Election 2012: A Political Farmer’s Market

Election 2012: A Political Farmer’s Market

by Lori Latrice Martin | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)

With Election Day a week away, many are reflecting upon the nation’s past and contemplating the nation’s future. The subject of whether or not President Obama can capture the hearts, minds, and imagination of enough Americans to win a second term has garnered a great deal of attention and print in some of the country’s leading newspapers.

One subject receiving a great deal of attention is whether or not President Obama has taken blacks for granted and whether the loyalty that blacks have shown to the Democratic Party, specifically to the nation’s first black president, has come at a cost.

President Obama’s attention, or lack thereof, to a laundry list of issues facing blacks is routinely compared with that of past administrations. At the same time, blacks scholars critique other black scholars for what they say is a failure to call out the president for turning the proverbial blind eye to matters, including: racial wealth inequality; racial health disparities; the mass incarceration of men of color; unemployment and employment discrimination; and racial differences in academic achievement and educational attainment; to name a few.

Such critiques are often limited in focus and misguided as they involve the comparison of what amounts to political apples and oranges. Not only are comparisons made between the current administration and previous administrations, but also between the days leading up to Election Day 2008 and Election Day 2012.

For one, this president and this presidency is unlike any other in history. The significance of the ascension of a black man to the highest office in the land cannot be overstated, muted, or overlooked. Race is as significant today as it has been in the past. Racism today is alive and well. It may not look like the racism of the days of old, but it is certainly not dead.

To say that race remains very visible marker in America society, is an understatement. Moreover, we must not forget that race is a social construct and as such we continue to give meaning to what it means to have membership in a particular racial group.

Membership is no more voluntary for the president than it is for anyone else. Thus, “the price of a black presidency,” includes the mistrust of a segment of the population still beholden to a narrative that says certain groups are more deserving of benefits and others more deserving of society’s burdens. Consequently, we continue to live in a society that differentiates access to wealth, status, and power on the bases of a number of sociological factors, including race. This system not only predated President Obama’s historic victory in 2008, but also his birth and the births of every one of us in this country.

This country was built upon a very powerful racialized social system that no one election or administration can dismantle, no matter how loud black intellectuals shout or no matter how silent they remain. Whether President Obama yells from his bully pulpit, with his fingers clutched and raised in the air, the system that privileges members of the dominant racial group in this society, over and above other groups, will remain intact.

Election Day 2012 will not be like Election Day 2008, not because President Obama has failed the nation or the black community, but because Election Day 2008 was an historic and unprecedented event, the likes of which may only be comparable to the election of Nelson Mandela after the dismantling of the oppressive Apartheid system in South Africa. No one expected that Mandela would be able to turn right-side up, what had been upside-down for some many years. Similarly, President Obama should not be saddled with the same unattainable expectations. The list of problems President Obama inherited from the previous administration are well documented, as are the list of inequalities, between blacks and whites, the rich and the poor, and men and women, which were written into the nation’s founding documents and principles.

Thus, comparing this president and this election to any other is tantamount to comparing political apples and oranges. Efforts to change societal patterns in fundamental ways will require a radical transformation, not attainable in four-, or even eight years. The groundwork is being laid however, in the uprisings we’ve seen spring up over worker’s rights, health care, education, equal pay, and the like.

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Lori Latrice Martin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Africana Studies at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of the forthcoming, Black Asset Poverty and the Enduring Racial Divide (First Forum Press, a Division of Lynne Reinner Publishers).

Olympic Legacy Questioned by Inner City London

Al Jazeera English

 

One of the key aims of the London 2012 Olympics was to create a sporting legacy for Great Britain. Last year there was anarchy on the streets of London as rioting and looting spread across the city, just a short distance from the Olympic stadium. But now those most affected by the riots are asking how exactly things have changed, and wondering if the Olympic infrastructure will improve their own communities. Al Jazeera's Laurence Lee reports from Tottenham in North London.

