If Not, WHY Not? And If Not, Is That A Good Thing?
The prolific blogger shanikka wote a piece today (Sunday, 1/6/08) titled A Black Woman’s Musings on Coffee with Dad, Racism, and Barack Obama. It appeared on a number of blogs, including dKos, My Left Wing and her own blog, Maat’s Feather and it was in answer to a dKos post titled Coffee with Dad.
Shanikka’s essay is very long and more than worth a read, but I cite it here only because it got me to thinking about what is happening regarding Barack Obama’s recent almost landslide-like success in Iowa and…much more importantly in terms of the possibility of his securing the Dem nomination and/or the Presidency of the United States…in the media coverage of that success and of his candidacy in general..
So far, the dominant meme regarding Mr. Obama is that he is the first person of color to reach a position of front-runner for that nomination. Some approve of this situation, some do not, and some are reserving judgment. Many of those who do not approve cloak that disapproval in code words and elisions, this being the PC century and all. Many others resist his candidacy for other reasons as well…lack of experience, relative youth, personal ambition, etc.
Shanikka’s article has to do with the hidden racism implicit in the post that she is criticizing, which was basically about a so-called “liberal” white woman’s conversation with her (at least subliminally) racist father regarding the Obama candidacy.
But shanikka’s post got me to thinking.
About race, about self-limitations of all sorts, about the real reasons…aside from the accidents of historical flow…for Obama’s success so far, about the resistances that he is encountering from several sides of the political spectrum and about why so many who are NOT normally involved in politics to any great degree (the so-called “uncommitteds”) are greatly attracted to him and to his candidacy.
Read on if you so desire.
Here is the basic question that we must face if we are to see Obama’s candidacy clearly.
Is he a “black” politician? Or is the total sum of his effort greater than that?
We all…ALL of us…have to get past race if we are going to get anywhere here.
Get past race as a primary identifier. Just as we must get past sexual orientations, class and cultural affiliations, religions or lack thereof, nationality or any other partial identifiers which tie us down to a preconceived set of notions about right and wrong, good and bad.
I mean…is Hillary Clinton a “white”politician? Is that who she is?
Is she a female politician?
Is John Edwards a white politician?
A southern politician?
A male politician?
How about Rudolph Giuliani? Or is he just an Italian politician?
Is Joe Lieberman a Jewish politician? Or just a two-faced Republican mole. (Sorry…couldn’t resist.)
So why must Barack Obama be a black politician?
And all of these obsessive-compulsively imposed modifiers are driven by one thing and one thing only.
Our own self-identifiers.
The need for an attitude adjustment of this sort is especially true for the elite.
The leaders.
The gifted ones.
Because if they…may I be so bold as to say in some sense “we”, seeing as how those of us who spend hours every day trying to think and feel our way to the bottom of this mess are at the very least a small minority of committed souls who have been gifted with enough intelligence to see that something is indeed fundamentally wrong with what is going down here…if we do NOT try to rise above our own entirely accidental positions in the warp and woof of society then all that we are really doing is proposing alterations to the condition of who is the oppressor and who the oppressed.
It’s OUR turn now, motherfuckers!!! Move the fuck on over!!!
And the screw just keeps on turning…
An internal position of this sort is much harder to achieve for members of groups of people that have suffered long-term oppression than it is for members of the oppressor groups. Harder for people whose history includes gross injustices done to themselves, to their loved ones, to their ancestors and to others with whom they identify and brothers and sisters. But that adjustment MUST BE MADE. By all of us. Too many people in all positions of society throughout the world awaken in the morning and immediately…upon their first conscious set of thoughts…crawl into a box with a big negative label stuck on it.
OPPRESSED JEW!!!
FUNDAMENTALIST CHRISTIAN!!!
OPPRESSED BLACK PERSON!!!
CONSERVATIVE RICH!!!
OPPPRESSED POOR WHITE!!!
RIPPED OFF WORKING CLASS!!!
ANGRY FEMINIST!!!
ABOUT TO BE ELEVATED TO PARADISE JIHADIST!!!
PUT-UPON WHITE MIDDLE CLASS WAGE SLAVE!!!
And on and on and on and on and on.
Straight downhill.
But that adjustment must be accomplished if we are to be able to see things clearly.
If there is ANYTHING that appears to me to set Barack Obama above his peers…and I do not care which group of “peers” you wish to consider, from people of color right on through Harvard-educated lawyers and national politicians…it is that he gives the impression (to me, at least) that when he wakes up in the morning his box is WAY bigger than that of most people and that it has next to no negative labels on it.
