Losing the Narrative By Glenn Loury – March 31, 2008
To my mind, commentary about Obama’s ‘race’ speech in the press has been superficial and overtly, unreflectively partisan. (It was a fine speech, to be sure; don’t get me wrong. This guy is not only a brilliant politician, he’s a genuine intellectual. He has integrity. And, he’s brave, to boot.) Yet, as editorial writers rush to call it “the greatest speech on race since King’s 1963 oration…,” I can’t help but notice how they blithely overlook LBJ’s 1965 commencement speech at Howard University which, to my mind and by any serious historical standard, was easily a more important and historic statement. Johnson’s speech was, after all, a statement which had and still has consequences, in terms of major institutional reforms embodied in our nation’s laws and practices, affecting the lives of many millions of people over the span of two generations. (But, then, the Obama enthusiasts have successfully implanted the idea that it is somehow ‘racially insensitive to recall that LBJ’s skills, vision, courage and compassion were absolutely indispensable in bringing about the progress we all take for granted today…)
It seems to me that this is a defining moment in the discourse on race and justice in America. Clinton once tried to promote a ‘national conversation on race,’ which was well-intended though ineffective. Well, we may be on the threshold of having a very different national conversation on race, thanks to Obama’s brilliant yet troubling speech. That line about how the movement he’s leading — across lines of race, class gender, age and social location, on behalf of the idea that people can work together — must not be made hostage to the past, this goes right to the heart of the matter, in my view. How shall we deal with our unlovely racial past? What claims, if any, does it make on us today? Of course, we ought not to be prisoners of our past. But, as a person deeply concerned for the welfare of black people in this country, I am far from being convinced that Obama’s vision, as set out in his Philadelphia speech, marks out a coherent plan for moving forward on these issues.
Wright’s error, Obama tells us, is that Wright’s view of America is static, ignoring how things have changed — so much so that one of his own parishioners now stands on the threshold of being elected to the highest office in the land. As a (more or less) angry black man of Jeremiah Wright’s approximate generation (I graduated high school in 1965), and while offering no brief for Wright himself and no defense of the remarks that have created this firestorm, I nevertheless find that argument very patronizing. I know, just as Wright surely knows, that things have changed a great deal. I also know that, as I write this, one million young black men are under the physical control of the state; a third of black children live in poverty, and, the Southside of Chicago, with more than one-half million black residents, is one of the most massive, racially segregated urban enclaves ever to have been created in the history of the modern world… These things are a reflection of social, cultural, economic and political forces deeply enmeshed in the structure of American society. They are not merely the consequence of attitudes embraced by some more or less well-meaning but benighted black and white persons — attitudes which can be thrown-off if only we were to become determined, under the inspiring and inspired leadership of the junior senator from Illinois, to work together to solve our common problems, etc.
I can’t get past the fact that Obama was negotiating with the American public on behalf of MY people in Philadelphia last week. In the process, he presumed to instruct a generation of angry black men as to how they ought to construe their lives. I am not really sure that Barack Obama has earned the right to do either of those things. How the Senator’s negotiations will ultimately shake out – in terms of American attitudes about the nation’s responsibility to act so as to reduce racial inequality — is something I’m not very confident that anyone can predict. Advocates of the interest of black people have to consider what hand we’ll be left to play, should he be defeated in November. The narrative-defining moves that Obama is making now, in the heat of a political campaign and in the service of his own ambitions, must be critically examined as to what impact they will have on the deep structures of American civic obligation, for generations to come.
At bottom, what is at stake here is a fight over the American historical narrative. Obama, a self-identifying black man running for the most powerful office on earth, does threaten some aspects of the conventional ‘white’ narrative. But, he also threatens the ‘black’ narrative — and powerfully so. In effect, he wants to put an end to (transcend, move beyond, overcome…) the anger, the disappointment and the subversive critique of America that arises from the painful experience of black people in this country. Yet, the forces behind his rise are NOT grassroots-black-American in origin; they are elite-white-liberal-academic in origin. If he succeeds, there will be far fewer public megaphones for the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons and Cornel Wests of this world, for sure. Many will see that as a good thing. But a great deal more may also be lost including, just to take one example, the notion that the moral legacy for today’s America of the black freedom struggle that played-out in this country during the century after emancipation from slavery – I speak here of Martin Luther King’s (and Fannie Lou Hamer’s, and W.E.B. DuBois’s, and Ida B. Wells’s and Frederick Douglass’s …) moral legacy – should find present-day expression in, among other ways, agitation on behalf of and public expression of sympathy for the dispossessed Palestinians – who are, arguably, among the ‘niggers’ of today’s world, if ever there were any. (We all know that Rev. Wright’s publicly and vociferously expressed sympathies in this regard – his condemnation of America’s support for what he called ‘state terrorism’ in the Middle East – are a central aspect of the political difficulty that Obama now finds himself having to deal with.)
