Obama and the Politics of Race in the 21st Century: On Ta-Nehisi Coates’s "Fear of a Black President," Part II

The following post is the second part of a two part post from Carl Pedersen.  The first part was posted yesterday. 

Carl Pedersen is Adjunct Professor at the Institute for Business and Culture at Copenhagen Business School. He is the author of Obama’s America (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009). His article on Obama and race, "The Obama Dilemma: Confronting Race in the 21st Century" is forthcoming in Michael Ledwidge et al., eds., Barack Obama and the Myth of a Post-Racial America (London: Routledge, 2013)

IV

In what is perhaps his most scathing attack on Obama, Coates accuses him of using his bully pulpit not to address racism, but instead of employing a Booker T. Washington approach of "railing against the perceived failings of black culture." Coates does both Obama and Washington a disservice by castigating them as merely subservient conservative politicians. As Robert J. Norrell points out in his new biography, Up From History, the accommodation-protest binary (which Coates addresses by contrasting Bookerism with "another political tradition [that] casts its skepticism not simply upon black culture but upon the entire American project") ignores the similarity between Washington’s challenges to white society and the protest tradition of the NAACP. Norrell argues that "Washington made public protests against Jim Crow on railroads, lynching, disfranchisement, disparities in education funding, segregated housing legislation, and discrimination by labor unions. He arranged and partly financed lawsuits challenging disfranchisement, jury discrimination, and peonage. And he campaigned constantly against the pernicious images of black projected in the media and popular culture. The NAACP would do those same things after him."

Obama has taken a slightly different approach. He has voiced opposition to racial profiling, explicitly in the case of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and implicitly in the Trayvon Martin case and in response to a question at the second debate about Arizona anti-immigration laws. But his opposition to racial injustice is primarily conducted through what Thomas Sugrue in Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race has called a "hybrid approach" that focuses on not only African American attitudes and responsibility (as Coates would have it), but on, as Obama put it in his NAACP speech in 2009, "structural inequalities that our nation’s legacy of discrimination has left behind."

Obama’s seemingly race-neutral policies, such as stimulus dollars for public sector workers, grants to underperforming schools (without, however, mandating school desegregation), and, not least, the health care reform that will over time provide coverage for millions of uninsured Americans and increase health-related employment, have arguably benefited African Americans disproportionately.

Other examples of his approach are in a sense hidden in plain view, with policies that have received relatively little media attention. Even Coates acknowledges that the appointment of Shirley Sherrod as Georgia State Director of Rural Development at the USDA "represented the kind of unnoticed but significant changes that Obama’s election brought," notwithstanding her rather ignominious dismissal by Obama following misunderstood remarks that were perceived as racist.

Sugrue argues that the "White House bully pulpit has never been sufficient, in its own right, to transform institutions. It has taken the coercive power of the law to make appreciable changes in African Americans’ status in American society. The record of Eric Holder’s Justice Department is a case in point. Early on in his tenure, Holder called the US "a nation of cowards" for failing to address the issue of race. Under George W. Bush, the Department of Justice increasingly neglected enforcement of civil rights, from housing and employment to voting rights. Holder has taken the opposite tact, filing briefs supporting affirmative action, and lawsuits requiring communities to construct affordable housing that would make it easier for minorities to seek employment in the suburbs. Holder called the attempt of Republican-controlled states to pass Voter ID laws that the Brennan Center for Justice estimate could disenfranchise up to 5 million mostly minority and younger voters a new form of poll tax. The Justice Department has brought suits against states for violation of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act that subjects voting changes to administrative review.

In her book on how the War on Drugs has led to mass incarceration in the US, Michelle Alexander accuses Obama of "revving up the drug war through the same failed policies and programs that have systematically locked up young men of color into a permanent racial undercaste." However, in 2010, the Obama signed into law the Fair Sentencing Act, which reduces the disparity between mandatory minimum sentences for possession of crack and powder cocaine. The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the legislation should apply to those convicted before passage of the act but after sentencing.

V

Mitt Romney is making history in 2012. The headline of a recent piece in The New Republicsays it all: "Romney Has Historic Lead Among White Voters." In 1944, the Supreme Court outlawed white primaries in the case of Smith vs. Allwright. In 2012, the GOP had had no need of judicial remedies to keep African Americans from voting in their primaries. The African American vote in the GOP primaries in Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, and South Carolina was negligible. A poll released in August 2012 put Romney’s support among African Americans at 0%. A survey conducted by Associated Press in October found that racism against African Americans has increased since Obama was elected in 2008. With only slight hyperbole, the British journalist Gary Younge called the election of 2012 the most racially polarized in history.

