There's a black man in the White House!
Those of you who grew up in the 60s or 70s might recognize the inspiration for that turn of a phrase. It's a play on a somewhat common exclamation in certain households, expressing a pleasant if sometimes distrustful surprise that the powers-that-be in television-land had, through the power of their their holy office, deemed it acceptable to portray a black person on television. Some will find the phrase offensive, as was clearly demonstrated on DU some months ago when a newbie who did know what it meant offered it up as an original post in General Discussion. Others won't understand it at all. Some will chuckle. Some will roll their eyes and move on. But some will, because they've paid attention to the first year of President Barack Obama's term of office and have a keen awareness of the still sorry state of race relations in the United States, recognize it for what it is, a sardonic reference to the fact that many, many white people find it incredibly odd that there's a guy with dark skin sitting in the Oval Office. What's worse, that black guy simply isn't acting like a lot of white people believe he should act.
I offer that paragraph as an introduction to and summary of some thoughts I shared with a friend via e-mail the other day and which I mentioned obliquely in a post to the Barack Obama group on DU just yesterday. A participant in that forum suggested I post what I described as “sort of an essay” here, and this is my attempt to do so. S/He hadn't read it, so it's not anyone's fault but my own if these words aren't welcome here. I said at the time I wrote the e-mail that I was doing so because I felt I had to get the words out to someone who could understand them but that I “do not dare” do so in a political discussion forum. I guess I dare.
As you can see, this is long. It's not really written around the concept of forum posting and so may be hard to read. I've tried to add some formatting and have, believe it or not, omitted long sections. (My friend and I write LONG letters to each other.) I salute you if you're able and willing to wade through it.
The e-mail I originally wrote was based in part on some shared experiences between my friend and me but was inspired by a thought that has been building in my mind since even before Obama was assured of the Democratic nomination. As I said to him, “I've had this thought running through my head for awhile now, gathering evidence like a bee gathers pollen dust, and it won't go away no matter how many times I swat it. Every day that passes makes what I wish weren't true seem more true, and I have not been able to find anything to convince me otherwise, despite actively looking.” So, I've stopped swatting. A time comes when the evidence you see must be the evidence you accept. Recent events on DU specifically have indicated to me it would be foolish to do otherwise.
The personal events specific to my friend and me have been mostly redacted from this piece because they would make absolutely no sense to anyone without my offering a long and convoluted back-story. In its place, I have added commentary of a different sort that attempts to bring together introduction and conclusion using the words I wrote to him without changing the underlying, intended meaning.
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I'm just a dumb white guy from the South with a thick accent and bad teeth, but I know a few things. One thing I know is this. There are an awful lot of people who claim to be liberals or progressives or leftists -- or whatever they want to call themselves today – who have a hot streak of racial prejudice running through them that has been blatantly exposed with the election of Barack Obama. I don't doubt they, for the most part, mean well, but I don't doubt that Horace Greeley meant well either when he expressed the idea that the seceded states forming the Confederacy should be allowed to peaceably exit so as to expel the “sin of slavery” from an association with them and, in his view, the inherently moral United States of America. Too bad, Greeley implied but did not directly say, that all the enslaved get to remain that way. At least it doesn't make
me look bad. Road to Hell. Good intentions. Yadda, yadda.
I've been a liberal all my life. That's what I call myself when speaking of political ideology. I first used the phrase as a self-reference about the time I was twelve, inspired by my grandmother, a child of the Lost Generation who lived through WWI, the Depression, WWII, and countless struggles afterward. She was a liberal, though some in this ultra-conservative state said she was a confused conservative because she was an old white lady who didn't know any better, thus proving her own point that “none of these bastards has the first damn clue what I am, and they wouldn't understand it even if I told them.” My grandma was an example to me. She taught me that no one else may define who I am as no one was allowed to define who she was, else suffer her wrath in the attempt. What she taught me also, by extension, is that people will try to define you, are compelled by their own prejudices to do so, and if you do not meet the expectations of that definition, they will denounce you, attempt to overwhelm you, to deny you your agency, and ultimately attempt to break you of the desire to exercise it.
