It finally came out, the predictable ogre of race and racism that has been stalking the US 2008 elections ever since Senator Barack Obama declared his candidacy and became a serious contender for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination following a string of overwhelming victories in the bulk of the 40 primaries and caucuses that have been held thus far.
For more than a week the gullible media and giddy pundits have deliriously played and pontificated on speciously spliced and decontextualized sermons from Senator Obama's former pastor, the recently retired Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the Illinois Senator has tried to douse the manufactured flames.
In the end Senator Obama was compelled to give a much anticipated speech, a defining speech of his candidacy according to many of the white pundits who hog the media. And it is being called a great speech, delivered with brilliant calmness and inspiring courage. Many already regard it as historic in its searing honesty, eloquence, and fearlessness in addressing America's original and enduring sin of racism and its bitter fruits of anger and resentment among blacks and whites. I was deeply moved by this exceptionally well-crafted speech in ways that I am usually not by political speeches with their predictable banality, although I was troubled by the gratuitous obeisance to Israel and the questionable moral equivalence of centuries old white anti-black racism and decades old white anti-black resentment.
As perhaps only a person of his complex biography could, he may have forced the nation to face up to, have a conversation about, its ugly racial past if it seeks to forge a brighter post-racial future. Senator Obama is not only biracial, but also the offspring of a recent African immigrant and an old European immigrant stock. Unlike many biracials of African American origin, he has no ancestry among the enslaved Africans who came to America over four long centuries of Euroamerican capitalist barbarism. So he simultaneously has his feet in the intimate solitudes of the black and white worlds, of the old and recent immigrants, of Africans and Europeans who have created this complex, troubled, and fascinating country. He is a transnational biracial, a member of the new African diaspora with peculiar insights into America's racial soul and position in the world.
Only the future will tell what impact the speech itself will have on America's tortured silences and stilted conversations on race and the trajectory of Senator Obama's own candidacy. What is clear, however, is that the very fact that Senator Obama, not the white candidates, not Senator Clinton or Senator McCain, was required to address the issue of race is a disheartening testimony to the racism of America's racial discourse. Much as Africa is carelessly homogenized, stripped of the splendid diversities of its countries, conditions and contexts, and Europe is carefully differentiated, blacks in America often bear the homogenizing burdens of their race in a way the presumably unraced whites rarely do. Also, the same insidious Euroamerican racial ideologies that cast doubts on the full humanity of Africans on the continent, question the full citizenship of African Americans in the diaspora. This partly explains why Senator Obama became answerable for Rev. Wright, for his patriotism, for his Americanness.
The racialized burden of race is also expressed in the very expectation of blacks and biracials to speak out on race, to be experts on race, to own race, to be raced in a way whites routinely are not. Typically in American public discourse, black commentators are often confined to racial commentary; rarely are they called upon to voice their opinions on the burning public issues of the day from the state of the domestic economy and international finance to foreign policy and war to pressing technological, health, and environmental matters, except where black people are victims or perpetrators. Even in this election, as James Thindwa has noted on The Zeleza Post, black commentators are notable for their limited presence among the chattering media class.
In this context, Senator Obama's race speech, notwithstanding its seminal significance and intervention in American racial discourse, falls into a predictable pattern. It demonstrates white America's failure to come to term with race and racism, that the enslaved Africans who were forced to come to these shores did not create racism, and their descendants do not benefit from it, and still do not, by and large, control the material and ideological apparatuses that sustain and reproduce it, that indeed the black identity imposed on, and adopted by, a transnational biracial individual such as Senator Obama is the result of a long history of Euroamerican racialization and racism.
America can only transcend the cruel legacies of race and racism when blacks no longer bear the burden of speaking out on race and racism, when whites bear their own historic racial crosses. The fact that Senator Obama was forced to repudiate and explain his former pastor, reveal the vibrant and secluded world of the black church with its complex social gospel that is hidden from whites during Christian America’s most segregated Sunday morning, and remind his nation of its imperfect union, shows America has a long way to go to build a more convivial multiracial, let alone, postracial nation worthy of all its citizens and the world’s respect.
First Written March 19, 2008
For a video clip of Senator Obama's speech and text click on the following:
http://my.barackobama.com/hisownwords
Obama's Speech and the dynamics of race
Once again, you proffer a very insightful analysis of the present day America's racial dynamics. What I would like to point out however is the observation that generally, biracial people tend to break out of the compartmentalized racial views. As regards to Obama, being a transnational biracial puts him on an even better pedestal to talk about racial issues in a more objective manner because his history is tinged with racial world-views from both divides.
Watching the democrat campaign unfolding, I have also observed how race becomes only an issues if an African American makes comments that are deemed racially sensitive.
Insightful analysis of a social disease
Professor Zeleza, as usual, writes about difficult and vexing issues in a sensible and even poetic way. In this case, the issue is (to use Jamaican philosopher Charles Mills' phrase) the racial contract of de facto white supremacy that continues to constrain and distort American democracy.
