Barack Obama's win in Iowa was historic. Proving that a black man can be embraced by a large group of whites in a white primary. His close, second place finish in New Hampshire, following a week of polling where he was up by double digits, is reason to give us pause. Most pundits argue that the polls ended two days too early, that there was a late swing that was uncaptured by the polls. A ten point swing? If true, it's unprecedented and shows just how finicky and undecided much of the electorate is (which I think it is), but I remain unconvinced. The supposed swing isn't evident in polling of late deciders, who broke pretty evenly for Obama and Clinton (39% for Clinton and 36% for Obama). The swing was said to come from white women, especially middle aged white women. This narrative makes sense, Obama's unthoughtful and misygonist comment of "your likable enough" as well as the debate moderator's insulting questioning of how being unlikable makes Ms. Clinton feel, I am sure resonated with a lot of women. As did her attempt to fight back tears when talking about the pressures she is coping with on the campaign trail. This reminded me of an interview given by Frank Luntz on Now, "The number one thing that matters to them [30-45 year old women] is that they don't have the time that they want for their job, for their kids, for their spouse, for themselves, for their friends. The issue of time matters to them more than anything else in life." And Hillary tapped into that with her talk of the struggle of multi-tasking her campaign. Of course, being the cynic that I am, I thought it instructive that her first tears in 17 years in the public eye came not at some horrible atrocity in the Sudan, at Hurricane Katrina, or the murder of Palestinians, but at the prospect that she might lose. It was all about her.
Truth is, I think race had a lot to do with the shift. It had a lot to do with the shallowness of Obama support, and it had a might have swung the electorate. As one Obama supporter wrote, "The exit polls in New Hampshire were accurate for the Republicans and for the second tier Democrats. The only miscalculation was the amount of support for Obama. That miscalculation is about race. Iowa caucus goers stood by Barack, in part, because when voting with their bodies, in front of their neighbors, Iowans are held accountable. In the quiet, solitary space of the voting booth, some New Hampshire voters abandoned Barack." Now, there is some evidence that this isn't true. The so-called Bradley Effect (also called the Dinkins Effect and the Wilder Effect) is usually a factor in general elections, not primaries. Also, if race were the motivating factor, why not a swing among white males away from Barack? But Andrew Kohut, the dean of American opinion polling thinks it's a matter of race, as he wrote in the New York Times:
"another possible explanation cannot be ignored — the longstanding pattern of pre-election polls overstating support for black candidates among white voters, particularly white voters who are poor.
In exploring this factor, it is useful to look closely at the nature of the constituencies for the two candidates in New Hampshire, which were divided along socio-economic lines.
Mrs. Clinton beat Mr. Obama by 12 points (47 percent to 35 percent) among those with family incomes below $50,000. By contrast, Mr. Obama beat Mrs. Clinton by five points (40 percent to 35 percent) among those earning more than $50,000.
There was an education gap, too. College graduates voted for Mr. Obama 39 percent to 34 percent; Mrs. Clinton won among those who had never attended college, 43 percent to 35 percent.
Of course these are not the only patterns in Mrs. Clinton’s support in New Hampshire. Women rallied to her (something they did not do in Iowa), while men leaned to Mr. Obama. Mrs. Clinton also got stronger support from older voters, while Mr. Obama pulled in more support among younger voters. But gender and age patterns tend not to be as confounding to pollsters as race, which to my mind was a key reason the polls got New Hampshire so wrong.
Poorer, less well-educated white people refuse surveys more often than affluent, better-educated whites. Polls generally adjust their samples for this tendency. But here’s the problem: these whites who do not respond to surveys tend to have more unfavorable views of blacks than respondents who do the interviews.
I’ve experienced this myself. In 1989, as a Gallup pollster, I overestimated the support for David Dinkins in his first race for New York City mayor against Rudolph Giuliani; Mr. Dinkins was elected, but with a two percentage point margin of victory, not the 15 I had predicted. I concluded, eventually, that I got it wrong not so much because respondents were lying to our interviewers but because poorer, less well-educated voters were less likely to agree to answer our questions. That was a decisive factor in my miscall.
