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Barack
Obama:
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.
(Crown 2007)
Barack
Obama:
The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the
American Dream.
Random House/ Hardcover, 608 pages
$27.95
* * *
* *
Of Obama and Oakland
By
Keenan Norris
Glen Ford's
article, published in ChickenBones and also available at
Black Agenda Report, regarding Barack Obama's
visit to the Edmund Pettis Bridge in Selma, Alabama is
indicative of the largely negative stance taken by
hard-line black liberals in regard to Mr. Obama's
presidential campaign. Ford suggests that Obama is a
politician, first and foremost, principally concerned
with acquiring power; and that Obama only promotes an
agenda that speaks to black people's needs when it is
politically advantageous to him. Thus, depending on
whether Obama is speaking in Selma, Alabama or in Palm
Springs, California, the man is liable to profess far
different political agendas; consequently, he is no more
trustworthy for blacks (or, to follow this logical line,
for any other group of people) than his white rivals on
the campaign trail.
As a California
black, where people of my race represent only about six
to seven percent of the statewide population and where
blacks rank as the third-largest minority group, it has
long been clear to me that despite our urgent and
specific needs as a race, black people cannot
successfully advocate for more equitable public school
funding or legislation against environmental racism or
any of our other myriad needs without joining the
relevant mainstream political debate. To require that a
black candidate for president or any other national
office adhere to a specifically black agenda makes
little sense in a country where blacks make up only
about thirteen to fifteen percent of the overall
population. Any black politician making a serious
attempt at the presidency should advocate for black
issues up to but not beyond the point that those issues
conflict with the wants and needs of the rest of his
constituency, white, Asian, Latino, etc. The candidate
should be honest with black people and explain that
because his constituency is racially various, where the
specific demands of any one group supersede the demands
of the majority of his constituency he must, of
necessity, side with the majority. The invisible hand of
institutionalized racism would not guide such a sea
change, but the quite visible and imminently
understandable hand that tallies votes and weighs
imperfect options.
Abraham Lincoln
skillfully reconciled his racist white Northern
constituency with a radical minority of abolitionists
and created out of that uneasy pairing the most
significant legislation in U.S. history; not only the
Emancipation Proclamation, but the legislative
underpinning of Reconstruction. Dr. King managed to
balance the radicalism of SNCC and the gestating Black
Power Movement with cautious, moderate white liberals
like John F. Kennedy and held together a movement that
was, despite its failures, one of the most extensive
social justice movements in history.
Today Black America
needs political figures that are similarly mindful of
the imperfect constituency that they represent.
Advancing a solely black agenda will ultimately advance
no agenda. In South Central Los Angeles and Houston,
Texas, Maxine Waters and Sheila Jackson Lee represent
predominantly Latino districts. Their support for the
rights of immigrant laborers, which, in truth,
often-times do not coalesce with but contradict the
needs of working-class black people, is the kind of
issue for which less-loved black politicians are so
often taken to task. But the reality of political life
outside of black cities like Baltimore, Detroit, and Gary
and in the nation itself is that blacks represent not a
numerical majority but a dependent minority. We must,
therefore, argue not from a position of self-defeating
weakness that masquerades as power, but from a position
of relative and shifting strength.
To take the
immigration issue, for instance: instead of defending
our dead-end working-class jobs from Mexican immigrants,
we need to unite with people of other races that share
our under-served neighborhoods and advocate for an
education system that makes its primary goal not social
promotion or ethnically-identified coursework but math,
computer, and multi-language skills that are relevant to
the white-collar work force. In addition, we need to
identify those unionized working class jobs that still
pay well and make a concerted effort, through
extra-educational means, to dominate those professions.
* *
* * *
Barack Obama came
to Oakland recently. The event was free, a kind of
festival, really; the crowd was vast, disorganized,
constituted primarily of people under thirty; the mood
was casual, police and security not in evidence.
Oakland. The home
of the most principled legislator in either the Congress
or the Senate, Barbara Lee; the home of the old
Congressman and new Mayor Ron V. Dellums. Oakland: today
the most Californian of all California's cities. Without
anything close to a majority population (blacks are the
majority-minority representing somewhere between 30-35%
of the population), Oakland possesses significant
minorities of Mexicans, El Salvadorans, East and
Southeast Asians, Tongans, Samoans, Arabs and
European-descended people. The crowd at the City Center
was either primarily white or primarily black. I
couldn't tell which.
In his speech,
Obama made self-congratulatory reference to legislation
he wrote and helped pass in Chicago requiring police
interrogations to be videotaped (a popular selling point
in the historical home of the Black Panthers). He also
came back several times to his steadfast opposition to
the war in Iraq, which dates back to its original
declaration, when support for the U.S. invasion was
widespread. Obama was not lying and to charges that he
is attempting to be all things to all people and in the
process selling out black America, it should be noted
that Obama is on record predicting that an invasion of
Iraq would result in a "dumb" war in 2002 and 2003. This
is hardly a moot point for black people when one
considers that we make up one-quarter of U.S. military
personnel and are thus over-represented two-to-one in
view of our population percentage (12-13%) within the
nation. Obama has written legislation proposing the
swift withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Other of his
claims, such as the institution of a universal
healthcare system by the end of his first term in
office, are not exactly irrelevant to the quality of
black lives.
The fact that none
of these issues are solely black issues and that none of
these issues is exclusive of the needs of the white
majority is, of course, smart campaigning. Obama's
campaign is a practical one and he will, apparently, be
the first non-white candidate to make a truly serious
run at the presidency. The inclusive nature of his
platform is also the reason that he has so many
detractors among hard-line black liberals. There is a
strain of always-oppositional, anti-establishment black
intellectual thought present in the internet media,
academia, and grassroots political organizing that is
fine so far as it goes but that needs to be left on
message boards, in lecture halls, and at neighborhood
rallies. All politics is not local. If we, as black
people, want a real share of fortunes in the political,
professional, and academic world that extends beyond our
neighborhoods and self-perpetuating ghettoes, we need to
embrace a way of being in the world that does not wed
itself to unrealistic demands, that is smart-minded,
inclusive even of opposing forces and which is focused
finally on our long-term goals for equity, access, and
power.
I have no idea what
will become of Mr. Obama's presidential campaign, and,
personally, I feel Mrs. Clinton would probably make as
good, if not a better nominee for the Democrats. But I
want us as black people to recognize militancy for what
it is, a local strategy, and to learn how to represent
our interests in a practical manner in the wider world.
* *
* * *
Keenan Norris
works as an adjunct community college professor in the
Bay Area and is pursuing his Ph.D. at UC Riverside. His
work has been published in the Santa Monica, Evansville
and Green Mountains Reviews, as well as internet
entities Rhapsoidia and ChickenBones. He was a
contributing author to Inlandia: A Journey Through the
Literature of California's Inland Empire.
posted 31 March 2007
updated 22 October
2007 / 13 January 2008 |
