by va
Look, I know how you blog addicts surf around, refreshing all the blog pages, anxiously awaiting the moment when all the blogs collectively and simultaneously put up joyful blog posts about Bush Imprisoned or Administration Resigns or The Last Seven Years Have Actually Been A Bad Dream & It’s Finally Safe To Chill Out, but I got nothing to talk about right now but old shit. Two-week-old, ancient shit: that Obama speech about his position vis-à-vis assorted YouTube clips of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, compiled in the tradition of the Dean Scream, John Kerry’s “botched” joke, etc.
Now, it was horribly predictable what our Konservative Kommentariat would have to say about it, less predictable what the white bourgie troop of masturbating monkeys that is our national media would have to say, and still less, I thought, how credible leftists would take it. Not so very well, it seems. And that’s fair enough; I get it: Obama’s rhetoric is full of conciliatory stuff that has people worried he’s inclined to sell out the Democratic base and at worst, paper over racial injustice with a lot of feel-good hot air; and yes, surely one of the aims of his speech was to flatter the white bourgie press and bourgeoisie generally. It seems to me, though, that the Wright speech doesn’t offer hard evidence that Obama wants to ignore racism and its history, nor evidence that Obama reads the state of the nation in a very different way from any given staunch liberal.
The overarching complaint I’ve heard (IRL; no link) is that Obama described as “distorted” the idea that “white racism is endemic.” The gesture here may seem anti-progressive, some version of the conservative claim that our society isn’t racist. But the choice of the word “endemic” there is pretty neat, actually. He’s not saying that racism isn’t widespread or prevalent; he’s saying that racism isn’t “in the people,” not a part of their essential makeup. That’s something I think we can all agree on (otherwise, why fight it?).
In fact, that’s a basic blogosperic tenet: racism isn’t the essence of the people but a divisive “Southern” strategy that aims for 50% + 1, more or less successfully put in play by GOP candidates since the mid-late sixties, and it seems to me that it’s that history, and not the history of American racism writ large that Obama wants to "transcend." (Incidentally, I think all claims that Obama wants to get “beyond” race itself or that he is a “post-racial” candidate are basically sheer media fabrications, and I wish we could just put a moratorium on those words.)
Obama’s strategy in that regard is, as I see it, to invert the Southern Strategy. That is, rather than make racism the basis for a bunch of other populist claims for Victorian “moral values” and shit, I think Obama is staking out a populism that elevates a host of other demands that cut across race, going so far as to claim that racism will be alleviated if and when those demands are met. In fact, I think his “race” speech wasn’t really about race at all: as I read it, he sets it up so that racism is “really” about economics.
Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle-class squeeze -- a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many.
In other words, Dear White People: Black people do not present the problems Lee Atwater made you think they do. Not a bad gambit as a way of neutralizing race as a political issue (and two weeks later, we haven’t heard from the Geraldine Ferraros of the world).
The terms in which this not-very-grand, not-awesomely-inspiring speech should be debated among progressives, then, are probably economic terms. Will checks on corporate power help poor and middle class white and black people equally? Will an Obama presidency mean a lower Gini coefficient and a straighter Lorenz curve, and will that alleviate racism? I’m not sure, but I do assume that they would alleviate black poverty (24.2% of black people were below the poverty line in ‘06; 8.2% of white people were, for those keeping score). But I leave that to the experts to figure out.
Obviously more questions remain, since racism’s material impacts are not only economical. But surely it’s a mistake to take Obama to task for silencing black radical voices. For one, I don’t think he was doing any such thing, and for another, it seems to me that American black radicalism will have to revise some of its assumptions in the event of an Obama presidency, anyway. But shit, I’m just a white kid who went to a fancy prep school (and don’t let Thers tell you otherwise!), so what do I know.