When I first posted about Barack Obama in
July 2004 after his now-fabled speech at the DNC, one astute observer in the comment thread wrote, "Part of his power lies in the way he frames the issues. He tilts the landscape against the opponents of change."
Bingo. Obama's power comes from his ability to
tilt the landscape against opponents of change. Exactly what that change will look like once he's in the Oval Office shuffling policy papers remains a bit of a mystery; but as I see it, I'd rather roll the dice with Obama than suffer 4 more years of dismal certitude under either Clinton or McCain. With Obama, at least we can entertain the possibility of progress in DC.
Not that I'm quite on board the chugging honking whistling freight train of Obama-mania, even if I confess that I sometimes get misty during his momentous speeches (I get caught up, you know how it is). I still have reservations about some of the compromises he has had to make to get to where he is; I have serious problems with the fundamental structure of the Democratic Party; indeed I'm likely to end up voting for a third-party candidate like Cynthia McKinney (calm down, my state is safely blue). Moreover, I tend to view the whole spectacle of presidential politics as a grand charade during which tremendous national energy gets spent endlessly chattering about which pre-approved palatable public figure is to be the next temporary PR/sales representative of the global neo-imperialist gangster state. Nevertheless, I think that on the whole, the Obama phenomenon is a positive development in US politics. I hesitate to call it a full-fledged "grassroots movement" at this stage, but it's certainly more of a groundswell than his rivals' stiff-throated calls for upstanding in-the-know citizens to shun the dark horse and goose-step in line with an orderly dynastic succession. Obama's
essential message is one of populist empowerment, whereas Clinton and McCain's messages are
fundamentally deflating and paternalistic in philosophical orientation, aimed more at appealing to unresolved childhood issues rather than lofty visions of social uplift and liberatory self-determination. Clinton and McCain go around trying to drain the air out of rooms which Obama has pumped up with hope.
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That's my elevator-chat breakdown of today's big-stage electoral scene. You may have noticed that I didn't mention the explosive issue of
race in this little exposition; because in my view, race is not the primary driving factor in this election. Of course race is ever-present in US society; but as far as I can see, Obama's success in the Democratic primary has occurred not because of, but in spite of, his being Black. So prodigious are his political, oratorical, and organizational skills that he has to some extent leap-frogged the color line and somehow overcome an attribute which is ordinarily a handicap in the socio-political machinations of mainstream society. He has implemented Sun Tzu's strategic advice and turned a nominal weakness into a social strength.
Needless to say, there are white folks who believe that African Americans have it easy in the US, being the beneficiaries of a foolishly generous edifice of handouts and quotas on the upwardly mobile speedway. This worldview is the result of the cognitive indoctrination according to which white people are socialized in US society, wherein the systemic advantages, privileges, and conceits of whiteness are rendered invisible, as are the systemic injustices and entrenched obstacles facing people of color. Thus, the gradual erosion of white privilege and racism, and the ever-increasing autonomy and visible success of people of color, are seen by some white folks as somehow unnatural, an indication that "politically correct" white liberalism has gone too far in its self-flagellation and that whites are now being discriminated against. As twisted and upside-down as it is, this view does not necessarily indicate any spiritual failing or moral flaw on the part of the individual who sees the world through this lens; it indicates that they were socialized in racist society and remain locked in their conditioning, and that they must undertake a certain amount of anti-racist education and reflection if they wish to free themselves from this erroneous and dehumanizing perceptual prism.
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It seems to me that one of the principal sources of confusion when it comes to racial disourse is the stunning lack of clarity and consensus regarding the exact meanings and definitions of the words "racism" and "racist". Those of us who spend significant time doing anti-racist work end up developing a variety of nuanced concepts surrounding these words, but many people never explore those meanings and instinctively respond to talk of racism with strong emotions and weak understandings. Racism is a complex multi-dimensional interdisciplinary subject which cannot be reduced to an absurdly-shallow bifurcation of the populace into laudable "not racists" and condemned "racists".
Racism is an overarching, interlocking set of economic, political, social, and cultural structures, beliefs, and actions which systematically advantage one racial group at the expense of all others. A statement, thought, belief, assumption, or action can be described as
racist when it plugs into the overarching grid of
racism, like a node which lights up once it plugs into its compatible network, thus transcending an individual act of bigotry or prejudice and fusing into broader institutions and societal forces.
