Monday, August 29, 2011
Race, Class, and Obama
By Clarence Lang
In his latest book, The End of Anger: A New Generation's Take on
Race and Rage (Ecco), published in May, the journalist Ellis Cose
argues that middle-class African-Americans are uniquely optimistic
about the future. A few months later, however, the Pew Research
Center disclosed that from 2005 to 2009, the racial wealth gap had
reached a record high, with wealth falling by 53 percent among
black households. That news arrived as President Obama and
Congress brokered an end to the debt-ceiling standoff, laying the
groundwork for deficit cuts that will disproportionately affect
black Americans. Meanwhile, prominent voices in the black public
sphere have been urging African-Americans to defend Obama against
his detractors. How to reconcile Cose's optimism, Pew's findings,
and the appeals of African-Americans to circle the wagons, even as
Obama appeases Republicans by sacrificing black constituencies and
interests? Simply put, you can't.
The dissonances of the past few months indicate how class
complicates black politics. African-Americans have traditionally
perceived their fates as linked, so for some, the thinking goes,
public criticism of Obama undermines the collective interests of
the black community. This view, expressed recently by the Rev. Al
Sharpton and the radio personality Tom Joyner, reflects the
anxiety and optimism of striving black professionals, many of whom
regard the president as a symbol of black middle-class triumph.
But their insistence on keeping quiet, however well-meaning,
carries dangers that black-studies scholars are well positioned to
highlight and critique.
To do so, we need to take a look at how race and class have shaped
the Obama phenomenon from the beginning.
As the sociologist Jennifer F. Hamer suggests in Abandoned in the
Heartland: Work, Family, and Living in East St. Louis (University
of California Press, 2011), Obama's presidential campaign unfolded
during a calamitous period for most African-Americans, beginning
with the disenfranchisement of black voters in the 2000 elections;
the deprivations exposed by Hurricane Katrina; and a staggering
black jobless figure that is more than twice the rate for whites.
According to "The State of America's Children," a 2011 report put
out by the Children's Defense Fund, nearly 40 percent of black
children in America lived in poverty in 2009. Predatory loans,
turmoil in the housing market, and the scaling back of
public-sector professions has now begun to erode the black middle
class.
Class and race provided a subtext to Obama's campaign. Projecting
an image of black middle-class respectability, Obama understood
that displays of emotion, especially anger, put him at risk of
being framed as a thug. (Note how the Republican presidential
hopeful Michele Bachmann has used this tactic, referring to his
administration as "gangster government.") Paradoxically, Obama's
opponents also used his Ivy League credentials, cerebral manner,
and air of relaxed confidence to accuse him of being, in Georgia
Rep. Lynn Westmoreland's words, "uppity"—a term historically used
by whites to disparage African-Americans considered too smart or
successful for their own good.
But Obama was not simply the object of race and class anxieties.
He strategically employed them, too. As Thomas J. Sugrue notes in
Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton
University Press, 2010), Obama admonished African-American
audiences for their overreliance on government and their
dysfunctional child-rearing. This rhetoric was aimed at white
television viewers, who wanted proof that Obama could get "tough"
with black people. Yet he was also drawing on a heritage of black
"racial uplift," whereby black middle-class professionals assume
stewardship of the poor masses—lifting them on their backs as they
climb the ladder of racial progress. Those African-Americans who
applauded Obama's words weren't castigating themselves; rather,
they were making clear that they don't engage in backward
behavior, while acknowledging that others in the community were in
need of uplift. Obama's performances were, moreover, consistent
with the Democratic Party's overall swing to the right.
The narrative of racial uplift was reinforced by the Black
Enterprise magazine publisher, Earl G. Graves Sr. In a widely
circulated essay, he asserted that Obama's victory proved that
black youth had "no more excuses" for not succeeding. From Booker
T. Washington's Up From Slavery to The Autobiography of Malcolm X,
faith in perseverance and victory over adversity have been
mainstays of black narrative. Obama's election confirmed that
belief, and Graves echoed it. Yet Graves's message, intended as
motivation, nonetheless implied that poor blacks were to blame for
an economic debacle they did not cause.
Since then, as the right has challenged Obama—sometimes with crude
racist mockery, cultural "othering," and political caricature (as
in the case of an Orange County Republican official who
distributed an e-mail to party members depicting Obama's head on
the body of an ape)—entreaties from within the black public to
defend the president have grown more boisterous. When Mark
Halperin, of Time magazine, used a vulgarism to describe the
president, Tom Joyner published an open letter blaming Tavis
Smiley and Cornel West—both outspoken critics of Obama—for
contributing to an environment in which white journalists feel at
ease slurring a black president. By throwing brickbats at Obama,
Joyner suggested, Smiley and West effectively legitimized white
racism.
Such denunciations capture what Ellis Cose—in an earlier
book—characterized as the rage of a black privileged class.
Scorned and marginalized in their own professional lives, they
identify with Obama as a symbol of self-affirmation. Yet this
attitude threatens to distort black discourse at a crucial moment.
Emphasizing Obama's heroics prioritizes personal charisma over
collective ability and wisdom. Why is the president more deserving
of support than members of the Congressional Black Caucus and the
Progressive Caucus, a number of whom have lobbied against Tea
Party Republicanism, pressed for jobs programs and
public-investment initiatives, and refused to vote for the
draconian debt-ceiling compromise? Of what value is the
president's virtuosity if it bolsters a longstanding liberal
retreat from issues of racial and economic inequality? What good
is his "cool" if it masks, as the entertainer and civil-rights
veteran Harry Belafonte has claimed, Obama's lack of moral courage?
From the black-convention movement of the 19th century to the
freedom struggles of the 20th, the African-American public sphere
has been the site of robust exchange about the state of black
America. Neither black interests nor anyone else's are served by
making the president an exception.
During the Southern Christian Leadership Conference's 1965
Selma-to-Montgomery campaign for black voting rights, when Martin
Luther King Jr. turned marchers back at the Edmund Pettus Bridge
to avoid disobeying a court injunction, grass-roots activists
regarded the act as a betrayal and took King to task. Their
disapproval helped push King to higher planes of political
consciousness. Likewise, Obama must be held accountable for his
missteps. As class and similar intraracial dynamics continue to
complicate black opinion, and as scholars of the black experience
persist in seeking historical and interpretive meaning in Obama's
presidency, the need for such engagement grows ever more acute.
Clarence Lang is an associate professor of African-American
studies and history at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign. He is author of Grassroots at the Gateway: Class
Politics and Black Freedom Struggle in St. Louis, 1936-75
(University of Michigan Press, 2009), and co-editor, with Robbie
Lieberman, of Anticommunism and the African American Freedom
Movement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN
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