“Obama 2008"
Joy James, Humanities Program, Williams College

“Remember who we are as democrats. We are the party of Jefferson and Jackson, of Roosevelt and Kennedy.” —Barack Obama following his victory over Hillary Clinton in the May 6 North Carolina primary.

The call for unity in a party and union in a nation, each situated within a racially and economically stratified society, may either ignore race, gender and class divisions and exploitations or address their complexities through language couched in terms of social justice and redress. The latter, “speaking truth to power,” is a fairly difficult endeavor on a campaign trail. As Manning Marable notes in his essay, the worst time to date for presidential candidate Barack Obama occurred when the issue of race or racism—for most whites specifically an un-embraceable blackness—emerged in April 2008 through Obama’s association with his former pastor Revered Jeremiah Wright. The candidate delivered the April “A More Perfect Union” address in Philadelphia’s Constitutional Hall in response to widespread (white) condemnation following media inundation of the citizenry with spliced soundbites of Wright’s sermons. Wright’s denunciations of U.S. domestic and foreign policies captured on tape (the most controversial being accusing the U.S. of biological warfare against blacks and stating the 9/11 was a response to U.S. terrorism abroad, in effect, accusing the United States of state terrorism) looped the national airways while soundbites from Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” dominated YouTube (the generational and educational divisions manifesting in the [white] electorate are also shaped by preferred info-technologies). “A More Perfect Union” briefly seemed to bury the issue of “racial divisions,” specifically black rage against white supremacy, in a way that reassured main street, or at least its more stable and prosperous property owners.

Weeks before the April 23rd Pennsylvania primary, however, Barack Obama’s California closed-session comments, publicized by a blogger, about “bitter” whites who “cling to guns and religion” and won’t vote for “others” diminished the appeal of the candidate and (any) affinity that white, lower-middle class and working class voters in Pennsylvania and elsewhere might have had for “A More Perfect Union.” Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary by nearly ten points. She had polled a twenty-point lead prior to her fictionalized accounts of war-time heroism, dodging bullets on a tarmac in Sarajevo; and on May 13th she would win West Virginia—a predominately white working class state—by a landslide victory, with a 40% point advantage; and later would repeat that commanding win with the same demographics in Kentucky.

Obama’s gaffe about bitter whites presumably led to Clinton’s rise in the polls. Or at least this is how media would spin it; but it is unclear if this demographic—lower-income, less formally educated white democrats—aligned with Clinton in Ohio prior to “bittergate” would have voted for Obama even if he had not “misspoke” that is, appeared to be a “race man.” However, the gaffe had increased resonance in light of Wright’s “incivility.” In sharp contrast to Martin Luther King, Jr. (by whom all three presidential contenders, Obama, Clinton, and John McCain have claimed to have received inspiration), Wright’s political speech and sermonizing suggested the style and substance of Malcolm X. Wright’s phrase “chickens coming home to roost” referred to 9/11 with no attribution to Malcolm’s infamous pronouncement following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. His language sharply contrasted with Reverend King’s rhetorical style embraced by Obama (at least the “I Have a Dream” March on Washington King sans his grim reflections in the post-march wake of white terrorists bombing the Birmingham Church and killing four black girls).

Wright’s “bitterness” and “incivility”—viewed by few as a radical analysis of structural repression via U.S. imperial and racial polices— seemed to sanction 9/11 terrorists by referencing U.S. sponsored state terrorism. Wide-spread ridicule of and condemnation for Wright refrained from discussing state violence, such as the Central Intelligence Agency’s assassination-prone practices, the School of the Americas’ training of Central American death squad leaders, Iran-Contragate revelations of illegal funding for contras and international drug cartels. We could add to the list, funding of counter-revolutionary paramilitaries or “contras” in Southern Africa and Latin America (at times in violation of the Bolin Amendment), and despite the fact that such groups targeted civilian populations for intimidation and torture, i.e., our tax dollars employed terrorists to destabilize progressive movements. Such critical accounts disappear in conventional discourse and media reports. In the face of such bold political amnesia, what is political “blackness” here?