The context is clear. Obama is the first African American president. The trajectory of demographics points in one direction—a majority minority nation by mid-century. The US Census for 2010 revealed that 4 states—Hawaii, New Mexico, California, and Texas—have already become majority minority. The Republicans are appealing to an ever-shrinking base. Hence the talk of an Anglo-Saxon heritage and more civilized nations and racially-charged rhetoric about welfare and government handouts. White rage is informed by this larger context which makes it all the more potent.

Coates presents a strong case for how the US has not changed measurably in dealing with race. However, in his 1997 study of race relations, A Country of Strangers,  David Shipler concluded that "things are getting better and worse at the same time. Racially, America is torn by the crosscurrents of progress and decay. Practically every step forward is accompanied by a subtle erosion of the ground beneath." The first African American president governs a nation still beset by racial prejudice but which has nonetheless made progress in race relations since the 1950s. Those who would turn back the demographic clock and reestablish white dominance are admittedly still powerful adversaries. But in spite of their efforts, Obama is, incrementally and often under the radar, changing the way we think about race.

Odds & Ends

1 (of 3). Check out (some of) Corey Robin's review of Daniel Rodgers' Age of Fracture at Crooked Timber. Robin can only offer passages in the CT post because the review appeared in belongs to the London Review of Books.

2. Over at The Root, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., uses the pioneering black journalist Joel Augustus Rogers as a springboard to ponder the long history and diversity of the black community in the United States. The following two paragraphs, plus a sentence, from Gates' piece impressed me the most:

The more I research the history of African Americans' ancestors in this country, the more astonished I am by two seemingly contradictory things: First, how people from as many as 50 ethnic groups were plucked from West and West-Central Africa and then dispersed as property throughout the American slave community, North and South, and then with noble heroism and courage, determination and pure grit and great collective will, created one of the world's truly great cultures; and second, at the extent of these same people's surprising, often counterintuitive opinions within the race, as well as their widely varied beliefs and disagreements and debates, over just about every aspect of politics, culture, strategy, religion -- you name it. 


It seems as if our people have been arguing with each other about how best to ease their collective burden almost since the day the first group arrived as slaves on these shores! And why should that surprise us? Why should African Americans be any less complex than other groups of human beings? We sometimes tend to romanticize the black past, imagining a time when our people were united, when they "spoke with one voice." Never happened!  

Even at the worst times in African-American history, there seems never to have been one "African-American" opinion or pattern of behavior about much of anything, as far as I can tell. 

3. James Kloppenberg reflects on our recent political conventions at Commonweal. Here's an excerpt from his introduction (bolds mine):

An insatiable craving for the newest news drives commentary on American politics. Dozens of angles have come and gone in recent months, as writers and talking heads have proposed new story lines only to drop them after just a few days. The economy dwarfed every other issue—until it didn’t. Foreign policy didn’t matter—until it did. CEO Romney and policy-wonk Ryan were riding a wave of antigovernment sentiment—until they weren’t. Romney’s wealth and disdain for all but the wealthy would sink him—until it didn’t. Obama the reclusive, bloodless deliberator had to grow a backbone and start giving fiery speeches to inspire Democrats and independents—until he let Bill Clinton handle that chore at the convention.

In the weeks after Obama’s acceptance speech, the media’s interest in the election as horse race has nearly blotted out the substance of the president’s address and its relation to the broader themes of the Republican and Democratic campaigns. As attention ricochets almost hourly with momentum shifts, and as millions of dollars are raised and spent in swing states from New Hampshire and Florida to Colorado and Nevada, trivial scoops crowd out the substantive issues. If pundits are inevitably drawn to the latest gaffe or poll, historians should take a longer view. That’s my goal here. Only by refusing to play the soothsayer can one escape the danger of inaccurate predictions.

