Obama's Multiracial Coalition and the Politics of Racial Reconciliation

Here's some food for thought from the Black Agenda Report.

As the presidential campaign heats up, the precarious nature of Obama's "multiracial coalition" along with the nature of the "racial reconciliation" his candidacy brings becomes more. Under the Obama version of "racial reconciliation" the opinions commonly held by most of Black America are deemed "divisive" relics of the past. Black opinion, wherever it differs from that of white corporate media is off the table. A shrewd and savvy politician, Obama is entitled to make these choices for himself, and for his own reasons. But should the voices of Black America be silenced and banished from the national discourse because they do not serve the career plans or short term interests of the Obama campaign? Just what shots does Black America call in this reconciliation, and what benefits do African Americans receive in this "multiracial coalition"?

by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon

“We took this country (from Native Americans) by terror...”

“We bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We nuked far more than the numbers killed in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye...”

“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and the black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas has been brought back to our own front yards? America's chickens are coming home to roost...”

These and similar statements by Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, the long time pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ are not even particularly controversial in the Black community. They are, as the University of Chicago's Michael Dawson affirms well within the mainstream of Black opinion, and can be heard on street corners, barber shops, churches and around dinner tables all the time. The fact is, most African Americans agree with Rev. Wright.

But the common and ordinary wisdom of Black America is inadmissible in mainstream US discourse. In the reality-defying bubble of US corporate media, one must never speak of the genocide and dispossession of Native Americans as “terror”. Comparing the atomic bombings of hundreds of thousands of civilians in World War 2, the snuffing out of two million Vietnamese lives in the sixties and seventies or one million plus Iraqis and counting in the current war is, in mainstream media, strictly off-limits. And any suggestion that US imperial policies in the Middle East, Africa or elsewhere might provoke justified resistance or understandable retaliation is deemed beyond-the-pale anti-American hate speech.

The foundation of Barack Obama's electoral strategy is reliance upon a base of voters in black America motivated by a nationalistic desire to see one of their own in the White House, no matter what his beliefs. Thus the black vote, ordinarily the most dependably left wing bloc in the US can be safely and permanently taken for granted, leaving Obama free to move rightward, doing and saying whatever it takes to win white votes and corporate favor. Barack Obama is therefore the establishment's dream black candidate, almost entirely free of obligation to African Americans and our historic agenda, but getting our votes anyway.

Accordingly, to preserve his standing among white and Republican voters who imagine him as the “post-racial” candidate, Obama has for the past week sought to distance himself from his pastor of twenty years. In speeches and interviews Obama compared Rev. Wright to “that old uncle everybody has” who mumbles things we disagree with. He pronounced Wright an “angry” man, hopelessly stuck in the fifties and sixties. Obama's much ballyhooed March 18 speech went several steps further, suggesting that white American racism is a not a fundamental feature of American life, mischaracterizing his pastor's views on the Middle East, and blaming war and US imperial adventures that part of the world on “radical Islam” instead of on our insistence upon controlling their resources.

"...the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."

The fact is that black America is more pro-Palestinian than any other constituency except Arab-Americans. Black America is highly suspicious of US claims to be an “honest broker” for peace in the Middle East. Obama's labeling of "radical Islam" as the transcendent national enemy, however, is perfectly in line with that of corporate media, as well as with Hillary's, McCain's and Bush's "war on terror" foreign policy framework. But it happens to be the exact opposite of where most of Black America stands.

If Barack believes, as he says, that "the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam" are the reasons we are at war in the Middle East, what difference is there between Obama and Hillary, between Obama and McCain or even between Obama and George Bush or the neo-cons? If Barack believes this, his promised withdrawal and “over the horizon” redeployment of "combat troops" (not of mercenaries or contractors or counterinsurgency troops or training troops or the rest of the occupation, just the "combat brigades") will be followed by another intervention somewhere else in hopes of squashing "the perverse and hateful ideology of radical Islam". Maybe Somalia, which we already bomb regularly. Maybe Afghanistan. Maybe nuclear-armed Pakistan, a target Obama has already identified.