Professor Zeleza is right to highlight the double standards that force Obama to be "held accountable" to white America for the comments of Reverend Wright (which Wandia Njoya contextualizes so well in her essay on this site), even as Clinton and McCain are not held accountable to people of color in the U.S., let alone globally, for their own racist statements and behavior, to say nothing of their associations with some of the most reactionary white racists inside and outside the Washington power elite. Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg (to use a metaphor relevant to climate change and environmental racism on a global scale) when it comes to racist double standards.
How can Obama's middle name, and ceremonial donning of traditional Kenyan garb during a past visit to his father's homeland, attract ire among the blathering pundits in the U.S. corporate media, while the same John McCain who jokes about wanting to "bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran" to the tune of a Beach Boys song (a noxious blend of soulless music, frat-boy sarcasm and morally repugnant saber-rattling) is all but worshipped as a war hero for being a prisoner of war in Vietnam. On a personal note, I was in Vietnam just two months ago, and I saw homeless war veterans on the streets of Ho Chi Minh City with missing limbs and fingers, and older people with extensive scarring from exposure to chemical weapons. My father fought in that in the war, having been stationed with the U.S. military in the Mekong Delta during the Tet Offensive in 1968, and he has told me that, while he joined the army full of youthful naivete, it was all brutally shattered by the acts of destruction has was trained and ordered to perform, before he was shot in the arm by a Vietnamese soldier and airlifted to a military hospital.
And the fact is that McCain is not a hero, but a war criminal. He was shot down in the process of dropping bombs and chemical weapons on Vietnamese people, on their villages and farmland, destroying their lush tropical forests and polluting their rivers with toxic agents and weapons of mass destruction manufactured by corporations like Lockheed Martin and Dow Chemical. And now he is saying that the U.S. should keep Iraq as a permanent military protectorate, even as an estimated 1 million Iraqis have been killed in an externally fomented and stimulated civil war, and 4.5 million refugees are languising inside and outside of Iraq. And now the business press is reporting that British Petroleum, Chevron, Total and other U.S., British, French (etc.) multinationals are now signing contracts with Iraqi Oil Ministry officials who were hand-picked by the U.S./U.K. "Coalitional Provision Authority."
We can also ask why Hillary Clinton's vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq is somehow off the table in some debates within the Democratic Party, even as ordering air strikes on Iran is "on the table" for Mrs. Clinton. Obama, to his credit, voted against the war, but he has gotten as far as he has partly by accepting some of the parameters of U.S. foreign policy as determined by the energy industry and the military-industrial complex. I will vote for him if he gets the nomination, but I will not vote for Clinton if she does.
Maria Ziegler makes several points which I agree with, but I take issue with a few of them, particularly her statement that New Zealand is a model of racial justice. While I have not been to New Zealand, and I am sure that she means well, her statement is belied by several things I have read over the years by Maori activists about the state of their own people in relation to the government of New Zealand, and to white New Zealanders. While some gains have no doubt been made, it appears that (at the very least) New Zealand is scarcely better than the United States or Australia (and other post-colonial "settler states") with respect to the treatment of the indigenous population, and immigrants of color, by the descendants of European settlers and immigrants. This website is a good source of information on this topic:
http://aotearoa.wellington.net.nz/back/intro.htm
New Zealand a model of racial justice
Did I write that? I doubt it: the MODEL bit.
Of course different races have different issues, and of course the white settlers have originally done many injustices, but we never had a situation like that of the aboriginis. Every New Zealander NOW, not in the beginning of the last century, has equal opportunities.
Of course there always will be people who can find fault or who "missed the boat", I have read "once were warriors" By the way I am not a New Zealander ,although I came here as an immigrant and survivor of a Japanese Concentration camp. We arrived penny less
as my husband also was a survivor from a german concentration camp.
We were not coloured , but for the rest we had no privileges, we just worked hard in whatever job we could get.By the way our neighbour in Auckland was Maori, It is my guess you Wellington writer are Maori and also "missed the boat of opportunities" ?
BLACK AND WHITE
Excellent article! however as long as those expressions still are used to denotate differences in American society as belonging to BLACKS and WHITES, we still see ourselves as living in neo-imperialist times.
Black is a negative colour: it does not show nuances, the same applies to white( my husband is painter and never do I see pure black, nor white.
White is supposed to be pure: but I rather prefer the warm glow of brown, In nature white flowers are always surrounded by the green of their foliage.
While visiting New York, I visited Ellis Island, a MUST for everybody , who wants to write about America.
Unfortunately few Americans themselves have ever visited Ellis Island: the place through which every emigrant had to pass. and from which many were sent back to their original homeland.
In America I am sure that black and white do not only
point to race, but also CLASS!
That is why it is so hard to wipe out of the general conscience!
Here in New Zealand we have still a bit of it: , but not much.
We are so fortunate to be an underpopulated country( just over 4 million! and because of a signed treaty with the English Queen, ( Treaty of Waitangi) the Maoris , the original inhabitants( but also immigrants, from long ago)are not discriminated against..
Many Maoris are intellectuals, they have heir own party,
and fulfill many functions in public office.
In the perspective of history, we can probably conclude that America is still in a very early process of unification and cultural development, very much a class society based not only on colour but also on the time of entering America as an emigrant, very much
on money orientated , in which the new "nobility" is
established on monetary values and probably colour, just like in South Africa. MZ