My grandmother died long before the election of Barack Obama, or anyone like him, was more than a dream in some idealist's eye, but she predicted his coming, and she predicted his reception. During the 1984 election season, she saw Jesse Jackson, and she liked him, but she said, “He'd be dead before he took the oath.” I asked her why she said that, underneath thinking that my grandma herself had just exposed a racial insensitivity I had at that time not been aware existed in her. She replied, words to the effect of, “He's too certain of himself, to much his own man, and in this day and age that still gets black men shot at. Jesse Jackson won't do what others tell him to do. He'll only do what he tells himself to do.” The more complete version of what she meant, as I learned over time, was that she believed those who would support him would expect him to act a certain way just as much as those who opposed him would expect him to act in another way. Neither would be satisfied with the way he would act, and the sorry state of race relations would ensure, in her view, that he would never be allowed to exercise the genuine power of the office he sought, not by his supporters or his detractors. He would, she thought, attempt to do what he said he would do, but few would have listened to it.
Conversations with my grandmother in which this subject was raised came back to me recently as I pondered our current political predicament, specifically thinking about how self-described progressives, liberals, etc. have turned against, in the most vile ways, the man many had helped elect as President in November of 2008. Times had changed, I initially thought to myself. Finally, finally a man was elected regardless of the color of his skin. Finally we have moved past that barrier, and my grandma was wrong or would have been wrong had she been extending her assessment into the future. A black man did take the oath. People did listen to him. People believed in what he had to say and what he would do.
But I've come to understand recently that Grandma was right, just not in the details.
I went to college and learned a few more things about individual agency and the struggle to exercise it that minorities have faced throughout this nation's existence. I came to know through study one Frederick Douglass, a man who has inspired me at least as much as my grandmother, even though I, of course, never knew him and even though we, on the surface, had very little in common.
On April 14, 1876, one of the finest orators, one of the finest minds of the 19th century stood before a mixed-race audience at Lincoln Park in Washington D.C. and presented one of, if not the most memorable speeches of his long, storied career. The man was Frederick Douglass, and he had, for a mere eleven years, been able to refer to himself as a man as it was legally recognized in the United States of America, yet he had within that time achieved the status of a intellectual giant, quite an accomplishment for a man of a race that had been legally considered inherently inferior a mere decade before. A man he had been, but not in the eyes of the law, not within a legal system that held within its grip millions of his countrymen as chattel and among the rest of the nation as little more than an annoyance to be shunned, deported, or simply forgotten if possible.
Douglass was there to provide remarks at the dedication of a memorial to Abraham Lincoln. His being chosen as a speaker was not universally well received. Many whites, notably the powerful financiers and captains of industry who would be the impetus behind the compromise of 1877 that ended Reconstruction and surrendered the effort to provide for equality of the races, felt he was too radical. Many blacks, most of whom had perceived little change from the antebellum years beyond a change in the words used to dictate their enslavement, found him too conservative. Douglass was neither conservative nor liberal, neither radical nor reactionary. He was his own man with his own ideas and his own vision of what had been, was, and could be. He had been his own man since the day he lifted himself up through the power of his own agency and left his enslavement to achieve the status of a man, not a device.
Ironically, to some, Douglass had first publicly exercised his individual agency in opposition to those who perceived themselves to be his great benefactors when he broke with that great abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. Garrison and Douglass had, almost from their first meeting, been allies, but the surface appearances of their relationship had obscured an underlying tension. Garrison, like most abolitionists of his day, saw himself through a paternalistic lens, as an individual whose status as a white man empowered him beyond the abilities of a black man, or a man of any other race, to effect positive change in the world. His ideas were better, more refined, more pure. He took Douglass under his wing, but at length, he failed to recognize that Douglass was an independent soul with his own ideas, his own opinions, and his own abilities. Douglass eventually broke his alliance with Douglass over the matter of the best route to achieving universal independence, with Garrison decrying the Constitution as a foundation of an inherently slaveholding republic that should be discarded entirely while Douglass eventually came to see it as an imperfect device that, when properly interpreted, could be perfected and that could and should be used to secure both freedom and equality of all Americans of his or any other race or sex.