As for defining what makes an individual person "a racist", I think it's a pretty fuzzy area, and not a particularly fruitful intellectual direction. Most anti-racists are much more concerned with identifying, understanding, and dismantling
racism, than in exposing any individual as "a racist", whatever that means. Clearly, there are hate-crime types out there who organize their lives around advancing white supremacist violence and such; but most of the racism that people of color deal with in our day-to-day lives — especially those of us who interact with a lot of white liberals — is far more subtle and covert, more of a background buzz than an in-your-face threat. White liberal racism tends to manifest in unspoken assumptions, attitudes, and social dynamics which normalize and center white privilege, while deprioritizing, marginalizing, and dismissing the voices, perspectives, experiences, histories, cultures, agendas, and initiatives of people of color. White liberals who engage in these behaviors aren't "racists" in the same sense as the hate-crime types, but they are nevertheless participating in the replication and perpetuation of racism. Pointing this out is not "playing the race card"; it is accurate socio-political observation. Pointing this out is not the same as running around indiscriminately shouting "racist!" at every white person within earshot in some kind of rageful frenzy; it is constructive anti-racist critique aimed at illuminating an important but dimly-lit pattern, for the purpose of healing wounds which continue to bleed our society and our own humanity.
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In
February 2007, I wrote that "we might as well brace ourselves for a full year and a half of cringeworthy foot-in-throat racial punditry. With Obama in the presidential spotlight, talking heads and politicians and scribes across the land will have countless opportunities to comment on race and thus chomp on their feet; I'm expecting serious feasts of pale toes." And yes, Geraldine Ferraro has recently indulged us with probably the best example yet, not only with her initial knee-slapper about what an advantage it is to be a black man when running for president, but even more so with her petulant reactions to the flare-up: refusal to listen, flagrant denial, white victimization, shallow invocation of anti-oppression cred, and so forth. Isn't that how it usually works? If the white liberal blogosphere has taught us anything, it's that lots and lots of white liberals act this way when persons of color talk about racism.
Unfortunately, what I didn't quite envision a year ago was that the most egregious statements would come from feminists making false correspondences between racism and sexism. All forms of oppression do share certain characteristics, but each one operates along a different axis of life. Sexism often operates in the most intimate settings, as sexist men often live with, marry, and rely upon women; but racism tends to flourish on a more coldly institutional level, as racist white folks seek to structure their lives precisely so that there is no intimate contact with other races. Neither of these situations is more or less desirable than the other; they function across different dimensions and cannot be lined up for analytically-honest comparison or correspondence; as is true of all forms of oppression. Yet the Clinton campaign has generated a depressingly vocal line-up of white feminists who draw wrong comparisons and conclude that sexism is a more virulent force than racism in today's society. Some white feminists
insultingly assert that women of color are betraying their gender by voting according to race, denying the possibility that there are other factors in this election. If the argument is that feminists should always vote for feminists, then I'm curious how many white women cried "betrayal!" in 1972 if women did not vote for
Shirley Chisholm's presidential run (which garnered 152 electoral delegates, while the Mondale-Ferraro ticket in 1984 won a sorry 13 electoral college votes). Indeed, I wonder how many white women supported the truly historic presidential "dream ticket" of
Victoria Woodhull and Frederick Douglass, who joined forces to run for the White House in 1872 and whose radical platform included women's rights and abolition of slavery and racism. The most prominent white feminists of that era distanced themselves from the Woodhull-Douglass ticket, not only because they decided that anti-racism was a secondary issue but because Victoria Woodhull controversially advocated women's sexual freedom.
The bottom line is that race is indeed at play in this election as it is in all facets of US society, but this fact is neither here nor there. Let's get real: being either a woman or a man of color is a historically-proven obstacle to the presidency; but these factors aren't insurmountable in this day and age. I don't believe that either race or gender is the single determining attribute in this campaign. I believe that those who reduce the Obama campaign to the notion that "Black man prez is cool right now" are masking racist sentiments which remain largely unexamined. Such people are sinking in the tides of history; the times have passed them by. A new tide is washing across this country, carrying a strange glimmering hope for progressive, redemptive, constructive change. I'm inclined to ride it and see where it goes.
[ Cross-posted at Zuky ]
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