Speaking for myself, and as a black American man, if forced to choose, I’d rather be “on the right side of history” about such matters, melding the historical narratives of my people with those of the ‘niggers’ in today’s world, than to make solidarity with elites who, for the sake of political expediency, would sweep such matters under the rug (or, worse.) My fear is that, should Obama succeed with his effort to renegotiate the implicit American racial contract, then the prophetic African American voice – which is occasionally strident and necessarily a dissident, outsider’s voice – could be lost to us forever.
Obama’s speech, quite understandably, glosses over such matters, while desperately (if on occasion disingenuously) trying to reassure the American mainstream. For instance, everything Obama has had to say since this firestorm broke out, on behalf of the humanity, the intelligence and the complexity of his Christian pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, could also have been rightly said on behalf of the despised Muslim imam and reputed anti-Semite, the Hon. Louis Farrakhan – a man who, like Wright, has helped transform for the better many thousands of lives, and who ministers to a huge flock in exactly the same community where the Trinity United Church of Christ is located. It can come as no surprise that the congregation at Trinity favored Farrakhan with an achievement award. After all, the two religious movements are drawing on the same black population there on Chicago’s Southside, and through their respective ministries they are responding to the same sensibilities, attitudes and perceptions which are widely held in that community – the community, I might add, which Barack Obama represented so effectively in the Illinois state legislature for many years.
Finally, one could argue, with good reason, that the purportedly post-racial Obama candidacy has been hypocritical in its exploitation of a simple-minded racial voting reflex among black Americans. This central fact of the current campaign is only spoken of guardedly, and often goes unnoticed altogether. It is supposed to be an insult to him — and, by extension to blacks as a whole – that he might be seen as a ‘black’ candidate. And yet, it is the fact that so many blacks see him precisely in that way – viewing him through the lens of a politically infantile narcissism – that has allowed him to obtain a winning hand in the delegate count. (This, by the way, is the same narcissistic reflex that installed Clarence Thomas on the US Supreme Court a decade and a half ago. These are very different cases, to be sure; but, it’s the same reflex.) Here we have the ‘post-racial’ candidate who is favored to win the crucial North Carolina primary because he can confidently rely on drawing 90% of the black vote. Can I be the only observer who sees a profound irony in that?
I believe that deep disillusionment with American political institutions is implicated in all of this. Being “lied-into” an interminable and pointless war has exposed a hollow core. Legitimacy has been cast into doubt. The taint of failure is everywhere — in government and in the press. And, anxiety is everywhere, too — about security, about the economy. George W. Bush has managed to profoundly damage conservatism’s brand. “Liberalism” was long ago discredited — Bill Clinton himself drove a stake through its heart (“the era of big government is over.”) Obama’s post-ideological campaign, by eschewing explicit identification with the great tradition of Democratic progressivism, by trumpeting the ‘transformative leadership’ of Ronald Reagan, etc., only reinforces this tendency. (This is what Hillary Clinton’s futile and seemingly shrill protest over the health care mandates issue is really all about, in my view) And so, Obama and his followers speak of transcending ideology: no more “red states vs. blue states” or left wing vs. right — that’s the old way of thinking, it is said. We need to transcend those categories, to move-on from those old arguments, to seek a new direction, to inaugurate a new generation of leadership, etc. etc. Throughout this campaign he has avoided the responsibility — and he did it again in his ‘race’ speech — of saying directly and explicitly what (beyond “the old ways of Washington politics”) are the nature and dimensions of the failure, and how will what has gone so horribly wrong ever be remedied. Instead, he simply calls for “change.”
Obama, an African American from the south side of Chicago (sort of), has become the embodiment of this call. The question is, will the deep structures of American power accept a stealthy revolutionary’s ascent to the pinnacle? I doubt it, very seriously. As his life experience and his current political strategy would seem to suggest, he can only succeed by abandoning the critical, skeptical, dissident’s voice which is the truest political expression of the lessons learned by black people over the long centuries of being America’s ‘niggers.’ So, anyway, is how I’m seeing things at the moment.
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