Sleeping on the Politics of the First Black President
By Simon J Black
Published: 02/13/2008
ATTENTION READERS: Here's a piece I scribbled for POUND about a year ago. Unfortunately, it never made it into the magazine but I intended to put it up on the website anyway; alas, I didn't, so here's the slightly dated commentary on the myth and meaning of Barack Obama for the hip-hop generation. I'm working on a column that will bring these arguments up-to-date in light of Obama's current success and very real chance of becoming the Democrat's presidential candidate in November '08. Obama's position on the subprime mortgage crisis is by no means progressive and is in fact authored by a number of right-wing Harvard and U of Chicago economists associated with Bill Clinton's administration. Now if only Obama's supporters would stop clapping for a minute and start questioning.
No one’s sleeping on Barack Obama. From appearances on Oprah and 60 Minutes to the covers of Vanity Fair and Time, the man is everywhere. And with last month’s official announcement of his presidential bid, America’s worst kept secret is no more: Obama wants the White House and he intends to get it in 2008. But just who is Barak Obama and what does he stand for? What would his presidency mean to the politics of race and class in the heart of the Empire? And for the millions of Black Americans who remain overwhelmingly poor and working class, does the colour of a President matter?
In a 1998 essay for the New Yorker, Nobel prizewinning novelist Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton “our first black president. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children's lifetime.” For Morrison, Clinton “displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.” Apart from her vulgar constitution of ‘blackness’ there’s a deeper malaise at work in Morrison’s portrait of Clinton: the tendency, so apparent in the age of celebrity, to gloss over a politician’s record and policies while emphasizing their biography and cultural significance. This preference for style over substance has become the trademark of ‘Obamamania’ coverage. Thus as Barack Obama’s media train gathers momentum, our hip hop activist sistren and brethren Stateside need to stay on point and ensure that the politics of someone who could be the first truly Black president are not slept-on. This is what happened in the Clinton years as many activists withdrew from battle assuming an ally was in charge and that Clinton would bring justice to Black America.
Like Toni Morrison, many African-Americans considered Clinton a friend of ‘the people’. True, he did appoint a record number of African Americans to positions of prominence in the White House. But cast alongside his savage welfare reform (disproportionately impacting poor women of colour) and the rising incarceration rates of Black males under his watch, this development is trivial at best. In fact, Clinton’s progressive credentials with the Black community should have been in doubt from the time he made his presidential longings public. In order to appear tough on crime while on the campaign trail in ‘93, Clinton used his powers as the then Arkansas governor to ensure that the death sentence of a mentally handicapped man, Ricky Ray Rector (an African American), was carried out with morbid timing. Rector’s mental state was never in doubt and when he requested the desert that accompanied his last meal be put aside for “after”, one would hope Clinton’s conscience was at least pricked.
And when African-Americans do scale the white walls of American political power, it does not necessarily mean the coming of progressive change. The records of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell speak for themselves as they stand complicit in one of the most reactionary administrations US politics has ever seen. But being Republicans, no one could have expected anything different. All this history is merely to warn that as we enter the year of Obama, one should not forget that political posturing is not progress and pigment no easy predictor of politics.
As for the substance of Obama, critical Black commentator Paul Street has noted some of his more suspect political stances:
*Obama’s given support to the Hamilton Project, formed by Wall Street Democrats to counter the Left’s rebellion against corporate power within the Democratic Party.
*In primary races, Obama has actively campaigned for mainstream Democrats against their antiwar opponents.
*He opposed an amendment to the Bankruptcy Act that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent, easing the debt loads of some of the poorest Americans.
*He’s on record as opposing Canadian style public health care which would be a god-send for the 44 million Americans without health insurance.
*He voted to re-authorize the repressive PATRIOT Act.
*Obama will not rule against the possibility of using first-strike force against Iran.
*He voted for war criminal Condoleezza Rice to be appointed Secretary of State.
Given this record, the danger for progressives (including hip hop activists) is that they get sucked into campaigning for the mirage of political change that is Barack Obama, devoting energy and resources that would be better spent elsewhere. We’ve seen this before with the false hope army that rallied around Jesse Jackson’s campaign in the 1980s. If Obama is elected, the realities of America’s racial and economic injustice are not likely to be addressed. Those concerned with this injustice will have to once again dig their trenches and fight on despite the arrival of the First Black President.
Published in sadly, nowhere