[DEBATE] : (Fwd) Obama and US race (not Durban II) and class - Ayers/Dohrn and Schechter

[Patrick Bond]

(Obama's power turns 100 days old tomorrow. Wow how he has misused it. 
Still, some complicating factors need airing.)

Monthly Review

What Race Has to Do With It
Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn


Bill Ayers is Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University 
Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago and recently author of 
Fugitive Days (Beacon, 2008).

Bernardine Dohrn is director of the Children and Family Justice Center 
and Clinical Associate Professor at Northwestern University School of 
Law, Bluhm Legal Clinic. She is coeditor, with Rick Ayers and Bill 
Ayers, of Zero Tolerance: Resisting the Drive for Punishment in Our 
Schools (The New Press, 2001). This essay is excerpted from their new 
book, Race Course: Against White Supremacy (Third World Press, 2009).

Who could have imagined the 2008 presidential campaign?

Commentators, media people, and especially politicians fell all over 
themselves proclaiming that the 2008 election had, “nothing at all to do 
with race.” And yet every event, every speech and comment, every debate 
and appearance had race written all over it. Stephen Colbert, the 
brilliant satirist, hit it on the head when he asked a Republican 
operative, “How many euphemisms have you come up with so far so that you 
won’t have to use the word ‘Black?’” Everyone laughed good-naturedly.

It turns out that they and everyone else had plenty. When Senator 
Hillary Clinton spoke of “hard-working American workers,” everyone knew 
who she meant, but just in case anyone missed it, she added, “white 
workers.” The invisible race talk was about “blue collar” or “working 
class” or “mainstream” or “small town” or “hockey mom” or “Joe the 
plumber,” but we were meant to think “white.” All the talk of Senator 
Barack Obama’s exotic background, all the references to him as 
“unknown,” “untested,” a “stranger,” or a “symbolic candidate,” or 
“alien,” a “wildcard,” or an “elitist,” which one Georgia congressman 
admitted meant “uppity,” all the creepiness packed into the ominous 
“what do we really know about this man?,” and all the questioning of his 
patriotism, the obsession with what went on in his church (but no other 
candidate’s place of worship)—all of it fed a specific narrative: he’s 
not a real American, he’s not reliable, he’s the quintessential mystery 
man. The discourse was all about race, us and them, understood by 
everyone in the United States even when the words African American, 
black, or white are not spoken. Anyone who dared to point to these 
proxies and to call them euphemisms for race was promptly accused of 
being a racist, and, of course, of playing the ever-useful race card.

In this carnival atmosphere throbbed the omnipresent and not so 
clandestine campaign drumbeats that the senator from Illinois is a 
secret Muslim, that because his father was a Muslim, the son is forever 
a Muslim—assuming, of course, that faith in Islam is disqualifying. In a 
year of loopy ironies, it took a conservative Republican, retired 
general, and disgraced Bush secretary of state Colin Powell, to 
vigorously call the question, movingly insisting that it should be 
perfectly fine to be an American Muslim, and a president. In a perfect 
storm, Powell was immediately accused by white commentators of siding 
with his race.

Then there was the lethal mix of gender, race, ethnicity, and class. In 
the wake of Obama’s primary win in the “heartland” (white) state of 
Iowa, the Clinton campaign escalated. Gloria Steinem’s Op Ed in the New 
York Times on primary eve in New Hampshire, “Women are Never 
Front-Runners,” laid down the gauntlet, asserting a hierarchy of 
oppression, claiming that it was women who were the most despised, 
vilified, and unfairly treated by the media and by history—compared to 
the (supposed) deference to black men. “Why,” she wrote, “is the sex 
barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?” Steinem’s 
intervention made a dichotomy of race and gender, and instead of a 
complex analysis of the breakthroughs of discriminatory barriers, here 
was an assertion of superior victim status on the part of white, 
powerful women. It obliterated the half of African Americans who are 
women, and the half of women in the United States who are women of 
color. Intending to highlight the real river of misogynist venom 
unleashed against Clinton, it posed and perpetuated racial division 
rather than intersection and unity—the popularly recognized hallmarks of 
the Obama campaign.

