night, Jesse Jackson was weeping on national television. This is a man who was with Dr. King when he was murdered, and he was bawling like a baby. John Lewis—who had his head cracked open and has been arrested more times for the cause of justice than possibly any other living person in this country—was visibly elated. If they can see it, who are we not to?
Some on the left seem so addicted to losing that they are incapable of taking even the one-quarter victory lap made possible by Obama’s accomplishment. Rather than welcoming the partial win and helping move things to the next level, they prefer to lecture the rest of us about how naïve we are for having any confidence in him. He’s just the new face of empire, they say, no different from the forces of reaction on the right. Folks such as these have become code-pendent on despondency and addicted to their moral purity. They mock those less radical than they for believing that sometimes you just have to hold your nose and do less harm, and then act shocked when they accomplish nothing. But who wants to join a movement filled with people who look down on you as a sucker?
If we on the left want “mere liberals” to join the struggle, we’re going to have to meet them where they are. And that is most decidedly not in our Emma Goldman Book Club. For those who can’t get excited about Obama, fine, but there are millions of people who are, and they are looking for an outlet. That outlet could be activist formations, community groups, and grassroots struggles. That could be us. But not if we write them off. At some point, the left will have to relinquish our love affair with marginality. We’ll have to stop behaving like people who have a favorite band, until the band has a couple of hits and makes some money, at which point they now suck and have sold out. We’ll have to dispense with this self-defeating notion that if people like you, you must not be doing anything important.
People are inspired by Obama not because they view him as especially progressive but because folks respond to optimism. This is what the Reaganites understood, and it’s what Dr. King knew, too. It wasn’t anger and pessimism that broke the back of apartheid in the South, but rather, a belief in the ability of people to change if confronted by the yawning chasm between their professed ideals and the bleak national reality. What the ’60s struggle took for granted, but the barbiturate left refuses to concede, is the essential goodness of people, and this country’s ability, for all its faults, to evolve. A movement predicated on the opposite message—one that suggests the United States is irredeemably evil—is destined to fail. More than this, it will deserve to fail. Were it to succeed, it would do so only by burning everything to the ground, at which point it would not likely be replaced by anything approximating justice. Anger and cynicism do not make good dance partners. The combination is consumptive, like a flesh-eating disease, the first victim of which is compassion.
I know some choose to believe that reformism, the likes of which Obama represents, dampens the enthusiasm for transformative change. Things must get worse before they can get better: This is their mantra. It is a mindset that has never been vindicated in history, yet they persist in its propagation. When things get worse, they just get worse. People don’t typically rush the barricades when things are at their most dire. They are too busy trying to stay alive. Notice too, that the people who say this are rarely the ones who suffer the most when things get worse. They typically are the ones with enough material privilege to get by, even as they lecture others about how just a bit more hardship will trigger the revolution.
Please don’t misunderstand: In one sense, the skeptics are correct, and this too is worth noting. We cannot rest on our laurels. Yes, we can savor the moment for a few days, but soon we will need to be back on the job, in the community, where democracy is made. Because for all the talk of hope and change, there is nothing about real change that is inevitable. Hope, absent commitment, is the enemy of change. It gives away one’s agency or reduces that agency to showing up every few years and pushing a button or pulling a lever. We must do more than that.
The worst thing that could happen, next to imbibing the cynicism of the barbiturate left, would be for us to go back to sleep, to allow the poise of Obama’s prose to lull us into slumber like the cool underside of the pillow.
And so, with all that in mind, let us begin.
DENIAL IS A RIVER WIDER THAN THE CHARLES
IMPLICIT BIAS AND THE BURDEN OF BLACKNESS IN THE AGE OF OBAMA
IF YOU’RE CURIOUS as to the breadth of America’s racial divide, recent events from the hallowed environs surrounding Harvard University will provide you with all the insight you could desire. The incident, involving Professor of African American Studies Henry Louis Gates Jr., Cambridge police officer James Crowley, and now, President Obama, reflects the magnitude of that divide almost perfectly.
To recap for those who might have missed it: Tipped off by a neighbor as to the presence of a possible burglar at a Cambridge home, Crowley arrived to find Gates, who lives there, inside. Angered at being considered a criminal, Gates yelled at Crowley, who then arrested him for disorderly conduct, even though yelling at a cop does not meet the definition of that offense, according to the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Then Obama, asked for his take on the matter, offered that the police had acted “stupidly” in arresting Gates: a reaction that has set off a flood of hostility aimed at a president still learning the dangers of governing while black in the United States. In this case, as with so many news stories that touch on race, from the O.J. Simpson trial to Hurricane Katrina, white people and black people see things in largely different ways.
To hear most white folks tell it, Gates was to blame. Yes, he was only trying to enter his own home when a white woman saw him and his driver, assumed they were burglars, and convinced another woman to call police. And yes, he produced identification when asked, indicating that he was the resident of the house. But because he became belligerent with Sgt. Crowley, and because he called Crowley a racist, he is presumed blameworthy for escalating the situation. Meanwhile, Crowley, according to the dominant white narrative, is a thoughtful cop and hardly racist. After all, we’ve been informed, he teaches a diversity training class and once gave mouth-to-mouth-resuscitation to a dying black athlete. As a side note, if this is the only thing one must do to not be a racist—not let a dying black person die—the threshold for minimal human decency has been lowered to a degree almost too depressing to contemplate. In any event, having been willing to save a black person’s life, Crowley has therefore been smeared, first by Gates, who accused him of bias, and then by the president, who questioned the intelligence of the decision to arrest the professor, whom he considers a friend.
Such a perception on the part of white people makes sense, given the white racial frame, as sociologist Joe Feagin calls it. It’s a frame that says, among other things, that so long as you are respectful to police, nothing terrible will happen to you. If something bad does happen to you, it was likely your fault. Additionally, there can be no racism in an incident unless the person accused of such a thing acted with bigoted intent. In this case, since Gates mouthed off and Crowley is, from all accounts, hardly a bigot, the case is closed, as far as the dominant white narrative is concerned.
But for most black folks, the lens is different, and not because they are irrational or hypersensitive, but because their experiences with law enforcement are different from those typically enjoyed by whites. The first policing blacks experienced on our shores was that of the slave patrol, followed by those who would arrest, jail, and then release black men into the hands of white mobs for alleged crimes or just for questioning white authority. This was then followed by cops who were the enforcers of segregation, the ones who pulled sit-in protesters off lunch-counter stools and set dogs and water cannons on children in Birmingham. It has been police, since then, who have enforced the so-called war on drugs, the damage of which has fallen mostly on their communities, despite equal rates of drug use and possession by whites.
So for African Americans, the possibility that racism was involved in the Gates incident