Tim's Light Reading (3-15-2012): Gretel Adorno, Richard Theodore Greener, Ontics, Defending First Principles, and Tony Judt via Jennifer Homans

1. Gretel Adorno: Just A Stenographer?

Martin Jay reviews Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's Towards a New Manifesto, freshly translated by Rodney Livingstone, and hints at some interesting questions about Gretel Adorno's role [right, 1] in the life her husband and his famous conversation partner. Here are some sample passages from the opening of the review (bolds mine):

Gretel Adorno was a remarkable woman about whom far too little is known.[1] Although the recent publication of her correspondence with Walter Benjamin has confirmed the impression that she was a formidable intellect in her own right, she remains largely a mystery.[2] What we do know for certain is that she was deeply devoted to her husband Theodor, whom she married in September, l937. Abandoning a career as a chemist to support his work unreservedly, she seems to have been resigned to his extra-marital affairs, and was so despondent after his death in August, l969 that she made a botched suicide attempt. Among the many services she rendered was the dutiful taking of minutes from the intellectual discussions he thought worth recording. Beginning in March of l938, shortly after his emigration to America and full integration into the life of the Institut für Sozialforschung (then resettled in New York), she wrote down a number of conversations he had with the director of the Institute, Max Horkheimer.[3] She continued to play this role well after they all returned to Frankfurt in the early l950s to reestablish the Institute. ...

It is worth remembering Gretel Adorno's role in their preparation, and not only because it reminds us of the asymmetrical gender relations that prevailed at the Institute (which never had a major female presence in its ranks). Without a tape recorder, she was responsible for faithfully putting down a highly abstract conversation developing at breakneck speed -- the editorial foreword rightly calls it "a careening flux of arguments, aphorisms, and asides, in which the trenchant alternates with the reckless, the playful with the ingenuous" -- and it has to be accounted a minor miracle that anything coherent survived at all. If we add the tendentious title introduced by the publishers, which turn a relatively minor moment in the dialogue into its telos, it is clear that we have a text that cannot be understood as the polished reflections of authors who wanted these formulations to represent their considered opinions for public consumption. ...

And yet, however gingerly we have to treat them as hasty and undercooked pronunciamentos, they do provide a fascinating snapshot of the concerns of the major Frankfurt School theoreticians at a critical moment in their development. For this, Gretel Adorno's stenographic skills have to be acknowledged with gratitude....

And the final paragraph of the review [Theodor and Gretel right, 2]:

Collective political action is impossible at the present time, they conclude, and so are personal relations that try to avoid the gravitational pull of the bourgeois order. Even women's desire to "acquire the right to dispose of their own bodies" is tied up with the idea that "human beings become their own property." (28) The belief that love is a viable refuge or meaningful alternative is therefore sadly mistaken: "Love probably contains the false negation of bourgeois society," Horkheimer avers. And Adorno responds, "it negates it in an impotent fashion, perpetuating it through its negation." (28) What, we might wonder in conclusion, was Gretel Adorno thinking as she recorded these sour thoughts?

Indeed. So we are left to wonder: Was Gretel Adorno merely a stenographer? Did she transcribe literally, or did she translate for meaning? Are the conversations of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer "hasty and undercooked pronunciamentos" because or in spite of her best efforts to make sense of them?

Read the rest of Martin Jay's intriguing review here. I would say this book and these conversations go toward our larger understand of how Marx and Critical Theory work in America.


2. Artifacts of Richard Theodore Greener (1844-1922), Harvard Class of 1870, Discovered in Attic

The story is here. Here are some pertinent passages from the story (bolds and links mine):

Hidden in the attic that McDonald was contracted to clear before the home’s 2009 demolition was a trunk. Inside were the papers of Richard T. Greener [picture from Wikipedia], the first African American to graduate from Harvard.

“I didn’t know who he was,” said McDonald, 51. “But as soon as I found out, I knew this was a story that had to be told.”

Historians thought the documents were lost in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake because Greener had passed through at the time. They were astonished to learn in the past week that Greener’s 1870 Harvard diploma — water-damaged but intact — his law license, photos and papers connected to his diplomatic role in Russia and his friendship with President Ulysses S. Grant have survived.

“It gives me gooseflesh,” said Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., who leads Harvard’s W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African-American Research. “Greener was a leading intellectual of his time. It’s a remarkable discovery.”

His graduation blazed a trail for black Harvard intellectuals including Gates’ friend, President Barack Obama, the professor added. “He was the voice before DuBois and the president’s predecessor.”

As Ben Alpers noted on the USIH Facebook page, this passage from later in the story is amazing for its, um, lack of perspective: Gates — known for his 2009 “beer summit” on the White House lawn with President Obama and a Cambridge cop who arrested him on his own doorstep — says he would “love to bring the artifacts to Harvard.” ...That's ALL for which Gates is known?! ;)

But do read the rest of the story for what it reveals about Greener's life: born in Philadelphia, son of a slave, enrolled in Harvard in 1865 as an experiment courtesy of white sponsors, appointed philosophy professor in 1873 at the University of South Carolina, survived assassination attempt, had six children, became Howard University Law School dean, friend and rival of Booker T. Washington and Frederick Douglass, Russian ambassador under President McKinley, and on and on.