Certainly, we live in a different world today. The Pew Research Center has conducted analyses of elections between candidates of different races in 2006 and found that polls now do a much better job estimating the support for black candidates than they did in the past. However, the difficulties in interviewing the poor and the less well-educated persist.
Why didn’t this problem come up in Iowa? My guess is that Mr. Obama may have posed less of a threat to white voters in Iowa because he wasn’t yet the front-runner."
Race in this election is going to be a central issue, will whites support Obama? Will blacks?
The white, corporate media has often framed the question of Obama's support amongst blacks as a question of his racial authenticity. "Is he really black?" "Is he black enough?" This, I think, misrepresents the dominant questions about Obama within the black community, and misconstrues the "black community" as a monolith, as Shelby Steele says, "in black America, identity has become almost totalitarian... You [must] subscribe to the idea that the essence of blackness is grounded in grievance, and if you vary from that you are letting whites off the hook."
Obama's "blackness" isn't the central question. Steele argues that it is. In his new book, A Bound Man: Why we are Excited about Obama and Why he can't Win, he argues that Obama is essentially betraying black interest by not expressly advocating for a politics of racial grievance. Steele argues that there are two types of black political leaders, the challenger and the bargainer. The question that I had was, "is this a reformulation of the "field negro" vs. "house negro" that Malcolm talked about in his speech, Message to the Grass Roots?" There he wrote:
you have to go back to what [the] young brother here referred to as the house Negro and the field Negro -- back during slavery. There was two kinds of slaves. There was the house Negro and the field Negro. The house Negroes - they lived in the house with master, they dressed pretty good, they ate good 'cause they ate his food -- what he left. They lived in the attic or the basement, but still they lived near the master; and they loved their master more than the master loved himself. They would give their life to save the master's house quicker than the master would. The house Negro, if the master said, "We got a good house here," the house Negro would say, "Yeah, we got a good house here." Whenever the master said "we," he said "we." That's how you can tell a house Negro.
If the master's house caught on fire, the house Negro would fight harder to put the blaze out than the master would. If the master got sick, the house Negro would say, "What's the matter, boss, we sick?" We sick! He identified himself with his master more than his master identified with himself. And if you came to the house Negro and said, "Let's run away, let's escape, let's separate," the house Negro would look at you and say, "Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?" That was that house Negro. In those days he was called a "house nigger." And that's what we call him today, because we've still got some house niggers running around here.
This modern house Negro loves his master. He wants to live near him. He'll pay three times as much as the house is worth just to live near his master, and then brag about "I'm the only Negro out here." "I'm the only one on my job." "I'm the only one in this school." You're nothing but a house Negro. And if someone comes to you right now and says, "Let's separate," you say the same thing that the house Negro said on the plantation. "What you mean, separate? From America? This good white man? Where you going to get a better job than you get here?" I mean, this is what you say. "I ain't left nothing in Africa," that's what you say. Why, you left your mind in Africa.
On that same plantation, there was the field Negro. The field Negro -- those were the masses. There were always more Negroes in the field than there was Negroes in the house. The Negro in the field caught hell. He ate leftovers. In the house they ate high up on the hog. The Negro in the field didn't get nothing but what was left of the insides of the hog. They call 'em "chitt'lin'" nowadays. In those days they called them what they were: guts. That's what you were -- a gut-eater. And some of you all still gut-eaters.
The field Negro was beaten from morning to night. He lived in a shack, in a hut; He wore old, castoff clothes. He hated his master. I say he hated his master. He was intelligent. That house Negro loved his master. But that field Negro -- remember, they were in the majority, and they hated the master. When the house caught on fire, he didn't try and put it out; that field Negro prayed for a wind, for a breeze. When the master got sick, the field Negro prayed that he'd die. If someone come [sic] to the field Negro and said, "Let's separate, let's run," he didn't say "Where we going?" He'd say, "Any place is better than here." You've got field Negroes in America today. I'm a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man's house on fire, you don't hear these little Negroes talking about "our government is in trouble." They say, "The government is in trouble." Imagine a Negro: "Our government"! I even heard one say "our astronauts." They won't even let him near the plant -- and "our astronauts"! "Our Navy" -- that's a Negro that's out of his mind. That's a Negro that's out of his mind.