Hillary and Bill Clinton seized on this framing of feminism as a white 
women’s concern with escalated race talk. Hillary proclaimed on Fox 
News, “I don’t think any of us want to inject race or gender in this 
campaign.” But the Clintons promptly resorted to the well-worn “Southern 
strategy” in South Carolina and the border states. They dismissively 
referred to Reverend Jesse Jackson’s historic campaigns of 1984 and 1988 
as purely race-based, rather than recognizing the unique “rainbow” 
coalition that included white workers, farmers, and professionals and 
was to be a harbinger of the Obama campaign. Clinton flagrantly appealed 
to white voters’ identity as “workers” or “women”—offering white people 
any reason to vote against Obama without saying he’s black—and followed 
the ancient and dismal road of racial discourse that appeals to white 
supremacy, fear, and anxiety. In fact, the prolonged Democratic primary 
served to chart the Rovian path the Republicans would later hone and 
utilize in the general election against Obama. Combined with their 
brazen strategies of voter suppression, demagoguery, and hate, the 
defense of the color line would become the core of the McCain/Palin 
convention and subsequent attack machine. dfsFabricated issues of 
“character,” values, and patriotism dominated the discourse, appeals 
were floated to white voters’ racial resentments and fears, and the 
deliberate marketing of the Republican Party—our kids used to call them 
“Repulsicans”—as the bastion of white peoples’ interests saturated 
targeted states across the land.

On March 18, 2008, Barack Obama delivered an epic, masterful speech in 
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on race and identity. Senator Obama’s talk 
was called, “A More Perfect Union,” and it tapped a deep longing to be 
free from the racialized straightjacket of anxiety, fear, and 
separation. The comedian Jon Stewart got it right when he said, “He 
treated the American public as if we were adults!” Obama managed to 
frame the discussion of racial justice in terms of broad American unity.

The speech was designed to redeem his campaign momentum in the wake of 
relentless, replaying videos of a line delivered by Reverend Jeremiah 
Wright, Obama’s pastor, after September 11. In it Wright challenges 
Americans to question the nation’s sense of exceptional goodness, and 
the refrain “God bless America” in light of our history. It was an edgy 
sermon to be sure, and apparently most dangerous of all, it was 
delivered by an angry black man. Using a technique honed by the far 
right over thirty years, the media seized upon and de-contextualized a 
sentence from Wright’s lifetime work, characterizing him as “ranting,” 
“raving,” and “divisive.” Liberals joined the discrediting party, 
referring to him as that “loony preacher,” spewing “bigoted and paranoid 
rantings.” In reality Reverend Wright’s sermons were no more incendiary 
than everyday conversations when white people aren’t looking or 
listening, or than Dr. Martin Luther King’s sermons a generation before.

In contrast Senator McCain’s active association with the Reverends 
Hagee, Parsley, and Robertson and the remarks by Governor Sarah Palin’s 
Pentacostal “spiritual warfare” and “prayer warriors” ministry remained 
unmemorable and apparently unremarkable. Hagee’s political preaching 
remained in the realm of the acceptable, including his assertions that 
AIDs is an incurable plague, God’s curse against a disobedient nation, 
until an audio clip surfaced in which he preached that what Hitler did 
in the Holocaust was God’s plan to drive Europe’s Jews back to the land 
of Israel. Only then, did McCain disassociate himself from his insidious 
religious flock.

Nothing stopped the McCain and Palin campaign from agitating, 
encouraging, or at the very least tolerating shouts of “Kill him!” when 
Obama was verbally attacked by the candidates from the stump. The 
candidates’ failure to aggressively disassociate themselves from such 
threats appeared to have lost them a significant part of the independent 
electorate, and all moral credibility—an encouraging development. The 
right-wing attack on Congressman John Lewis’s mild rebuke, however, 
comparing these white crowds to segregationist supporters of Governor 
Wallace forty years previously, again illuminated the incendiary role of 
race.

