The Obama Phenomenon: Toward a Multiracial Democracy - Softcover

Henry, Charles P.; Allen, Robert; Chrisman, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0252078225 ISBN 13: 9780252078224

Publisher: University of Illinois Press, 2011

Synopsis

Barack Obama's campaign and electoral victory demonstrated the dynamic nature of American democracy. Beginning as a special issue of The Black Scholar, this probing collection illustrates the impact of "the Obama phenomenon" on the future of U.S. race relations through readings on Barack Obama's campaign as well as the idealism and pragmatism of the Obama administration. Some of the foremost scholars of African American politics and culture from an array of disciplines--including political science, theology, economics, history, journalism, sociology, cultural studies, and law--offer critical analyses of topics as diverse as Obama and the media, ObamaÆs connection with the hip hop community, the public's perception of first lady Michelle Obama, voter behavior, and the history of racial issues in presidential campaigns since the 1960s.



Contributors are Josephine A. V. Allen, Robert L. Allen, Herb Boyd, Donald R. Deskins Jr., Cheryl I. Harris, Charles P. Henry, Dwight N. Hopkins, John L. Jackson, Maulana Karenga, Robin D. G. Kelley, Martin Kilson, Clarence Lusane, Julianne Malveaux, Shaun Ossei-Owusu, Dianne M. Pinderhughes, Sherman C. Puckett, Scharn Robinson, Ula Y. Taylor, Alice Walker, Hanes Walton Jr., and Ronald Williams II.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Allen is professor of biodynamics and control at the Institute of Sound and Vibration Research, University of Southampton, and the founding editor of the journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics: Learning from Nature.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Obama Phenomenon

Toward a Multiracial Democracy

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2011 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07822-4

Contents

Acknowledgments................................................................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction CHARLES P. HENRY.................................................................................................................................................................11. Toward a Multiracial Democracy: The Jackson and Obama Contributions CHARLES P. HENRY.......................................................................................................152. Analysis of Black American Voters in Barack Obama's Victory MARTIN KILSON..................................................................................................................343. Dead Certain: The Election of Barack Obama and Its Implications for Racial Politics HANES WALTON JR., JOSEPHINE A. V. ALLEN, SHERMAN C. PUCKETT, DONALD R. DESKINS JR......................604. What Trumped? Race, Class, Gender, Generation, the Economy, and the 2008 Elections JULIANNE MALVEAUX.......................................................................................825. Race, the Presidency, and Obama's First year DIANNE M. PINDERHUGHES........................................................................................................................926. Under Press-ure: Overcoming the Media and Its Mavens? HERB BOYD............................................................................................................................1117. Opportunity Costs: The Impact of the 2008 Campaign on the Legacy of William Jefferson Clinton SCHARN ROBINSON..............................................................................1268. Lest We Forget: An open letter to my sisters who are brave ALICE WALKER....................................................................................................................1439. The Ambivalent embrace of Barack Obama: The ethical Significance and Social Apprehension of Blackness MAULANA KARENGA......................................................................14810. Obama, Black Religion, and the Reverend Wright Controversy JOHN L. JACKSON................................................................................................................16511. Race, Religion, and the Race for the White House DWIGHT N. HOPKINS........................................................................................................................18112. The New Negro in African American Politics: Barack Obama and the Politics of Racial Representation RONALD WILLIAMS II.....................................................................20013. Barack Obama's Anomalous Relationship with the Hip-Hop Community SHAUN OSSEI-OWUSU........................................................................................................21814. Too Black and Too Strong: First Lady Michelle Obama ULA Y. TAYLOR.........................................................................................................................23615. President Obama: Freedom Democrat or Neoliberal? ROBIN D. G. KELLEY.......................................................................................................................25316. Multicultural Hegemony: Globalization and the Obama Doctrine CLARENCE LUSANE..............................................................................................................26217. An Affirmative Act? Barack Obama and the Past, Present, and Future of Race-Conscious Remedies CHERYL I. HARRIS............................................................................277Epilogue: The Legacy of the Obama Era: A New Electoral Majority? ROBERT L. ALLEN..............................................................................................................311Contributors...................................................................................................................................................................................315Index..........................................................................................................................................................................................319

Introduction

CHARLES P. HENRY

Times are out of joint. We have an African American president yet representatives call him a liar publicly and the Republicans hold an alternate State of the Union in Richmond, the capital of the Confederacy. Philadelphia, Mississippi, has a Black mayor yet Blacks and Whites find it hard to find a justice of the peace that will marry them in Louisiana, which has an East Indian American as governor. Chris Matthews forgets the president is Black but Harry Reid is able to distinguish him from darker, less-well-spoken African Americans. It seems some have transcended race but others have not.

I was only three years old when Ralph Bunche won the Nobel Peace Prize. Therefore I don't remember the extent to which the national and even world communities of African descent celebrated. I believe it must have been some collective party. After all, he beat out Winston Churchill, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Harry Truman—who called him with congratulations. The award came at the beginning of a series of post-World War II events signaling a period of racial advancement including the desegregation of baseball and the military. Again I was only eight when the Supreme Court's Brown decision was announced. As the only Black student in my elementary school this probably should have registered with me, but it didn't. However, I know it was a cause of national celebration among African Americans, or, as we were labeled then, Negroes. I know it inspired Martin Luther King and Ralph Bunche to predict that within ten years America would be fully integrated.