Just as the slavemaster of that day used Tom, the house Negro, to keep the field Negroes in check, the same old slavemaster today has Negroes who are nothing but modern Uncle Toms, 20th century Uncle Toms, to keep you and me in check, keep us under control, keep us passive and peaceful and nonviolent. That's Tom making you nonviolent. It's like when you go to the dentist, and the man's going to take your tooth. You're going to fight him when he starts pulling. So he squirts some stuff in your jaw called novocaine, to make you think they're not doing anything to you. So you sit there and 'cause you've got all of that novocaine in your jaw, you suffer peacefully. Blood running all down your jaw, and you don't know what's happening. 'Cause someone has taught you to suffer -- peacefully.
Steele's challenger and bargainer are simple reformulations of this age-old dichotomy. Steele states, "Challengers... say, I presume that you, this institution, this society, is racist until it proves otherwise by giving me some concrete form of racial preference." And, "A bargainer is a black who enters the American, the white American mainstream by saying to whites in effect, in some code form, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt. I'm not going to rub the shame of American history in your face if you will not hold my race against me. Whites then respond with enormous gratitude. And bargainers are usually extremely popular people. Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Sidney Poitier back in the Sixties and so forth. Because they give whites this benefit of the doubt. That you can be with these people and not feel that you're going to be charged with racism at any instant. And so they tend to be very successful, very popular."
Obama's background ensures that he cannot be too much of a challenger. He was raised by white folks who, we presume, loved him very much. The question of bargainer and challenger, while understood in racial terms, is about group interest. Will the bargainer represent the interest of the black community? Will Obama? Black folks are understandably nervous when a large number of white folks embrace a black man, cause the only time that happens is when that black man, whether he be Ward Connerly, Colin Powell, Bill Cosby, or Sidney Poitier doesn't overtly threaten white privilege and therefore doesn't truly represent the black community. So, why doesn't Obama challenge the white community? My arguement is that he does, just not in the easy to disregard rhetoric of racial grievance. Rather, he addresses it as a question of our individual morality and our collective interests. Much in the same way that Dr. King did, Mr. Obama talks of "all of us" or "one America" which are coded references to race-blindness, but not in the way a Ward Connerly would use it. Obama avoids racial reasoning and racial grievance and explores the territory of "prophetic moral reasoning" as Dr. Cornell West explains, "If claims to black authenticity are political and ethical conceptions of the relation of black interests, individuals, and communities, then any attempt to confine black authenticity to black nationalist politics or black male interests warrants suspicion." Here, Dr. West is throwing out the notions of black authenticity that maintain racial grievance and black nationalism or misygony as their guiding principles, he is rejecting the simplistic "challenger" vs. "bargainer" dichotomy, and with it, the house Negro vs. field Negro of Malcolm X. Dr. West is adding a new category, that of prophetic moral reasoner, and this is where Obama can possibly even realign the national political landscape. Just as Dr. King or President Lincoln did, Mr. Obama can call upon our "better angels" and help to ask us to create that "beloved community." I know I may be sounding naive, but isn't that the same rhetoric of Obama? And the same criticism, so perhaps it's not that I am being naive about Obama, or that Obama is being naive about American politics, but that everyone is being too cynical about our capacity as human beings to listen to those better angels, to create that beloved community.