My Barack Obama Problem

My Barack Obama Problem

by Mark Naison | special to NewBlackMan

Like many people on the Left, I have become disillusioned with the Obama Presidency.  As one of those people who devoted huge amounts of time, money and energy to getting Obama elected, and who cried on election night when his victory was assured, I found myself hoping against hope that there was some redemptive quality to his leadership amidst expansion of foreign wars,  attacks on public school teachers, bailouts of banks unaccompanied by serious controls, and a host of other policies that appeared to contradict everything he stood for during his campaign.

Although my heart wasn’t in it, I tried to justify his policies as the result of a powerful congressional opposition that refused to support policies that brought the full power of the federal government behind job creation and income policies designed to ease the pain of the  nation’s  struggling working class and middle class, along with those long trapped in poverty.

But recently, I have started to think that the “real” Barack Obama is not the community organizer pictured in Dreams from My Father or the fierce defender of the middle class that emerged on the campaign trail, but a cynical, ambitious, politician who loves spending time with the rich and the powerful and who has tied his administration’s and his own future to gaining their support.

The straw that broke the camel’s back, after many disappointments, was the image of the President regaling a $2,500 a plate dinner in San Francisco while Occupy Oakland was being attacked by an army of police using tear gas, rubber bullets, pepper spray and bulldozers.  The Obama of Dreams from My Father would have rushed across the Bay to stand with the Occupiers, but this Obama didn’t so much as give the protesters a second thought. 

The President was totally relaxed and in his element with the hedge fund and dot com executives, and media moguls, supporting his campaign. THEY, not the Occupiers, were now his real constituency. Not only were they the ones funding his presidential campaign, they were the ones who were going to be employing him after he left the Presidency, assuring that he, and his family would be part of the 1 Percent for the foreseeable future.

As a young man, who like the President, grew up in a lower middle class family and went to an Ivy League college and graduate school, I can understand the lure of great wealth and power to someone who grew up with neither.  When you are a talented person from a family of modest means, it can be very heady to be courted by and praised by some of the nation’s smartest, wealthiest and most powerful people.   And if you are so talented and charismatic that these people decide to groom you to become one of them, it can definitely persuade you to make compromises that end up affecting your conscience and your social consciousness.

For very personal reasons, I never enjoyed hanging out in the clubs and restaurants and vacation houses of the wealthy as much as the times I spent in neighborhood ball fields, schoolyards, and community centers interacting with working class and middle class people. I keep my feet in both worlds but I consider “the hood” to be my moral compass, the place where I have to go to find out if my life’s mission has any real traction, any real meaning.

But I fear the President is different.  The people who come to the White House, whether the professional basketball players who show up at his birthday parties, the talented musicians who come to entertain, or the CEO’s and political kingmakers who come to discuss policy, are always a cross session of the most successful people in whatever field they are in. The President never tries to bring in ordinary people to talk to him privately and find out what is going on in their workplaces and neighborhoods. Those are not the people he trust, those are not the people he is comfortable with; those are not the people he wants to spend time with when he leaves the Presidency.

A real cue to the President’s character came when he decided to host an Education Summit. To this event, he invited CEO’s of the nation’s largest corporations, and executives in some of the nation’s wealthiest foundations, but not one teacher.   This is the real Barack Obama—someone who has left the world he grew up in, and the communities in Chicago he organized in, and who craves the company and advice of people, like himself, who have accomplished great things or accumulated great wealth.

In some ways, he is the perfect President for a country where ambition is honored above loyalty, generosity, and concern for those who have fallen in hard times and where we honor those who have overcome great obstacles to “rise to the top.”

But whether he is the right President to lead us through the worst economic crisis in seventy years and stand up for all the people who have lost jobs and homes and hope is another matter entirely.

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Mark Naison is a Professor of African-American Studies and History at Fordham University and Director of Fordham’s Urban Studies Program. He is the author of two books, Communists in Harlem During the Depression and White Boy: A Memoir. Naison is also co-director of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP). Research from the BAAHP will be published in a forthcoming collection of oral histories Before the Fires: An Oral History of African American Life From the 1930’s to the 1960’s.