3. NYT's The Stone: Entry #1

In this post Colin McGinn [right, 3] argues that the term "philosophy" is outdated in relation to what current professional "philosophers" do. Because practitioners today no longer "love wisdom" in the way the ancients did, and because today's "philosophers" do no study human culture, McGinn argues for "ontical science" or just "ontics." And professional philosophers would become "onticists."

For my part, I have often thought that today's intellectual historians---especially those with a humanities view of the field---hew more closely to the traditional view of philosopher than today's professional onticists. Think about the works of the best intellectual historians in relation to those most respected in analytic philosophy. Or, more empirically (when possible), try arguing or discussing anything with a rigorous analytic philosopher. They will quickly translate your words into incomprehensible symbolic logic that subverts natural speech---both conversational and narrative. Rather than discussing grey areas and ambiguity, your conversation will become a pissing contest of binary code: 1000100111010110001. The discussion will become a logic game rather than a dialectic about the human condition.


4. NYT's The Stone: Entry #2

Michael P. Lynch [immediate right] and Alan Sokal [down and right] exchange thoughts on "Defending Science." Apart from the epistemelogical contest between science and religion, I found these opening paragraphs fascinating in relation to discussions about foundational and antifoundational philosophy (bolds mine):

Debates over epistemic principles sound abstract, but they have enormous practical repercussions. For instance, in order to decide policy matters (like what to put in our textbooks and what to teach in science classrooms) we need to decide on the facts.

But in order to decide on the facts, we need to decide on the best ways for knowing about those facts. And to do that, we need to agree on our epistemic principles. If we can’t, stalemate ensues. Each side looks at the other as if they inhabit a completely different world — and in a sense, they do.

So it is perplexing, even worrying, that debates over really fundamental epistemic principles can seem irresolvable. The problem is that you can’t defend first principles without presupposing them — that is what makes them “first” principles. As a result, when debates reach this point, they can seem rationally irresolvable. We can’t defend our principles without arguing in a circle.

The problem of justifying first epistemic principles is very old. It led the ancient Greek skeptics to say that knowledge is an illusion. But over the centuries, it has been more common to draw a different conclusion, one concerning the relative value of reason itself. According to many people, what the problem of justifying first principles really shows is that because reasons always run out or end up just going in circles, our starting point must always be something more like faith.

This is a great discussion. Read the rest here.

5. More On Tony Judt

Read the reflections of Judt's spouse, Jennifer Homans, on Judt's last days and his last work of intellectual history, titled Thinking the Twentieth Century. Keep some tissue nearby. Even so, here are some passages I found most intriguing (bolds mine):

The book is a history of twentieth-century thought. It begins with his reflections on Jewish idealism and Jewish suffering in Europe and ends with a devastating account of the failure of American politics in the post–cold war world. It is also an intellectual autobiography—of sorts. “Of sorts” because Tony rarely wrote in the first person, and the autobiographical sections of the book were wedged in, almost reluctantly, between the ideas, the history, the politics, and the ethical dilemmas that were central to his life.

This doesn’t mean that the book is not personal. For Tony, ideas were a kind of emotion, something he felt and cared about in the way that most people do about feelings like sadness or love. ...Ideas and the need for historical explanations ran deep, back then and right through to Thinking the Twentieth Century. [Judt family right, 4]

Of all of Tony’s writings, this book seems to me in need of some explanation: a backdrop or a scene, because the scene—the conditions under which it was written—was so dark and because the darkness shaped the book, in its form but also in its ideas. ...

So Thinking the Twentieth Century pours decades of thought and knowledge and days of illness into a lifelong idealism. It is an idealism that under the circumstances could be sustained only by a ferociously disciplined mind, and at great personal cost. I don’t mean that Tony believed in an ideal society. The only thing he was an idealist about was serious public debate. This was the one thing, along with love, that was always left standing no matter how much was felled by the disease, and so much was. Tony called it the core. To me it was a narrowing beam of light in the darkness that was separating Tony from us all. And if Thinking the Twentieth Century stands in the no-man’s-land between what is and what should be, as I think it does, this is in part because it was driven by the darkness but also part of the light. It was besieged, as he was.

The rest of Homans' piece is here.

The more I learn about Tony Judt, the more I want to read all of his work. - TL


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Picture credits

1. Gretel Adorno, here.

2. Gretel and Theodor Adorno, here.

3. Colin McGinn, here.

4. Judt family, here.