I do understand the nervousness Obama creates within the black community. If there even is a "black community" the media portrays it as a monolith, but as Angela Davis once wrote,
There is often as much heterogeneity within a black community, or more heterogeneity, than in cross-racial communities. An African-American woman might find it much easier to work together with a Chicana than with another black woman whose politics of race, class, gender, and sexuality would place her in an entirely different community. What is problematic is the degree to which nationalism has become a paradigm for our community-building processes. We need to move away form such arguments as "Well, she's not really black." "She comes from such-and-such a place." "Her hair is..." "She doesn't listen to 'our' music," and so forth. What counts as black is not so important as our political commitment to engage in anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic work.
So, the real question isn't Obama's racial autheniticity, but his "political commitment to engage in anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic work." This complex understanding of the question of racial authenticity will likely go unexplored by the white, corporate media which will continue to frame Obama's support amongst blacks as something akin to the "Is he really black?" question.
The question of Obama's dedication to anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic work, is one that deserves a moment of meditation. Obama has always been someone who listens to everyone and forges alliances in unlikely places. As David Brooks wrote,
Obama’s great skill is his ability to perceive and forge bonds with other people. Everybody who’s dealt with him has a story about a time when they felt Obama profoundly listened to them and understood them. One of mine came a few years ago.
I was writing columns criticizing the Republican Congress, but each time I’d throw in a few sentences slamming the Democrats, subconsciously trying to make myself feel good. One morning I got an e-mail message from Obama that roughly said: David, if you want to critique us, fine. But you’re just throwing in those stray sentences to make yourself feel good.
I felt like a bug pinned down in a display case.
Out of that perceptiveness comes a distinct way of seeing the world. Obama emphasizes the connections between people, the networks and the webs of influence. These sorts of links are invisible to some of his rivals, but Obama is a communitarian. He believes you can only make profound political changes if you first change the spirit of the community. In his speeches, he says that if one person stands up, then another will stand up and another and another and you’ll get a nation standing up (McCain and Obama).
Praise from David Brooks isn't a good sign for a person who is dedicated to anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic work (to this one might add, pro-democratic, pro-social justice, etc.). Obama has raised close to $90 million dollars so far in this primary, that's unbelievable. It's hard to believe that corporations like Excelon ($194,750 donated to the B.O. campaign through the first three quarters of 2007), Goldman Sachs ($369,078), Lehman Brothers ($229,090), JP Morgan Chase ($216,759), or Citigroup ($180,650) donate to Obama because of his dedication to "anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic work". So, why are they donating so much money? In fact, why do white people respond so well to Obama in general?
Corporations are betting on a winner, and most of those corporations have donated to Hillary Clinton as well, and will donate to whatever Republican seems to have momentum. It also helps that Obama has promised these corporations a "place at the table" in an Obama Administration. What this "place at the table" means is open for debate, and hasn't been defined by the purposefully vague Obama. However, Obama seems to be everything to everyone, which isn't a bad thing to be when running for President, however, when the real Obama begins to emerge he'll have to contend with the inevitable backlash. A backlash made more potent because of the psychic investments made by whites. There is a tremendous investment whites make in blacks who they think do not suspect them of racism, they project onto these blacks a lot of their own hopes and aspirations, and this isn't necessarily a bad thing. However, this also means a substantial investment within themselves, blacks like Obama reinforce whites' own best hopes for themselves and therefore there is a strong link between whites and these candidates, but also a huge and powerful potential for disappointment and backlash. Like the black guy at the office who you think likes you and doesn't think of you as racist, even when you make "innocent" references or jokes, the moment of reckoning when you find out his "real" opinions about your dumb racist ass is a moment of betrayal that rips at the white mans sense of self and leaves him feeling angrier than he would if that black man had simply told him to not tell dumb racist jokes from the beginning. This is the backlash that Obama may have to deal with. The day that Oprah begins talking openly about her feelings on racism and whites, is the day whites feel a sense of personal betrayal that one cannot predict or quantify. The vagueness of Obama makes this a possibility. As Shelby Steele states,
one of the iron clad rules for bargainers is they can never tell you what they actually think and feel. They can never reveal their deep abiding convictions. Because the minute they do that, they're no longer an empty projection screen. They become an individual. And whites begin to say, well, I didn't know you felt that way. I didn't know you believed that. And the aura dissipates. If Barack Obama starts to say, you know, I really think there's a value to racial preferences even though it conflicts with equality under the law, people are, you know, that that's a little too-- that's a little too revealing of who he might really be (Bill Moyers Journal).