In fact, it appears to me that it is a box that is labeled, if anything:
HUMBLE RECIPIENT OF AN ENTIRELY ACCIDENTAL PLACE IN HUMAN SOCIETY THAT MAY ACTUALLY ALLOW ME TO DO SOMETHING SUBSTANTIVE ABOUT HOW FUCKED UP AMERICA HAS BECOME AND THUS DO SOME GOOD FOR ALL OF HUMANITY.
In this he seems to me to share the kind of box that was inhabited by Robert Kennedy, who also seemed to have been able to get past his upbringing and his dumb luck in having been brought up smart, rich, committed and powerful.
May Mr. Obama’s fate be more merciful.
Why do I write this in reply to shanikka’s essay here?
Because almost the entire leftiness AND rightiness reaction to Obama’s candidacy has been about the attempt to put him in a box in which I do not believe he lives.
Not anymore he doesn’t.
To approve or disapprove of his candidacy based on the positions of our our own self imposed boxes.
We are all born into various boxes, but it is beginning to appear the Obama has managed to grow out of his own ancestrally delineated goddamned box, and more power to him.
The right wing…and I include in that category when dealing with racial matters WAY more than the 30% of the population that continues to give G. W. Butch positive poll numbers, including any number of DemocRats…sees him as a “black” politician, complete with all of the disapproving, racist code words that have appeared in this lovely era of imposed-from-above-PC.
“Affordable housing”, “welfare”, “equal opportunity”, “unelectable”, etc…we all know the drill.
It was easier when racists called a spade a spade. At least then it was clear who needed a shovel upside the head and who didn’t.
The left…especially many black leftists…seems to often see him as some sort of a modern Uncle Tom.
PROFESSOR Tom.
LAWYER Tom.
POLITICIAN Tom.
SENATOR Tom.
OREO Tom.
Not sufficiently involved with the problems of “his people” Tom, etc.
Duke Ellington, a prophet and seer in racial matters as he was in matters musical (His whole life was an illustration of the concept of “As above, so below” in perfect action.), was once told by a white interviewer that he was a “credit to his people.”
Duke’s immortally gentle answer? Sitting at a table wearing a beautiful dark red silk smoking jacket and sipping an espresso? This grandson of slaves? This black man who grew up when lynchings were often not even covered in county newspapers in the south because they just weren’t important enough news compared to hog futures and the market price of cotton?
“Which people do you mean, exactly? Claret drinkers, perhaps?”
Not that he ever in ANY way denied his blackness. (See the “Black, Brown and Beige Suite” that was premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1943 (!!!) for all you need to know about that.) Just that he rose way above the negative aspects of forced confinement to that particular box.
Mr. Obama is approaching Ellington-land.
And more power to him.
Maybe we HAVE reached that Promised Land of which Martin Luther King Jr. spoke.
Or…maybe we have not.
We shall soon see.
Stay tuned.
Meanwhile…y’all continue to try to climb out of your OWN little boxes.
And have fun doing it.
I am.
May you be born into interesting times.
A Chinese curse?
Or a blessing in disguise.
We shall soon see.
Bet on it.
We shall VERY soon see.
Later…
AG
Recommend this post if you want others to be able to read it.
Flame it if you can find reasons to do so.
Use tips as shorthand if you are too lazy and/or too busy to say any more.
I’ll be here…
AG
The fucking country to which I belong is still toooooo racist to elect a Black candidate, even if half of his genes are Caucasian. How disturbing this is for me to admit. I really want to believe that we are now over the eras of slavery and Jim Crow. Not so I’m afraid. The only hope that I have comes from Al Hunt, the journalist, who believes that Obama’s Iowa win was the consequence of a grand mea culpa from the white community for just that history, which all Black candidates bring to any election.
But the south and even the border states are still too racist, and it would put McCain into the presidency.
Democrats haven’t won southern states in years, so waht’s the big deal? We wouldn’t get their votes anyway.
The rest of the country can handle it, and I think people will not base their decision on the color of his skin, but on whether he matches what they want to see America become.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Obama carry a whole LOT of southern states that have been red fore decades.
There is a functioning working and middle class black infrastructure throughout the south that has not yet really flexed its national electoral muscle. Due to disbelief in (and disillusionment with) the sincerity of the Democratic power structure?
I think so, myself.
Obama at the top of a ticket?
That particular iceberg will reveal its hidden 6/7ths. ESPECIALLY in the south and border states.
Watch.
AG
The south is gone, granted. It is the border or quasiborder states that give trouble, like Ohio and Indiana, and even Arkansas, and others.
Never forgot an interview of Senator Hollings on the southern states when he left his Senate seat for good: all the Black people are in the Democratic party; all of the white people are in the Republican party. This breakdown, relatively speaking, holds as you move north. I’ll never forget the Reagan Democrats in Michigan whose sole role was to vote against Black Detroit.
