By: Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Posted: May 23, 2011 at 12:46 AM
Black Critics and President Obama
Are African Americans expected to shut up and suffer? That's just not democratic.
Black America finds itself in an unusual moment. By any measure, many of our communities are suffering heavily during this economic downturn. Black unemployment is officially at 16.1 percent (some believe the real number hovers around 28 percent, making nearly one-third of black America jobless). Even those who have been fortunate to keep their jobs have seen their weekly wages decline.
The foreclosure crisis has also disproportionately affected black communities -- we are 70 to 80 percent more likely to have lost our homes. And it is well known now that there is a direct correlation between racist lending practices and the vulnerability of our communities to foreclosure.
Faced with failing schools (while we wait for Superman) and the destabilizing effects of the prison industrial complex (nearly 1 million of us are locked up; families are destroyed as the rate of black female incarceration skyrockets, leaving many of our children languishing as wards of the state), entire communities -- even entire cities -- have been engulfed in what seems to be spiraling cycles of misery and hopelessness.
And yet we find ourselves embroiled in a heated public debate over whom to hold accountable for the failure to address these conditions. Recently, Cornel West offered a strident critique of President Obama's relative silence on this matter. For him, the president has failed to address substantively the conditions of the poor and the most vulnerable in our society. Instead, West maintains, Obama has been too concerned with appeasing the robber barons on Wall Street.
Many took offense, not only with the personal nature of the criticism but also with the fact that West dared to criticize the president at all. Some African Americans hold the view that this only contributes to right-wing attacks against Obama, making him vulnerable in 2012. Others believe that such criticisms betray an unreasonable expectation that Obama owes something to the black community because he is the first black president -- a troublesome black identity politics, they might say.
Worries about Democrats closing ranks for an upcoming election seem, to me, at least, to be a perennial (and uninteresting) concern. I am more interested in the underlying anxiety about black people criticizing Obama. It is as if we are being told to keep our mouths shut.
Three points need to be made about this issue. First, the challenge to black criticism of Obama reveals the persistence of a certain form of black identity politics. What is at work here is a startling effort to police black dissent in the name of race loyalty. This may be rooted in very different sensibilities.
There are those, as Gary Younge notes in the Nation, who hold that presidents, generally, do not affect their conditions of living. And if we are going to have a president, it might as well be a black one, and we should support him no matter the concrete realities of black communities. American politics don't work, and Barack Obama can't change that fact. One could view this as race loyalty from below.
Others maintain that support of Obama reflects a commitment to racial advancement. To criticize him is, in effect, to turn one's back on the black freedom struggle of which Obama is the culmination. One might think of this as racial loyalty from above. It is the latest version of racial uplift rooted in a particular black-elite aspiration to hold on to the levers of power.
In both instances, criticisms of the president by black people are met with impatience or fierce condemnation. Race loyalty joins with a lingering commitment among the broader public to postracialism.
This takes me to the second point. Postracialism is the latest effort to get rid of blackness; it is part of a neoliberal commitment to color-blindness. And it is often used to insulate Obama from criticisms about racial policy. Here, racial distinctiveness is denied. We are all just human beings. And any appeals to race constitute a holdover from a politics of old.
So we're left with the New Deal rhetoric of "lifting all boats" -- a way of talking that is designed, in part, to evade the scorn of Southern Democrats and leaves intact an idea of whiteness that undermines genuine democratic transformation. Obama, when asked to address black suffering, is called the president of all Americans.
Well, damn, aren't we Americans, too? The challenge in such an environment is how to address issues that actually involve race, and to do so without appeals to crude notions of racial solidarity or ideas that all black people hold the same interests because they're black.
This takes me to the last point: that the combination of race loyalty and postracialism effectively banishes black suffering from public view. We see Hispanic organizations demanding the passage of the DREAM Act; we saw the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community push for the repeal of "Don't ask, don't tell"; we witnessed the president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, threaten reprisals for those politicians who refused to support labor's agenda.
In none of these instances have we heard as a response to their demands that the president must be seen as the president of all Americans. Nor do we hear that such appeals are remnants of old forms of bad identity politics. And of course, they are identity politics.
What is going on here? One could be a bit cynical and say that this is just plain old politics. Folks are using race loyalty as way to keep black folks in line. So the Rev. Al Sharpton, Tom Joyner and others appeal to black solidarity as a way of shoring up the base. And yet Obama and the Congress don't have to deliver "the goods" because any race-specific policies are rejected out of hand as holdovers from a time long gone. But I want to resist going there ... for now.
What I do know is that folks are really scared to talk about racial inequality in this country. That fear stems from the belief that any effort to address the suffering of black communities directly would trigger deep-seated prejudices that still animate American life. America would lurch even farther to the right and all hell would break loose.
In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk. He dared to take on the power and influence of Booker T. Washington. Du Bois was concerned about Washington's style of leadership. He believed that it undermined democratic life within black communities. Too many cowered before him. Too many stood by silently for fear of reprisal.
Du Bois wrote: "[T]he hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing ... Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched -- criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led -- this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society."
He was right. What is at stake here is not some idea of race loyalty. Black people are suffering, and we need to engage that suffering publicly and directly. And that isn't an issue of whether someone is black enough. This is about genuine democracy, about holding to account anyone, including ourselves, who fails to muster the moral and political courage to respond to this crisis.
Do the fact of blackness and the fact of Obama's presidency commit us to some kind of uncritical loyalty? Are we to stand by silently in the face of this devastation? Absolutely not! In these critical times, to borrow a phrase from the late Palestinian critic Edward Said, "Never solidarity before criticism" must be our cry.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is chair of the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University.
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Today is
Individual Ownership of Ones Place In Life
I am responsible for my position on this earth.
I am responsible for my success.