Let's take a moment to examine who the "real" Obama is. He is a politician who supports the Hamilton Project, a think tank within the Brookings Insitution, founded by Bob Rubin and other "wall street Democrats" to give intellectual support to Rubinomics (aka Clintonomics). His support for Rubinomics (aka neoliberalism) suggests a possible reason for Wall Street's support of his candidacy. He refused to support a filibuster against Samuel Alito, the justice that turned the court hard right and led to a series of catastrophic decisions, such as Morse vs. Frederick (Bong hits for Jesus), PARENTS INVOLVED IN COMMUNITY SCHOOLS v. SEATTLE SCHOOL DISTRICT NO. 1 et al. (this ended legal integration schemes in public schools), or Ledbetter vs. Goodyear (this gutted discriminatory pay policies). He also supported Joe Lieberman over Ned Lamont, Lieberman isn't returning the favor though, he's supporting and campaigning for Mr. John 'Surge' McCain. He even asked that Lieberman be assigned his Senate "mentor". He also refused to cap credit card interest rates at 30%. He also voted for the notorious "Tort Reform" bill out of the Senate. He refused to support a censure against President Bush for the illegal wiretapping program, and he voted to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act.
On the other hand, as a State Senator in Illinois Barack Obama spoke at an anti-war rally saying, "Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors." He has maintained that position even as the public moved into triumphal mode after the fall of Baghdad. He did, however, give unconditional funding support to the War in Iraq in 2005 and 2006 and voted to confirm Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State even after her false testimony to Congress. He has been a quiet opponent of the war since that anti-war protest in Chicago back in 2003. Perhaps that's just smart, especially in a war situation where the unpredicatable reigns, being "quotable" means that one day's accurate assessment can become tomorrow's flight of fantasy or dour, defeatist forecast. His position toward Palestine has been the most disappointed "flip-flop" of his career. He was once a regular supporter of the Palestinian cause, but now has taken increasingly hard-line pro-zionist positions. This too could be excused for "smart politics" but what that argument forgets is that the campaign is when you explain and build support for your agenda, that which doesn't appear in a campaign, one doesn't claim a mandate for, so one has a hard time building support within the White House, especially on something as controversial as Palestine. There are numerous occasions where Obama's positions give lie to his vague message of "change". Is this smart politics or the kind of moderate Clintonian triangulation that we'll see from a Obama Administration? I do not know.
The inherent moderation of Obama's politics might explain the support he generates amongst whites. However, this is likely only a small part of his appeal. Where I think Shelby Steele makes a valuable point is in his discussion of white support for Obama. The vagueness of his politics and the lack of racial grievance makes whites feel less white than they would in front of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, however, I wouldn't characterize this as "selling-out" or abandoning a politics that includes the interests of the majority of the black community. Instead of color-blindness, which is what many whites see and hope for, and why they feel so good supporting his candidacy, I would argue his core message is racial transcendence. His message of the common good and American destiny appeals to whites not because it lets them off the hook (though many probably feel that way) but because it makes them a core part of the collective work of building a nonracist society. They are not the guilty party but a part of the beloved community. They are, in fact, as Steele argues, given the benefit of the doubt, at least in rhetoric.
The truth is electing Obama will not solve the problems facing America or the problems facing black America. He will have to be held to task as any politician would, but with an Obama Administration there would certainly be a more sympathetic ear, and his rhetoric could make him the Reagan of a new Democratic majority and usher in a new political realignment. Regardless of all this, the conversation within America about race makes this candidacy incredibly important to America understanding itself.
Be Brave. Be Wise. Be Forgiving.
No comments:
Post a Comment