Tea Party backlash, and end with essays examining two of the most important racial events during his time in office—the killing of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman and the uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the police killing of Michael Brown in 2014. In this section I also explore the death of Osama bin Laden and the problematic nature of the national celebration, as well as Obama’s own comments about the event. Although not a racial story per se, given the way in which the United States has racialized Islam and terrorism, it feels as though there is a subtext to the killing of bin Laden that calls for the inclusion of this piece.
Obviously, more could be said about race in the Obama era, and many of the essays in later sections will touch on some of that. But these pieces reflect the tenor of the time, from the Tea Party uprising to the birth of Black Lives Matter. As I explained in my 2012 book, Dear White America: Letter to a New Minority, the Obama presidency, combined with economic collapse and significant cultural and demographic change, produced a perfect storm of white racial anxiety. That storm would wreak considerable havoc, culminating in the election of Donald Trump in 2016.
We’ll get to that soon enough. But for now, just watch the video, and try to forget what you know about the ending.
GOOD, NOW BACK TO WORK
THE MEANING (AND LIMITS) OF THE OBAMA VICTORY
OUR CHILDREN WERE asleep when it was announced last night that Barack Obama had been elected 44th president of the United States. But even if they had been awake they would have found it impossible to understand what had happened. At 5 and 7, they have only the most rudimentary awareness of the larger society, let alone its longstanding racial drama. They cannot comprehend how unlikely this outcome seemed even a year ago, or how absurd the mere suggestion of it would have sounded to their grandparents when their mother and I were the age our kids are now.
Sadly, after gauging reaction from around the web this morning, it is apparent that my children are not the only ones lacking the perspective to appreciate the evening’s events. But at least, given their age, they have an excuse. The same cannot be said for some of my compatriots on the left whose cynicism has already begun to blossom not even twelve hours later, and who insist there is no functional difference between Barack Obama and John McCain, between Democrats and Republicans.
Having been on the left a long time, I’ve long heard some among our ranks insist that we shouldn’t vote, because “the lesser of two evils is still evil.” It’s the kind of statement meant to signal that one has seen through the two-party “duopoly” and won’t be fooled by the Democrats again. The rest of us, they insist, are like battered spouses who refuse to leave their partners, only far less sympathetic. They, on the other hand, are like Julia Roberts in Sleeping With the Enemy, making their break with their tormentor, or like Farrah Fawcett (google her, young folks) in The Burning Bed, prepared to incinerate the whole system in service to their ideological purity.
All of this preciousness would be humorous, were it not so incredibly offensive. Because if you cannot conjure any joy at this moment, or appreciate what it means for millions of black folks who stood in lines for up to seven hours to vote, then your cynicism has become such an encumbrance as to render you useless to the liberation movement. Yes, Obama was a far-from-perfect candidate. Yes, we will have to work hard to hold him accountable. Still, it matters that he, and not McCain and the Christo-fascist Palin, emerged victoriously.
Those who say it doesn’t matter weren’t with me on the south side of Chicago this past week, surrounded by community organizers who go out and do the hard work every day. All of them know that an election is but a tactic in a larger struggle. None will now think their jobs superfluous, due to the election of Barack Obama. But all made it clear that this is the outcome they desired and that it matters. They haven’t the luxury of waiting for the Green Party to become something other than a pathetic caricature, no more able to sustain movement activity than it was eight years ago or will be eight years hence.
Last 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.