Obama and the spectre of race

LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 7 September

It’s a paradox. Barack Obama’s candidacy is hailed as “historic” for the very sound reason that he is the first African-American to become the presidential nominee of a major party. In a country whose history is permeated by race, that’s clearly a significant event, at the least a huge symbolic breakthrough. Yet in his widely praised acceptance speech Obama made no reference at all to race or to the history that made the occasion “historic”.

Obama has projected himself as a candidate transcending race, and his nomination was hailed even by conservative opponents as a sign that struggles over race were a thing of the past. But then, that’s what they’ve been telling us for many years.

As was widely noted, Obama’s acceptance of the nomination coincided with the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. Obama harked back to that day in Washington, but subjected it to a carefully raceless re-construction. The “young preacher from Georgia” had not, Obama said, offered “words of anger and discord” but a reminder that “in America, our destiny is inextricably linked. That together, our dreams can be one.” Taken out of context, the one passage from King’s speech Obama actually quoted – “We cannot walk alone, and as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead” – is politically banal. In fact, as Obama must know, there were many “words of anger and discord” heard in Washington on that day; and no one lashed out more fiercely at the US’s persistent failure to deliver its “promissory note” to black Americans than King himself – a striking contrast with Obama’s upbeat celebration of the “American promise”.

Racial categories exist not in our bodies but in our minds. Their construction is artificial and arbitrary, historical not immutable, but their impact is terrifyingly concrete. As historian David Roediger writes in his new book, ‘How Race Survived US History’, “The world got along without race for the overwhelming majority of its history. The US has never been without it.” Racial inequality was inscribed in the US constitution, and despite the civil war and, a century later, the civil rights movement, it remains ingrained in US society, woven into the fabric of the labour market, workplaces and residential areas.

As Roediger notes, ten years ago the net financial worth of African-American and Latino families was 17.2% that of whites, and since then the disparity has grown. Today, whites have on average nine times the household wealth of African-Americans and Latinos. Nearly one in three African-American children live in poverty, compared to one in 10 white children. According to the research group United for a Fair Economy, under existing trends black and white median household wealth will not become equal for at least another 500 years.

Meanwhile, 75% of all active tuberculosis cases affect people of colour. And fifty years after the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in education, two thirds of all African American and Latino urban students attend schools in which less than 10% of the students are white. Conversely, in 2006, black students made up only 2.2% of entrants at the University of California at Los Angeles – and one fifth of these were scholarship athletes.

Black males born in 1991 are estimated to have a 29% chance of imprisonment, more than 7 times that of whites born in the same year; Latino men are incarcerated at four times the rate of whites. 60% of the prison population consists of people of colour, the result of massive racial disparities in sentencing, from petty drugs crimes to death penalty offences.

The statistics confirm what is plain to any open-eyed visitor to the USA. Racial hierarchies are there to see, from mid-town Manhattan restaurants to far flung southwestern suburbs.

All this persists some four decades after the civil rights movement succeeded in outlawing racial discrimination. The contradiction between an officially “colourblind” society and the reality of continuing racial inequality has given rise to a popular school of thought which argues that the problem is blacks themselves and their alleged cultural inadequacies. This pathologising of black communities substitutes for a fact-based analysis of racial inequality, takes for granted many assumptions of white supremacy, and grossly caricatures millions of individuals. To some degree, Obama, like many liberals, white and black, accepts the pathologising, and or at least avoids challenging it.

In the long aftermath of the civil rights movement, the main weapon against racial inequality has been affirmative action. This much mythologised programme, always minimal in scope and hemmed in by court decisions, has become the prime object of white resentment. Republicans have seethed against it for decades, while Democrats, even the most liberal, have been reluctant to defend or explain it. State referenda against affirmative action were passed in California in 1996, Washington in 1998, and Michigan in 2006. The issue is on the ballot this autumn in four more states. Republican thinking is that these referenda will mobilise white voters who will go on to vote for the Republican candidate. Obama himself is equivocal on affirmative action, and will certainly not want his campaign to be tainted in any way with what is seen as a black/white “wedge” issue.

Obama may wish to move beyond race but his campaign confronts it at every turn, though in contradictory forms. In the South Carolina primary, where he scored a significant victory over Clinton, he took 80% of the black vote and only 25% of the white vote, yet as the numbers came in, his jubilant supporters chanted “RACE DOESN’T MATTER!” It’s worth pointing out that only 18 months ago Time magazine was wondering whether Obama was “black enough” to mobilise the African-American vote. In the end, an overwehlming majority of African-Americans have chosen to back a candidate whose mother is white, whose father was a foreigner – which, Roediger notes, makes them the “most cosmopolitan” sector of the US electorate.

Obama criticised his former pastor, the black nationalist Jeremiah Wright, for having “a profoudly distorted view of this country – one that sees white racism as endemic.” In contrast to this divisiveness, Obama stresses what “Americans” have in common and describes race as a diversion from real problems. But racism and racial inequality will not vanish by being ignored, or merely as an incidental result of other processes, economic or demographic. As Roediger writes, “race thinking” is “not simply a diversion from other brutalities, but a prop on which they rest.” White racism may not be “endemic” but it is doggedly persistent, not a mere hangover from the past but an active agent in the present.

Despite his reassuring rhetoric, Obama poses an obvious challenge to the most powerful form of identity politics in the US today, the politics of the white-identified majority. As a result, there will continue to be huge resistance to his candidacy. He may try to ignore race, but it could turn out to be a fatal obstacle on his road to the White House.