Paul Street writes that Obama is "not all that black." The following is excerpted from "Barack Obama's White Appeal and the Perverse Racial Politics of the Post-Civil Rights Era" by Paul Street / June 16th, 2007:
"The first difficulty is that part of Obama's appeal to white America has to do with the widespread Caucasian sense that Obama "isn't all that black." Many whites who roll their eyes at the mention of the names of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton -- former presidential candidates who behave in ways that many whites find too African-American -- are by the cool, underplayed blackness and ponderous, quasi-academic tone of the half-white, Harvard-educated Obama. Obama doesn't shout, chant, holler or drawl. He doesn't rail against injustice, bring the parishioners to their feet and threaten delicate white suburban and middle-class sensibilities. He stays away from catchy slogans (like Jackson's "Keep Hope Alive") and from emotive "truth"-speaking confrontations with power. To use Joe Biden's revealing terminology, Obama strikes many whites as "clean" and "articulate" -- something different from their unfortunately persistent image of blacks as dirty, dangerous, irrational and unintelligible." [...] And, Obama is willing to accommodate racism, says Paul: "A second and related reason not to do racial justice cartwheels over Obama's popularity with whites is the candidate's deep willingness to accommodate white supremacy. In his ponderous, power-worshipping and badly titled campaign book The Audacity of Hope (Henry Crown, 2006), Obama ignores elementary U.S. social reality and strokes the master race by claiming that "what ails working- and middle-class blacks is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts." Equally calming to the white majority is Obama's argument that "white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America" as "even the most fair-minded of whites . . . tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country" (p. 247). Part of the reason for this "push back" -- also known as denial -- is, Obama claims, the bad culture and poor work ethic of the inner city black poor (Obama 2006, pp. 245, 254-56)." (Street) "White fears that Obama will reawaken the tragically unfinished revolutions of Reconstruction and Civil Rights are further soothed by his claim that most black Americans have been "pulled into the economic mainstream" (Obama 2006, pp. 248-49). During a speech marking the anniversary of the Selma, Alabama Voting Rights march, Obama claimed that 1950s and 1960s civil rights activists -- who he referred to as "the Moses Generation" -- had brought black America "90 percent of the way" to racial equality. It's up to Obama and his fellow "Joshua Generation" members to get past "that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side" (Barack Obama, 2007)" (Street) "And then there's Obama's claim that "conservatives and Bill Clinton were right about welfare." The abolished Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, Obama claims, "sapped" inner-city blacks of their "initiative" and detached them from the great material and spiritual gains that flow to those who attach themselves to the noble capitalist labor market, including "independence," "income," "order, structure, dignity and opportunity for growth in peoples' lives". He argues that encouraging black girls to finish high school and stop having babies out of wedlock is "the single biggest that we could do to reduce inner-city poverty" (Obama 2006p. 256)." (Street) "Never mind that blacks are afflicted with a shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their average net worth at one eleventh that of whites and an income structure starkly and persistently tilted towards poverty (Loewen 2005, p. 130; Shapiro 2005). Never mind that lower-, working-, and middle-class blacks continue to face numerous steep and interrelated white-supremacist barriers to equality. Or that multidimensional racial discrimination is still rife in "post-Civil Rights America," deeply woven into the fabric of the nation's social institutions and drawing heavily on the living and unresolved legacy of centuries of not- so "past" racism (Feagin 2000; Brown et al. 2003, Street 2005; Street 2007)," (Street) [...] "And never mind the absence of social-scientific evidence for the "conservative" claim that AFDC destroyed inner city work ethics or generated "intergenerational poverty." Forget the existence of numerous studies showing that the absence of decent, minimally well-paid, and dignified work has always been the single leading cause of black inner city poverty and "welfare dependency" (Handler 1995, 32-55; Jencks 1992, 204-235; Stier and Tienda 2001). Disregard research showing that high black teenage pregnancy rates reflect the absence of meaningful long-term life and economic opportunities in the nation's hyper-segregated inner-city and suburban ring ghettos. Forget that the single biggest thing that could be done to reduce inner city poverty would be to make the simple and elementary moral decision to abolish it through the provision of a decent guaranteed income -- something once advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr. and that other dangerous left "moral absolutist" (Obama's description of 1960s New Left peace and justice activists) Richard Nixon." (Street) "Racial hierarchy isn't the only oppression structure that Senator Obama is willing to eagerly accommodate. As I've been arguing for some time now (Street 2004, 2006, 2007a-2007e), he plays the same essential opportunistic and power-worshipping game in relation to related inequality structures of class and empire. Beneath peaceful and populist sounding claims to the contrary, he's largely on the dark and neoliberal side of power when it comes to each of what the democratic socialist and anti-imperialist Martin Luther King, Jr. called "the triple evils that are interrelated": racism, economic exploitation/inequality (capitalism), and militarism (King 1967, 250-251; Garrow 1986 p. 546) It's not for nothing that Obama was recently described as a "conservative" in a flattering New Yorker write-up titled "The Conciliator." (MacFarquar 2007) (Street) The above notes were excerpted from Paul Street's newsletter, The Empire and Inequality Report, bi-weekly news and commentary letter. Paul Street is a veteran radical historian, journalist, public speaker and activist and the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, and Policy in Chicago (Chicago, 2005) Street's next book is Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York, 2007). Do we need another right-wing Demcrat running the country? It has got to get better with Democrats or we don't need the Democrats. If Obama is the new black-white "hope" for America we need a revolution to throw out all the bums, Democrats and Republicans alike - anyway we must. Hank Roth