As soon as Barack Obama began winning primary battles, Michelle Obama, 
the senator’s brilliant, accomplished wife, became a target for the far 
right-wing haters. Brazen commentators mixed up a bitter brew of 
misogyny and racism, and sloshed it generously throughout the 
blogosphere: she’s anti-American; she’s a disgruntled and hectoring 
black nationalist seething with unresolved racial rage; she’s Reverend 
Wright but with estrogen and even more testosterone; she’s a 
ball-breaker who wears the pants in the family. Maureen Dowd referred to 
the attacks as “Round Two of the sulfurous national game of ‘Kill the 
witch.’”

Demonizing Michelle Obama began in earnest when, in February 2008, she 
said that because of her husband’s campaign, hope was sweeping the 
nation, and that, “For the first time in my adult life, I am really 
proud of my country.” Those fifteen words were played over and over in a 
stuttering loop of outrage on right-wing cable, and stood as absolute 
proof that she (and he) came up fatally short in the “real American” 
department. In this narrative, uncritical pride-in-country is assumed to 
be a given, the default of all the good people; anyone who can separate 
affection for people, a land, an ideal from the actions of a state or a 
government is a de facto traitor. There’s absolutely no room here for 
refusal or resistance, for criticism, skepticism, doubt, complexity, 
nuance, or even thought. Citizenship equals obedience. Right-wing 
“commentator” Bill O’Reilly’s first reaction to Michelle Obama’s 
proud-of-my-country comment was to say, “I don’t want to go on a 
lynching party against Michelle Obama unless there’s evidence, hard 
facts, that say this is how the woman really feels.” Interestingly, 
almost no one remembers her joy in the expanding and participatory 
electorate she was seeing, in contrast to her relatively mild critique, 
because the “first time” never stopped repeating. And almost no one 
recalls O’Reilly’s racialized threat of personal violence because it 
conveniently disappeared from the media’s discourse without a trace.

Fox News called her “Obama’s baby mama,” derogatory slang for an unwed 
mother. (Fox later apologized.) The National Review featured her on its 
cover as a scowling “Mrs. Grievance,” and referred to Trinity United 
Church of Christ as a “new-segregationist ghetto of Afrocentric 
liberation theology.” It is always black people who have to clarify an 
unstated assumption (as if John and Cindy McCain’s church, like George 
Bush’s and Ronald Reagan’s, are models of “post-racial,” integrated 
America). Take a look. It’s like the famous question: “Why are all the 
black kids sitting together in the cafeteria?” The white kids never 
explain why they sit together.

On the night Barack Obama claimed the nomination, he walked on stage 
with Michelle and she turned and gave him a pound or a dap, a playful 
and affectionate little fist bump. It flew around the Internet like 
topsy—reviewed, debated, photo-shopped, commented upon—until E. D. Hill 
called it a “terrorist fist jab” on Fox News and that proved to be one 
step too far—Hill was ridiculed and scorned and eventually apologized. 
Simultaneously, of course, it was seized upon and imitated by new waves 
of young admirers.

But Michelle Obama had become an established, larger-than-life target 
for racial and gender animus on conservative blogs. Where were the 
(white) feminists to defend her and decry the rot? And the liberals 
seemingly can’t help themselves either—the New York Times ran a positive 
puff piece on her in which they noted that compared to her husband, 
“Michelle Obama’s image is less mutable. She is a black American, a 
descendent of slaves and a product of Chicago’s historically black South 
Side. She tends to burn hot where he banks cool, and that too can make 
her an inviting proxy for attack.” So much racialized and racist 
craziness packed into three short sentences.