Douglass's road to freedom had not been of the legendary type, the one in which a rebellious refugee from the horrors of the black belt walked off the plantation and ran North into freedom and tried all he could to disappear into the sparse crowd of those exhibiting similar racial characteristics. He had indeed escaped from slavery in that traditional fashion, but unlike many who had not the resources nor the wherewithal to think beyond the moment of freedom, Douglass did not stop there. He referred to his day of personal emancipation as “a time of joyous excitement which words can but tamely describe” and that he had “lived more in one day than in a year of my slave life.” However, Douglass was aware of the laws, aware of the practicalities, and when he went North, he sought out a legal remedy to his situation even before his break with Garrison, but suggesting the circumstances under which that break would occur. He did not challenge the law with contempt. He challenged it by using it as a tool. Upon a visit to England in 1845 a group of British anti-slavery advocates, led by Ellen Richardson, purchased him, securing, according to the law, his perpetual freedom.
And then, as before, he went to work. By the time of his speech given a decade after the end of the Civil War, Douglass had amassed for himself accolades beyond the imaginings of most of those who had once and many who still claimed his inherent inferiority due to his race. A significant portion of his ability to achieve that status was due in no small part to the man he was there to commemorate. Still, he spoke of Abraham Lincoln in honest terms, not as a patrician, but as a cohort. Lincoln was, according to Douglass, “preeminently the white man's President. . .”
But granting this, even so, Douglass later asserted
When, therefore, it shall be asked what we have to do with the memory of Abraham Lincoln, or what Abraham Lincoln had to do with us, the answer is ready, full, and complete. Though he loved Caesar less than Rome, though the Union was more to him than our freedom or our future, under his wise and beneficent rule we saw ourselves gradually lifted from the depths of slavery to the heights of liberty and manhood; under his wise and beneficent rule, and by measures approved and vigorously pressed by him, we saw that the handwriting of ages, in the form of prejudice and proscription, was rapidly fading away from the face of our whole country; under his rule, and in due time, about as soon after all as the country could tolerate the strange spectacle, we saw our brave sons and brothers laying off the rags of bondage, and being clothed all over in the blue uniforms of the soldiers of the United States; under his rule we saw two hundred thousand of our dark and dusky people responding to the call of Abraham Lincoln, and with muskets on their shoulders, and eagles on their buttons, timing their high footsteps to liberty and union under the national flag; under his rule we saw the independence of the black republic of Haiti, the special object of slave-holding aversion and horror, fully recognized, and her minister, a colored gentleman, duly received here in the city of Washington; under his rule we saw the internal slave-trade, which so long disgraced the nation, abolished, and slavery abolished in the District of Columbia; under his rule we saw for the first time the law enforced against the foreign slave trade, and the first slave-trader hanged like any other pirate or murderer; under his rule, assisted by the greatest captain of our age, and his inspiration, we saw the Confederate States, based upon the idea that our race must be slaves, and slaves forever, battered to pieces and scattered to the four winds; under his rule, and in the fullness of time, we saw Abraham Lincoln, after giving the slave-holders three months' grace in which to save their hateful slave system, penning the immortal paper, which, though special in its language, was general in its principles and effect, making slavery forever impossible in the United States. Though we waited long, we saw all this and more.
That quote is rarely offered in its entirety. It is a single paragraph from a much longer speech, and one can cherry pick from it smaller elements to make any point they want to make about what Douglass intended to say. I offer that paragraph in its entirety to allow you to see the nuance it expresses, to allow you to see that Douglass, more than most, saw the bigger picture.
Douglass recognized that he and his people were used by Lincoln but that in so doing Lincoln was able to do for them what no one had been able to do before. Still, as Douglass takes care to mention, the black man took up his own weapon, fought his own battle, and acted on his own agency. The words here force us to recognize, if we take it in full and interpreted it in context, that Douglass allowed for the idea of thanks for the help, but insisted that the help the oppressed truly needed was the simple ability to be allowed to do it themselves in equal cooperation with others. They had their own goals, distinct from the dominant culture's goals, but in the end these goals were no less or more than what all men and women living in a free and egalitarian society should and would seek together without being told what to do, given the chance.
