Race in the Obama Era

Last year, we celebrated the forty-fifth anniversary of the famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. On that day, Martin Luther King, Jr., gave one of the greatest speeches in the history of this nation, “I Have a Dream.” In that address in front of the Lincoln Memorial, King elaborated on an aspect of his vision: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” The cataracts of time have allowed people to misconstrue King’s statement as imagining a color-blind society in some future reality. King enjoyed his cultural heritage too much to endorse such a vacuous and myopic idea. What King was saying was not that people would not see race, ethnicity, or cultural background anymore, but, rather, would not prejudge or oppress them as inferior human beings based on these characteristics of appearance and heritage. At the point of his death by an assassin’s bullet, King was acutely aware of the long road ahead yet to realize his dream.

Certainly, there can be no objectively reasonable gainsaying the fact that race, racial prejudice, and racism pervaded the caucuses, primaries, conventions, and general election in 2008, and the short period since the election could not possibly have eliminated these elements. The challenges to President Barack Obama’s nationality, the liberty with which conservative media stars have freely characterized him with racial invective, and the reactions to some of his Cabinet appointees, nominees to the bench, and hires to assist him in foreign and domestic policies are not simply forays from those who disagree with his politics, but, rather, personal attacks that have xenophobia as one of their components.

Obama sought to deflect some of the race baiting and hatred by renouncing support or association with individuals such as Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and Trinity United Church of Christ pastor emeritus Jeremiah Wright. Continued deliberate alignment with these and other blacks would have scandalized Obama’s attempt to appear moderate and painted him as the stereotypical angry black man. The very fact that Obama was compelled to respond to the racialization of his campaign drives home the point that the United States of America is far from the color-blind society that many claim his very ascendancy to the presidency supposedly proves.

When an esteemed Harvard University professor is humiliated and arrested right outside of his home after displaying legitimate evidence that he indeed lived there, how can we proclaim that we have arrived at a place where race is no longer a relevant social construct, however scientifically flawed it is? Thank God it was a Harvard professor and not a member of the black or Latino hoi polloi, so to speak, who would still be incarcerated for disturbing the peace, interference with official acts, attempted assault on a police officer—you name it! Manning Marable, another esteemed Ivy League professor of African descent, is accurate when he states that African Americans still suffer from “massive unemployment, massive incarceration, and massive disenfranchisement.” Public intellectual and Princeton scholar Cornel West, who can reissue his bestseller of the early 1990s, Race Matters, in the first decade of the twenty-first century and strongly argue why Democracy Matters, continues to report lamentably that he can stand on a corner in New York City and be repeatedly ignored by taxicab drivers. When the first leading African American environmentalist can be railroaded to resign as an adviser to Pres. Obama because his anger understandably got the best of him during the George W. Bush reign, the gravity of the claim that racism is a figment of our pigment’s imagination cannot be overlooked.

Amid the reality of an Obama Administration, we can remark that this nation, which started off with the canard that all men are created equal, has significantly improved in race relations and has removed enough of the shackles of race prejudice to elect a biracial person to the highest office. In a sense, the long night of racism has been imbued with the sunlight of cultural pluralism. This dawning of a new day, however, is still a cautionary tale, for there are a number of genuine impediments to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for many in this country, especially for people of color. The debate over whether or not to have a public or governmental option in the health care system is, indeed, a case in point.

Who, today, needs a public option? Is it not primarily those who have no health insurance and inadequate access to health care? Moreover, who are disparately numbered among the unemployed, emergency room patients, the uninsured, and patrons of free health and urgent care centers? These are the persons for whom a public option, a reduction of health care and prescription drug costs, and increased access to quality medical care would be lifesaving policies, literally! Whereas we may not be able to point the finger at one individual or a group of persons whom we can call racist without reservation, we can precisely pinpoint the perpetuation of institutionalized racism in the structures, processes, and policymaking of our resplendent democratic republic.

In 1953, when Howard Thurman became the first black dean of the chapel at a predominately white postsecondary educational institution, Boston University, the dean of the B.U. School of Theology and the president of the university received innumerable complaints from the white parents of prospective and current undergraduate students there who believed their children were being endangered by some libidinous and swarthy demonic savage. Despite these ridiculous, but serious, claims, the dean and the president prevailed. By his death in 1981, Thurman was regarded as one of the top ten preachers in the twentieth century! Here we are over a half-century later, and parents and conservatives alike protest the appearance of the nation’s president at a school to encourage students to develop good study habits so that they could persist to graduation, make something out of their lives, and give back to their communities and to the country. Does race play a part, however subtle, in the remonstrances against his visit? You bet it does!

We do not have to look far from where we are right now to ascertain that racism is alive and well today. Our greater metropolitan area remains divided along racial lines. Not only is there a chasm between what is known as east and west Waterloo, but also is there perhaps an even greater tale of division between the two cities. Somehow—and we claim we don’t know how—this divide is perpetuated year after year: as new students arrive on the UNI campus, as games between high schools are played, as civic leaders compete over commercial development, as faculty, staff, administrators, principals, teachers, and merit employees are hired, as curricula virtually stagnate, as cultural innovations and downtown renovations stubbornly ignore the contributions and achievements of people of color, and walls of segregation remain strongly intact. Yes, we’ve come a long way in our racial understanding, but we have a long way yet to go in our reach for a society free of racial discrimination.

Fleecy locks and dark complexion

Cannot forfeit nature’s claim:

Skin may differ, but affection

Dwells in black and white the same.

Were I so tall as to reach the pole,

Or to grasp the ocean at a span,

I must be measured by my soul—

The mind is the standard of the man.

Yes, I am happy that Iowa was a springboard for the successful run of Obama for the Democratic Party’s nomination and the general election. I am not ashamed to divulge my having a special sense of racial and ethnic pride when I say President Obama. But without sounding too immodest, I am not so stupid as to believe that his inauguration ushered in a post-racial, color-blind utopia and I just need to get over being so ensconced in the civil rights movement of yesterday and Martin Luther King, Jr., that I am unable to see that we have arrived at the fulfillment of King’s dream. The fact of the matter is that our society is not a dystopia, an imaginary place where people are dehumanized and fearful, but it is certainly still a real place where people are debased, impeded, suppressed, miseducated, overlooked, and misdirected in a way that is not arbitrary, accidental, or unknown, solely on the basis of their race and ethnicity. Although the deliberateness of the structures, processes, and policies cannot always be fingered at specific individuals, the results can be easily identified as well as how to fix them. The question is not whether we have the knowledge or the wherewithal, but, rather, whether we have the will. Clearly, enough of our leaders at all levels of government and location, folks in the public and private sectors, have not had the will.

As Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poemed:

Honor to those whose words or deeds

Thus help us in our daily needs,

And by their overflow,

Raise us from what is low!

On talk radio one night recently, I caught a conversation about Obama’s so-called Afro-Leninism, and how he wants to put every major industry and service under the federal government. Despite my immediate reflex disaffection towards such demagoguery, I found myself very disturbed by the use of the descriptor “Afro.” What the host and the caller said about their perception of socialism, which was patently skewed and erroneous, seemed to have nothing to do with the president’s race. Or did it? When the chatter moved to talk about recognizing when Obama’s about to lie or deceive the audience, because his nose gets wider, broader, and thicker, well, then I had my answer. Thousands upon thousands of people listen to this drivel frequently—and not with the disgust I felt for that brief moment in my car, but with derision, agreement, and disrespect. With such folderol in the media, on Capitol Hill, and in the social institutions all around us, race in the Obama era is a classic case of that saying, “the more things change, the more things stay the same.”