In the aftermath it’s time to remember that President Lyndon Johnson, 
the most effective politician of his generation, was never involved in 
the Black Freedom Movement, although he did pass far-reaching 
legislation in response to a robust and in many ways revolutionary 
movement in the streets. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was not a labor 
leader, and yet he presided over critical social and pro-labor 
legislation in a time of radical labor mobilization in shops and 
factories across the land. And Abraham Lincoln was not a member of an 
abolitionist political party, but reality forced upon him the freeing of 
an enslaved people. Each of these three responded to grassroots 
movements for social justice on the ground.

And it’s to movements on the ground that we must turn as we think beyond 
this election or the next, and consider—in the midst of massive economic 
calamity—the problems and possibilities of building a future of peace 
and love and justice. We may not be able to will a movement into being, 
but neither can we sit idly waiting for a social movement to spring full 
grown, as from the head of Zeus. We have to agitate for democracy and 
egalitarianism, press harder for human rights, link the demands that 
animate us, and learn to build a new society through our collective 
self-transformations and our limited everyday struggles. We must seek 
ways to live sustainably; to stop the addiction to consumption and 
development and military power; to become real actors and authentic 
subjects in our own history.

It is surely a unique, awe-inspiring moment. The Obama campaign offered 
up a new paradigm, activated young people under thirty who have not 
heretofore exercised the franchise, and illustrated that substantial 
numbers of white people and Latino people and Asian-American people 
would indeed vote for a black man. A new generation has learned the 
tools of campaigning, community organizing, and political discourse and 
debate. Now their experience can be put to use mobilizing those same 
people to insist on the changes they imagined. Within the context of 
cultivating the tacit myth of being a post-racial society, the Obama 
campaign inspired and mined a deeper longing for humanizing racial 
unity—even racial unity based on justice. There is change in the 
air—evidence that the population has travelled some distance—as well as 
the familiar stench of a racist history.

Our favorite moment came in the heat of the primary battle when now 
President Obama was asked who he thought Martin Luther King Jr. would 
support, Clinton or himself. Without hesitation, he responded that 
Reverend King would be unlikely to support or endorse either of them, 
because he’d be in the streets building a movement for justice. That 
seems exactly right.

***

Obama's Stress Test After 100 Days In Office

Apr 27, 2009 By Danny Schecter

Danny Schecter's ZSpace Page / ZSpace

How Should We Assess the Change Administration: What The World Thinks?

How would you do on a "stress test?" Even as the soundness of banks is 
supposedly measured-with many expected to show signs of insolvency---the 
whole stress idea demands a broader focus.

How many of the 20 million Americans out of work could pass a stress 
test, in flying colors? How many among the millions of families facing 
foreclosure? Or students defaulting on student loans? What about the 
reported 31 million maxed out on their credit cards, or the many million 
more bombarded with "debt consolidation" commercials on their cable TV 
channels at 3 AM when so many anxious people watch because anxiety keeps 
them from sleeping?

And now, what about the real threat of a deadly swine flu pandemic? 
That's something new to get stressed about.

Ours has become a stressed nation as we assess the impact of the first 
100 days of the Obama era. The President is coping with his own stress 
test. He is already at war, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan/Pakistan 
but also with the high expectations he himself raised. Another front in 
that war: an increasingly vicious and contentious right-wing media that 
is turning its viewers into troops for an uprising against his "tyranny.

I just returned from the Eurasian Media Forum in Kazakhstan where I 
challenged Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele on the bitter 
partisan rhetoric regurgitated daily on Fox News and that he has 
reinforced and not distanced his party from. Steele compared GOP attacks 
on Obama to what he considered far more extreme condemnations of 
President Bush "by the left." He compared himself to Barack Obama as the 
second most important black male in the country and suggested that the 
elections in 2010 will go against the Democrats because he believes 
their policies will fail.

He is cocky and clever---but is he right?

It is certainly true that the bailout plans initiated by his 
predecessor-and which he supported as a Democratic candidate has 
continued but has yet to "fix" anything. You can argue that the 
"glimmers" of prosperity he identified to stir confidence are an 
illusion and that the depression that many are already experiencing can 
and will get worse.