Wright resurrected the issue of black rage on April 28, 2008, at the National Press Club in his unrepentant, and “inflammatory” Q&A session (he also criticized Obama as a “politician”.) Perhaps, Wright’s offense was not so much his race as his radicalism filtering his race (if MIT professor emeritus Noam Chomsky who has lectured and written extensively on U.S. state terrorism were Obama’s religious mentor, one wonders if the “national” outcry would have been so fervent.)

It is prophetic culture (racially and religiously fashioned as the “black church”) and the persona of blackness as potential or real criminality and incivility that media and the Clinton and McCain campaigns have spun as rendering Obama (by his associations) “unelectable.” (“Electability” is thus defined then by one’s appeal to “Hillary democrats”— the generic “hard-working white voters” who supposedly are the absolute determining factor in a presidential election.) When Barack Obama denounced Wright (who declared that the media attacks were actually directed at the black church yet who responded as if to a personal attack), Obama disciplined and distanced from a black radical tradition while making an astute argument that this “racial” issue was a “non-issue”; i.e., that it is and was framed and fanned by the media to the disadvantage of discussions of a failing economy, failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the corruption of the civil rights legacy, environmental degradation and expanding police powers that curtail a weakened democracy. Such realities suggest a potentially “failed state” as a democratic quest; but black critics, or the racially-fashioned as inferior, may be the last demographic to make that public pronouncement.

The space for our critical speech is shrinking. Consider that Obama has categorized himself in the mold of King- the-multicultural-icon. Yet, King in one of his last sermons, in opposition to U.S. racism and imperialism (specifically the war against the Vietnamese people), King sermonized that God would “break the back bone” of this empire given its transgressions. Reverend King was widely castigated and denounced in mainstream media, most notably by the New York Times, for such prophetic comments. Of course, he was not running for office.
Some black radical media have attempted to energize this debate over “blackness” and racial accountability. In late April, the on-line Black Agenda Report Executive Editor Glen Ford observed in “Obama’s Race Neutral Strategy Unravels of Its Own Contradictions”:

For people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, mass Black incarceration and slavery are seamlessly linked, part of the continuity of racial oppression in the U.S. Most African Americans see the world the way Rev. Wright does - that's why he's among the top five rated preacher-speakers in Black America. This Black American world view, excruciatingly aware of the nation's origins in genocide and slavery, is wholly incompatible with the American mythology championed by Barack Obama.”

It’s not clear how “most African Americans” see anything anymore, including “blackness.” Monolithic constructs often overshadow complexities and divisions. Yet there are some things that we, who have been racialized or who have become racially conscious as anti-racists, will likely remember, even when encouraged to be amnesiacs. Blacks more than whites believe that “Katrina” was a “racial” event given the abandonment of impoverished, mostly black people following the failure of faulty levees built by the Army Corps of Engineers. Blacks more than whites see the dispersal of black city residents and homeowners, and the refusal of the right to return through gentrification and the demolition of public housing, as a “racial” gesture. Some African Americans, such as Obama and before him Bush Secretary of States Condoleeza Rice (who conservatives urge to be McCain’s running mate) and Colin Powell (whose wife Ama feared his assassination should he run for president) have denied that state abandonment in New Orleans had anything to do with “race” (the euphemism for racism). Thus, black presidential speech reflects “race-neutral” language. In this way it echoes presidential speech: Republican Senator John McCain who criticized an Administration that could “not get bottled water to babies. ”No current campaign’s presidential web site discusses how a relief effort became a “law and order” campaign overseen by Iraqi war veterans (the national guard) instructed to follow a governor and president’s “shoot-to-kill” edict for survivors or “looters” seeking bottled water for babies. Racializing Obama is not just a disciplinary move against “blackness.” It is a disciplinary move against radicalism. And if we can’t remember that, then an “Obama democrat” like a “Hillary democrat” or “McCain Republican” will prove to have much in common ideologically in this perfecting union that seeks to pave over the racial “divide.”

James is completing a work that examines the current primaries tentatively titled “Campaigns Against ‘Blackness’.”