A further proof of how liberated the black candidate Obama is from the will of black voters is his promised to increase the military budget over Bush levels, to add 90,000 more pairs of boots to the army and marines, and to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan, where we support a coterie of arms and opium smugglers masquerading as a government. Increasing the military budget is lower on the priorities of African Americans than of any other constituency in the land, and takes money away from all the cherished priorities of African American communities like education, public transit, and job creation.

And of course our "stalwart ally", as Barack called Israel, in fact a murderous apartheid regime in which Arab "citizens" are forbidden from owning land in much of the country, where their marriages are not recognized by the state, where Arabs are issued different license plates so their cars can be profiled from a distance, and many other indignities. And those are Arabs with Israeli citizenship. Palestinians, the owners of the land only two generation ago, are still experiencing wholesale confiscation of their remaining land and assets, penned up into Gaza and the West Bank, humiliated, starved and murdered at will by Israeli armed forces and death squads. Obama knows these to be facts, and at earlier points in his political career would show up at Palestinian events in Chicago. But the political game he has chosen to play, and the allies he has chose to play it with require a selective memory.

And just as Ronald Reagan was seldom able to complete a paragraph on race without a reference to fictional Cadillac-driving welfare queens, Barack Obama was unable to make a speech on race without a gratuitous and pandering reference to the alleged shortcomings of black fathers. Is this what “post-racial” black candidates must do to prove they are not “stuck” in the sixties? Is this how a “multiracial coalition” is built? Two decades ago he took the advice of a local pastor who suggested his work as a community organizer in Chicago's Roseland neighborhood would go better if he had a “church home”, and Obama chose Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street. In the very early 80s, long before most Americans knew Nelson Mandela's name, Trinity UCC had a “FREE SOUTH AFRICA” sign in front of its building. Meetings were held and collections were regularly taken up since at least the mid-1970s to aid liberation movements in what were then the white-ruled countries of Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia, Angola and South Africa. Rev. Wright was a theologian, an activist, a successful pastor and leader who built a thriving ministry that was one of the black south side's social, economic and political hubs for a generation. If you were up and coming on the south side, Trinity was one of the places to be, for many reasons.

Obama got what he could out of Trinity in the 80s,. He re-joined the church upon his return to Chicago after law school in 1992 to begin his political career. Obama admits that Wright married the him and his wife, baptized their children, and blessed their new house. But at this point in the campaign, Rev. Wright's message and ministry are as expendable as the political will of the rest of Black America has been all along. Campaign insiders have told reporters that if Rev. Wright was not retiring, Obama would have to change congregations, but since he is, that will not be necessary. In the end, Barack Obama is a grown man, a savvy and ambitious politician who will have to live with his moral and political choices. And so will we. We know what's in it for him. But what's in it for us?

What would it have cost Barack Obama to try to educate, to lead, to lift the level of the American people by picking say, the least controversial of Wright's assertions, say that the country was taken from Native Americans “by terror” and actually defending it? That would have been an historic and groundbreaking act of moral leadership. If Obama is not ready to lead now, when will he be? And where?

Obama's unconditional affirmations that America is “inherently good”, that white racism is not endemic, that “radical Islam” is the enemy, that apartheid Israel is a “stalwart ally”, and that his pastor and spiritual mentor, a man who accurately reflects the views of most of Black America is an angry, divisive old uncle stuck in the fifties and sixties --- all these may restore his credentials among whites as the candidate of “racial reconciliation”. But what is being reconciled here? Aside from the color of the president's face, what is being changed? And just what does Black America, its opinions and leading thinkers denounced, belittled and banned from the political discourse by the black candidate, no less, get out of this reconciliation, or this campaign?

Bruce Dixon is based in the Atlanta area, and can be reached at bruce.dixon@blackagendareport.com