Obama is a pragmatist talking left one day and moving right the next. 
This is called "pragmatism." He has already compromised some of his 
reforms and every welcome initiative like the disclosure of those Bush 
torture memos. He kowtowed to the CIA and has now killed the idea of a 
Truth Commission less anyone compare these United States to despotic 
days in Chile, Argentina or South Africa. Unfortunately this shuffle is 
hard for many of his most passionate backers to take and does not build 
trust and confidence.

Back at the international forum, Obama was still regarded with a sense 
of hope and relief by a word weary of the Bushevik order. Yet, on issue 
after issue, there was uncertainty on where he stands. Will he press 
Israel to push forward with some peace deal? Will he free himself from 
the grip of the Lobby, and take new initiatives or will we see more of 
the same equivocating that has ignored Israeli settlements and 
occupation? It may be significant that Secretary of State Clinton is 
proposing to recognize the reality of Hamas' popularity among 
Palestinians, I was struck to hear China's brilliant Victor Gao insist 
that justice for Palestine including Gazans is more important for 
America's prestige in the world than what happens in Afghanistan.

Will he ever withdraw from Iraq? Former Bush Ambassador Zalmay Khalizad 
says he is still trying to be "helpful" in Iraq and Afghanistan where he 
served, and, where as he told me, was shot out frequently ("I lost 
several helicopters") During his tenure, he was preoccupied with 
defending the Green Zone against frequent shelling by the Iraqi 
resistance." An Iraqi Kurdish leader there told me Obama is moving 
slowly and "responsibly." That "responsibly" is seen as an excuse by 
anti-war activists who believe Obama is delaying to please the military. 
(It reminds me of cold warriors who justified warring on Vietnam for 
fear of being accused of losing Vietnam like their predecessors were 
lambasted for losing China.)

A recent report in the Financial Times that surveyed the global downturn 
had one upbeat piece---a report on how well arms contractors are doing.

The Russians at the Conference welcomed Obama's rapprochement with their 
President and like his proposal for a phase out of nuclear weapons but 
so far see backtracking on backing human rights there and in China. 
There is still a lot of anger at America there, going back to "the fall 
of communism" which included the deliberate pillage of many of Russia's 
resources by American companies on a destroy and conquer mission. 
(Today, one Russian analyst on the panel with me, Professor Igor Panarin 
predicts the US will break up in 6 parts.)

Journalists are by nature skeptics and cynical but many there were so 
relieved that the US pushed "the reset" button in a phrase used by 
ex-Congressman Harold Ford Jr. from Tennessee, now head of the centrist 
Democratic Leadership Conference. Ford backs Barack but is also stressed 
by all the economic uncertainty. The DLC has a crisis too because it has 
consistently stressed free market pro-corporate policies only to find 
they contributed to the current calamity.

Later this week, you will hear endless punditry in attempts to offer a 
"report card" on the first 100 days, even though they all know it is too 
soon to make a real judgment. A lot of this blather will be partisan and 
all knowing and most of it will be wrong. There will be little reference 
to the bureaucratic and political delays he faces in staffing up 
Government agencies including the Treasury despite the fact that we are 
in a major crisis.

As the man at the top, Obama needs a team in place to make things happen 
and many of its members are not there yet. (Unfortunately, he can't use 
a phrase employed by an innovative journalist on a panel on the media. 
The acronym is JFDI-"just fucking do it.") So while everything 
internally is moving in slomo speed, everyone on the outside expects 
hyper-speed solutions.

The media can be unforgiving and quick to judge but the public seems 
more aware of how deep the challenge is. So far, the President's 
approval rating is up. My colleague DXM tells me that for the first time 
in the years he has been watching, Barack replaced Britney as the most 
searched after name on the Internet. Mr. Obama, however, finished 
second. The number one name on this hit parade is another Obama, the one 
named Michelle.


News Dissector Danny Schechter is making a film on the financial crisis 
based in his book plunder (Http://www.newsdissector.com/Plunder) He 
blogs for Mediachannel.org.Comments to Dissector at mediachannel.org

From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3847