So racism in my mind continues to be a problem. Has it receded enough to become a nonfactor? I don’t know. I am waiting to see whether McCain decides to make the pilgrimage to Bob Jones University in SC, as Bush did in 2000, in order to stimulate the racist vote.
You aren’t wrong, racism is alive and well. But it’s not just (or even primarily) black, it’s brown, cafe au lait, people with strange accents, strange eyes, or non-traditional family structures. Funny thing; most of the worst offenders have already clustered in the Republican party. They aren’t likely to vote for a woman, someone with more-than-average skin melanin, or even someone whom Ann Coulter calls “gay.” So not an issue.
What you forget is that within the decade, the majority of Americans will be “black, brown, cafe au lait, people with strange accents, strange eyes, or non-traditional family structures.” George Bush won the majority of Arab Americans in Dearborn, and at least 40%of the Hispanics. They aren’t blind any more. Frankly, they are “mad as hell and not going to take it any more.”
My hesitances to jump on the Obama train are two: First, he does tend to over-think issues. It’s hard to put his positions on bumper stickers. The Republicans have dumbed down our NCLB electorate so much that they won’t listen to that kind of answer any more. And second, I worry about his safety. Because the bigots to whom you refer are the true terrorists in this country.
I don’t have that hesitancy. He is an excellant candidate. But I don’t think that we should put blinders on either and refuse to believe that racism will not be factor in an Obama candidacy.
Just how it is dealt with may be critical to winning the Whitehouse.
Love it – nice work Arthur. I think the famous Rennaissance was interesting times and we might be in a similar state of flux.
Fascinating times for those of us lucky enough to keep a distance from the wars, or from the perception of separateness from other beings.
It’s all in the perception – the boxes. But sometimes we can surprise ourselves.
Everywhere people are beginning to look beyond race for “content of character.”
You have a ton of excellent points there, AG. I commend you for writing this.
1) But it is human nature to try to make sense of things by putting them in boxes.
and
2) It is human nature to strive to escape the box.
Humanity struggles between these two urges. Jackie Robinson was also The First. Now, it is commonplace 60 years later. To reach the commonplace stage, there still must be a first. The First does mean something. It means humanity is aspiring to improve itself. It means we’re getting better, reaching higher, doing more, being greater.
Having said that, the fact that you’re asking the question about Obama transcending the box is in and of itself, very important. When the second urge to improve overcomes the first urge to imprison, that’s when we get progress.
The heart of “progressive” is progress. And I can live with a candidate who does that.
20 If it is indeed “human nature to strive to escape the box”…how come almost no one actually does so?
AG
in the above post.
Or the big black dot.
Ahhh, the vagaries of html.
AG
The ‘boxes’ = means of processing sensory information. Sensate beings formulate boxes. The more sophisticated the processing entity, the more sophisticated the boxes.
What seems key to a continually functional sensibility is that the boxes be fluid. The formulation of self-identity is fine, as long as self-identification is fluid. The same goes for identifying others.
If media-driven public discourse is regressive, driven to simplicity rather than complex nuance, what else is new?
I suggest, when we listen to Obama’s speeches, close our eyes and we won’t see his skin-tone.
We need to stop the hyphenation of America that underpins our identity crisis. Obama embodies ‘Out of many, one people’
If we embrace his candidacy, we’re saying – as this essay by a conservative author lays out,-
Goodbye To All That
Obama is not “black.” He just has dark skin. By cultural definition, he is NOT “black.” He was born in Honolulu, spent his early childhood in Jakarta and came of age in a primarily Muslim community. I bet he doesn’t even know what ingredients go into a Good Luck Dinner on New Year’s Day. He doesn’t appear to have any “roots” in the African-American Tradition.
Duke Ellington may have grown out of a self-defining box but he was genuinely and elegantly “black.” I don’t think Obama ever lived in that box. He developed in some kind of “exception to being like black people” box.
Call me a racist if you want to but Obama is not a spade.
in the United States dressed down even a HAIR the questions of his parenthood and cultural upbringing would not matter one tiny little bit.
Bet on it.
Had he made eyes at a white woman in the 1930s south or before, they KKK would have been only too pleased to string him up.
When he walked down the street in LA, NYC, Chicago or Boston/Cambridge from 1979 until he became (quite recently) famous, he was considered “black” by everyone who reflexively categorizes people in those terms. Which is damned near every American, I fear.
You fool yourself if you think that he is not “black”, scjt. If he did not come UP in the African-American traditions, you can be DAMNED sure that he identified with them by the time he was in his teens out of absolute necessity if for no other reason. Hell, I am by birth about 90% Celtic and I embraced that culture…and later the NYC Hispanic cultures as well… from my teens because thaey were the cultures that birthed and supported my art. No one will mistake MY green-eyed ass for being African, but five minutes into any conversation with any right-thinking American person of color and they know damned well where my cultural alliances mostly lie.
