.abbe I don't know who you are but you are way out of your depth. Carnegie is possibly the least appropriate example to argue your point. He had nothing but contempt for those he called "selfish millionaires." Our closest contemporaries to Andrew Carnegie are Warren Buffet and Bill and Melinda Gates, all of whom have pledged to give away most of their net worth.
Carnegie was an outcast among his wealthy peers because he believed, among other disagreeable notions, that the duty of those who become very rich during their life was to find some way to return their wealth to society before they die. This endorsement of a heavy estate tax underscores the point:
The budget presented in the British Parliament the other day proposes to increase the death-duties ; and,most significant of all, the new tax is to be a graduated one. Of all forms of taxation, this seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for - public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire's unworthy life.
Cherry-picking history to make a point can be very misleading. You may want to do more homework, starting with a closer look at Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth.
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/rbannis1/AIH19th/Carnegie.html
As for Coates' article, it's probably best you skip posting about it altogether. Your comment reminds me of the drunk looking for his lost wallet under a streetlight because it was too dark to find it over there where he dropped it.
Posted by: John Ballard | Aug 29, 2012 4:49:20 PM
By now this comments thread is buried, lost in the archives. But if I don't post this timely link it won't be complete.
http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/news/AUG3012.pdf
Posted by: John Ballard | Aug 30, 2012 8:39:46 PM
Thank you, John! I always click on your name when I see it!
Posted by: Elatia Harris | Aug 30, 2012 9:37:22 PM
How thoughtful, Elatia! Thanks.
Do 3QD comments trigger a notice to you automatically or do you just keep some sort of OCD bookmark file? :)
Some comments threads have a "heads-up" feature to notify all participants as new comments appear, but I'm not aware of that for 3QD. I'm hoping the new makeover will have such an option.
Posted by: John Ballard | Aug 31, 2012 4:11:19 AM
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