I am responsible for my failure.
I am responsible for my decisions.
I am responsible for my actions.
I am responsible for my lack of education.
I am responsible for my lack of value to the business world.
I am responsible for my bad attitude, causing me to be fired.
I am responsible for my decision to lie, causing me to be fired.
I am responsible for not graduating high school.
I am responsible for not graduating college.
I am responsible for my child's bad behavior.
I am responsible for my child's bad grades.
I am responsible for my child's not qualifying for college.
I am responsible for my bad parenting skills.
I am responsible for my selfishness.
I am responsible for my unwillingness to fight for "me".
I am responsible for my unwillingness to learn something new.
I am responsible for my lack of skills.
I am responsible for my being in jail.
I am responsible for my not being a parent in my child's life.
I am responsible for my decision to quit college.
I am responsible for my lack of focus.
I am responsible for my being on welfare.
I am responsible for lack of physical conditioning.
I am responsible for my choices, good and bad.
I am responsible for graduating high school with a 3.0 average.
I am responsible for deciding to take engineering in college.
I am responsible for graduating with a engineering
degree.
I am responsible for getting a good job based on my college degree.
I am responsible for adding value to my company.
I am responsible for my high paying job, based my good decisions.
I am responsible for deciding to start my own business.
I am responsible for working hard for me, and the subsequent results
I am responsible for believing in me.
I am responsible for investing in me, and investing in my future.
I am responsible for my great knowledge of politics.
I am responsible for my knowledge of life's values for my person.
I am responsible for my great parenting skills.
I am responsible for my child's good and bad grades.
I am responsible for my child's great manners.
I am responsible for my child's character.
I am responsible for my child's graduation.
I am responsible for my child's understanding of his/her value.
I am responsible for my child's understanding of what love is.
I am responsible for my child's understanding of what selfishness is.
I am responsible for my child's understanding of "earning" anything.
I am responsible for my child's understanding of honesty.
I am responsible for my child's understanding of "giving love".
I am responsible for my child's understanding of his/her individualism
I am responsible for my child's strength of character.
I am responsible for my child's life's strong foundation.
The Value of President Obama to black people is his representation of a individual's ability to ascend, irregardless of his/her skin color.
President Obama simply provides proof to the world that skin color is inconsequential to any presumed intellectual ceilings, or any presumed character content limitations, that would suggest that a skin color precludes that a human being is incapable of doing something, or becoming something.
Now that President Obama have provided the proof, now its every black person's responsibility to earn theirs, because any excuse that you may use or even consider, are nothing more than an excuse for ones individual flaws.
For those who may attempt to analyze President Obama, and describe his efforts as "lack of concerns for the black community, or lack of concern for anyone person, any group, or any entity", you are vastly under educated on the totality of our political system.
Here's what matters in Politics
Your education of how government works.
The person that sit in a elected seat is "elected" to that seat, based on the number of electoral votes and or the number of total votes in his/her favor over the other candidate.
Money can't vote, people do, and the larger number of people that vote for a candidate, eventually elects that person. The current U.S. demographics reflect that the white race is still the largest individual race in the U.S...
However, the white Americans political position is split into 3 parts, Republicans, Democrats or Independents, and it's the separations of the white votes that helps the minorities, in that, Blacks & Hispanics total numbers are 1/3rd of the U.S. population, and its that 1/3rd numbers (100 Million), that are more than the total numbers of all the whites who are Republicans, or Democrats, or Independents, separately.
Therefore..., for those who don't realize how to make President Obama's ability to help black interest doable, or all the minorities interest doable, congregate the Black & Hispanic votes and not only vote President Obama back into office, vote in congressmen and senators in your states that would side with President Obama when he introduces bills that benefit minorities, and by having congress numbers and senate numbers on Obama side, you have directly help yourself.
Your understanding of your need to know.
Get to know the candidates who are running for any local office, and vote for the ones who represent minorities interest, and remember, Blacks, Hispanics and Asians can run for these offices as well.
By voting in local representatives, you vote in those who believe in your interest, and by cleaning out the corrupt, racist and bigoted ones, you clean your state from the inside out, because its your local congress person or senator that goes to washington to vote for and with the President.
We are responsible for what and who we are
I don't hold President Obama accountable for my place on this earth..., he has been our President for 4 years, and I'm much older than 4 years old, therefore, I had many years of history before this President entered in office and if where I was before he entered in office, was a good place, it wasn't because of Obama, and if I wasn't in a good position before Obama, it wasn't his fault.
I am who I am and where I am as a result of my life's past decisions and actions. To lay any responsibility of where I am or who I am, at the feet of this President would be a display of my own inability to be honest with my mirror.
I, however, am extremely aware of how "we" can help President Obama and all future possible Presidents to help minorities, and that is, making every attempt to increase our possibilities..., by joining with the Hispanics numbers, and together, Blacks & Hispanics numbers are more than enough to force these United States of America into the direction that we desire.
To not realize that the totality of Blacks & Hispanic congregated voting numbers is to show lack of understanding of what we are capable of doing politically, as compared to what blacks can do as an individual race, or what hispanics can do as a individual race.
You help yourself by realizing that the most important word in politics isn't "money", it's "votes", so help yourself by creating numbers that help you to place people in office who can help President Obama, and any future President, by working towards merging with the Hispanics.
We have a avenue into working with the Hispanics, in that, for the past 4 days, Hispanics have been rioting in Anaheim, C. A, because 2 Hispanic Men were shot by police, in what appears to be a standard, killing of brown skinned citizen with the police department refusing to take the appropriate actions.
We fight with and for the Hispanics, and by doing so, we fight for our collective futures.
Anaheim Police Protests
I am responsible for who I am, and I place my life's burdens on no other person.
In My Opinion
ASKFMB
7/26/2012
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