How much MORE “black” must Obama be within?
His ass was on the hard side of the color line from BIRTH.
Bet on it.
Not “black”?
Please.
Erase his fame from the minds of Americans, show them the above image and ask them to describe it and I will bet you anything you want to bet that the word “black” (or possibly “African-American” in extreme instances of kneejerk PC disease) will appear in the first sentence of about 98% of the respondents.
Please.
AG
P.S. I won’t even get INTO that “spade” thing, seeing as how I made a joke out of it in my own post.
But I was mocking it.
Were you?
Why must you always go off onto such wild tangents? You’re the one who put black inside quote marks in your title. Of course, Obama checks the African-American box on his census form. Of course, he is classified as quote — black — end quote.
The key words in my observations were “BY CULTURAL DEFINITION.” I’m saying, Obama’s formative years did not include the experience of being black in America. I don’t think he really understands that experience. Do you think he was discriminated against in Jukarta? Seriously. He didn’t enter a white majority society until his teens and even then he was insulated. Being “black” has most likely been an advantage for him in his adulthood instead of a disadvantage.
I’m saying that “black,” in quotes, denotes spiritual qualities to me, not a skin color. My second sentence was a joke on that theme.
Your main riff was how great he is for not letting himself exist inside a box labeled “black.” My counterpoint is I don’t think he’s had much direct experience with being IN that box. I don’t think he’s “black” in his soul.
And if you’ve got a problem with calling a particular person of color a spade then, I guess, you would also object to calling a particular pale-skinned person a redneck. Labeling people is how we sort out the good folks from the bad in our minds. And besides, I said Obama is definitely NOT a spade.
So what’s your real problem with what I said, AG? Or do you just have a knee-jerk reaction to any comment I make?
I barely recognize your sig.
Although I certainly will in the future.
Further…
Use the word redneck in a tough white southern or a cowboy/country bar and not much will happen unless you are being transparently, aggressively negative about it. Hell, scjt, there’s liable to be some music playing that uses the word in its fucking TITLE.
Try that with the word “spade” in a group of black people…unless you are in some way making fun of the use, which is how I quite consciously used it above…and see what goes down.
You wrote it. Make up your mind.
You think that he grew up “insulated” from racism?
Wake the fuck up.
Read his books.
Here are a few quotes.
Another source:
Yeah.
He obviously doesn’t know…OR feel…shit about being black.
Wake the fuck up.
AG
Now, this is a stretch: Obama is not “black.” He just has dark skin…He doesn’t appear to have any “roots” in the African-American Tradition.
Why? “because some of his ancestors owned slaves and he is a distant cousin of vice Cheney whom [Obama] refers to as the “black sheep”
Your premise on demographics is flawed. I was not born in the USA. My ancestors hail from Africa, maternal great grand-mother and grandfather from Portugal and Scotland.
Basis your observations, my skin-tone is, Not “black, just has dark skin.”
Guess what – early 1980s? “Sorry we have no reservations for you.” “No, this house is not for sale, taken off the market.” “Is this your car?”
Hail the rise of the new JFK?
May the same fate not befall him.
See reply to AG above. If you had problems being treated fairly in the 1980’s then you weren’t living in the City of Atlanta, GA or similar place.
I know I’m breaking etiquette here, but damn–that’s stupid. Beyond stupid, even. I can’t believe the bunch of rank, rancid, steaming bullshit you wrote.
Why do you continue this tripe that he is not Black, had no “Black” experiences and continues to have no “Black” experiences?
Shit, I didn’t know what went in a Good Luck Dinner until I was grown. My black parents always took me and my black brother to New Years Day Breakfast at my black Godparents’ home growing up.
I mean, why the fuck does it bother people that he grew up in Hawaii?! Jealous? Big deal!
Sorry, I expect more than this type of bullshit, I really do.
is hit remembers forever. Angolan proverb
I make a distiction between [ethnic] candidate, & candidate who is [ethnic]. The first type says vote for me because I am [ethnic]. S/he implies that s/he will not represent anyone that is not [ethnic]. The second type says vote for me because I am the best candidate. We are all members of ethnic groups, and I happen to be in these groups.
I put Obama in the second type. He is a great orator, and there is much that I like about him. But my bottom line, is follow the money. I am troubled by his corporate backers, which is why I prefer Edwards.
Obama takes no PAC money.
And if Edwards were the frontrunner, he’d be getting corporate backers too.
That’s how the game works. They think they’re covering their bets.
…is called Maat’s Feather.
http://www.maatsfeather.com/frontPage.do
I encourage all to pay a visit.