Barack Obama was by some measures the least progressive of the major candidates for the Democratic nomination for President. On the other hand, with matters of policy, the differences between the major candidates were matters of degree, not of kind. Not a great deal of difference existed, in other words, and where differences did exist, they were of a type that were essentially irrelevant given that the head of the Executive branch does not create policy, no matter how much political wonks with poor journalism skills want us to think otherwise. Yet he was championed by some, a minority it seems, as the voice of progressive causes. Those on the right side of the political aisle sought to brand him a socialist, and even as liberals sought to deny this, they to branded him with labels of their own devising. The political reality of today is that some progressives, at least as much as conservatives, have projected their own desires into the interpretation of Obama's so-called campaign promises and find themselves at the very least disappointed and at the ultimate, enraged. I am led to ask myself, from whence does this interpretation, this disappointment, this outrage come?
And then I return to my grandmother's thoughts and words as well as a few lessons from history that have been imparted to me by years of curious study.
They thought they owned him.
One can disagree with Obama's decisions, appointments, and performance and maintain an intellectually honest position. This is not about whether Obama is right or wrong, nor whether his detractors are justified in criticizing him. The manner of these criticisms, and the tone they take, however, leave questions to be answered, and both those questions and the potential answers do not paint a benevolent picture of his detractors. In the end, this reduces the power of the argument progressives make and provides one more nail in the coffin of irrelevance they have been building to bury their political ambitions since the turn of the century, once removed.
I am coming to believe, to put a fine point on it, that many progressives saw Barack Obama as a black man, not as a politician, nor even a man, a tool to be used. When he was elected, he became the first black man to reach that high office, one of the few racial minorities in any so-called Western nation to have ascending to such a position of power. He instantly became a symbol for the culmination of one aspect of the civil rights movements, an icon of success in the battle against oppression. A black man is, or should be according to this view, a liberal of the first order. He has, by his very station on the morning of January 20, 2009, been the beneficiary of all those good, white, suburban liberals who fought against their class and race interests and demanded that racial minorities have recognized and protected all the rights they had enjoyed for well over a century. "We were there to save you, my black brother. There. There on the altar of democracy is your trophy, our trophy. We have won a victory that has allowed you to rise to your potential, and now you
owe us. We own your political legacy and will shape it in our image."
What progressives are beginning to discover, like the slave owner in the waning days of 1865, is that they never owned anyone and never will own Barack Obama. The slave who left the plantation even before the Yankee army arrived had been, many planters lamented, a loyal and happy servant, always there with a kind word and a helpful hand even when it was not demanded. What they did not realize, because their deep seeded racism and prejudices did not allow them to realize, was that these tools they sought to use had their own minds, their own desires, their own agency, just as my grandmother had, just as Frederick Douglass had, just as Barack Obama has.
Progressives should criticize President Obama if they believe his decisions are antithetical to their goals, but they must do so from a position of intellectual honesty to achieve any sort of relevance. Obama was never theirs, never claimed to be theirs. They brought him into their Big House, and he ate the food and smiled and shook hands on his way out the door, but the latter is the relevant point. He went out the door; he did not sleep underneath the comfy duvet made of hemp covering the Ikea couch. He is a left-leaning centrist and always has been. He promised to include progressives as a part of the process, which he has done. He also promised to include conservatives as a part of the process, and he has done that also. He never promised to exclude anyone. The sum total of his parts is incredibly progressive, more progressive than any President in the last quarter century at least, but some of the individual parts are more conservative. This is who he is. It is always who he has been, and his right to exercise his own agency will not be denied.
Some progressives have built a dogma around the idea that the Democratic party must stop taking them for granted. A subset of this group need to look in a mirror and see how the argument they espouse could be applied to them. They must also stop looking the black man in the nasal bridge and assuming, because of his skin tone and experiences, that he is naturally an ardent ally who will do their bidding. They must stop this also with the homosexual, with the poor, with women, the illiterate, and the downtrodden. They must stop seeing these individuals as groups with collectivist opinions, beliefs, and needs. They need to rid themselves of their prejudices and look at the examples of the individuals typified by my grandmother, Frederick Douglass, and Barack Obama. They are who they say they are, not who others wish them to be.
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