The old folks had a word that described such events—a jubilation. Undoubtedly no event before or since matched the jubilation marking the Emancipation Proclamation. For many years into the twentieth century Blacks would celebrate this day of jubilation. The "Black Republican" president, Lincoln (Clinton was not the first "Black" president), had come through, and even though the scope of the Proclamation was limited, it signaled the end of enslavement. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson was on the scene in Port Royal, South Carolina, the morning of January 1, 1863:

About ten ... people began collecting, steamboats from up & down river ... [and] from that time forth the road was crowded with riders & walkers—chiefly black women with gay handkerchiefs on their heads & a sprinkling of men. Many white persons also, superintendents and teachers. As everyone gathered in a large clearing, a military band played in the background and local dignitaries mounted a platform set beneath towering live oak trees, where they had a clear view of the river. Like many observers, the sight of the black soldiers of the First South Carolina Volunteers especially impressed African American missionary Charlotte Forten ...

Ceremonies opened with prayer and a reading of the emancipation Proclamation, followed by a presentation of colors to the First South Carolina Volunteers. rev. Mansfield French delivered to Colonel Higginson a silk flag bearing the name of the regiment and the proud proclamation, "The year of Jubilee has come!" As Higginson waved the flag, African American women and men in the audience broke in with the national anthem. The freed people's burst of patriotism was "utterly unexpected" and moved many to tears. Higginson recalled, "I never saw anything so electric; it made all other words cheap; it seemed the choked voice of a race at last unloosed." humbled, he wondered how he could follow with his speech: "Just think of it; the first day they had ever had a country, the first flag they had ever seen which promised anything to their people."

Albert Brooks, an ex-slave interviewed by the Works Progress Administration in 1938, reported on the massive parade he attended as a young child. He said one teacher was so intoxicated with joy that she "stood on the church steps and just shouted unashamed before all the people that were present." His own stepfather climbed to the top of the church shouldering a massive American flag that he struggled to wave overhead. Looking back, Brooks said, "Since that first celebration I have attended many others ... but I'll never forget the first Emancipation Proclamation celebration."

Ironically, January 1st had widely been known as Heartbreak Day among many antebellum African Americans. It was traditionally a day of large slave auctions and witnessed the breakup of many families. Prior to the Emancipation Proclamation Blacks had often celebrated Independence Day on July 5th in protest of the failure of the Declaration of Independence to include them. Frederick Douglass's great Fourth of July oration, "What Country Have I," reflects the opposite of the patriotism felt on Emancipation Day. Even the formal end of the slave trade in 1808 was an occasion for celebration across the "Black Nation."

Once again I was around and even more aware of my history by the time of the March on Washington—the symbolic high point of the civil rights movement. I remember coming home in the late afternoon to find my father uncharacteristically sitting in front of the television. On the screen flashed more Blacks than I had ever seen before, along with Whites, milling at the marble feet of Lincoln. Since this was the first live television coverage of a civil rights march, I, like many others, was struck by the world-weary prophetic voice of Martin Luther King Jr. Yet, like many teenagers, especially in the North, the words had little conscious impact. I had been more impressed with the courage of the students closer to my own age that were sitting in and freedom riding all across the South.

By the time of Jesse Jackson's 1984 speech before the Democratic national convention, I was in the audience and fully aware of the implications of Jackson's challenge to the Democratic establishment. There was much weeping and a sense of pride but no jubilation—after all Jackson had lost the nomination.

It was in Denver in 2008 that I got a sense of the jubilation experienced by my ancestors. Walking into the stadium with a long line of Obama supporters, I met a Black woman in her eighties, dressed head to toe in hot pink and high heels, who said she had to be there. She rejected any offers to carry her bags and said she had driven from Southern California by herself to witness Obama's nomination.

And what must have been going through John Lewis's mind as he strode out to the podium before some eighty-four thousand people forty-five years to the day after he addressed the March on Washington? When he spoke at the feet of the Lincoln Memorial that day in 1963, he was the young radical whose remarks had to be edited at the insistence of Archbishop Patrick O'Boyle, Walter Reuther, Burke Marshall, and others. It was the second most famous speech or nonspeech of the March on Washington. He and his band of civil rights activists (community organizers) in SNCC wanted to attack the Kennedy administration for its failure to protect Blacks seeking to exercise their civil rights in the South. In the name of unity, his elders encouraged him to drop his most charged statements. He had wanted to personalize his speech by naming names and pointing out that at that very moment nine civil rights leaders were being indicted in Albany, Georgia, for peaceful protest, not by the Dixiecrats but by the Kennedy administration. Lewis wanted to conclude his speech with the line, "We shall crack the South into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of democracy."

After much debate—some bitter—and pressure to promote unity, Lewis agreed to modify his speech. Some said it "emasculated" the speech, replacing anger with hope. Yet Lewis did manage to retain a critical edge missing from the other addresses, and he alone did not use the word "Negro," replacing it with "Black people" and the "Black masses." Lewis said, "by and large, American politics is dominated by politicians who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic, and social exploitation." He added:

What political leader can stand up and say, "My party is the party of principles?" For the party of Kennedy is also the party of Eastland. The party of Javits is also the party of Goldwater. Where is our party? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march on Washington? Where is the political party that will make it unnecessary to march in the streets of Birmingham?

Now they are all dead. All the major speakers at the March on Washington and the heads of the principal civil rights organizations at the time are gone—except John Lewis. Now Lewis is the old lion, challenged by a younger generation of Black leaders for his early support of Hillary Clinton. These younger leaders saw the Clintons as the politicians of compromise and Obama as the candidate of principle. After much publicized soul searching and comments about being on the "right side of history," Lewis switched his support to Obama in the middle of the primary season.

As he stood in the twilight in Denver before eighty-four thousand energized activists, he must have felt that he made the right decision. Lewis told the crowd that with the nomination of Senator Barack Obama that night, "we are making a major down payment on the fulfillment of that dream," meaning Martin Luther King's dream. Continuing, he said that what they were witnessing was "the continuation of a struggle that began centuries ago in Lexington and Concord, in Gettysburg and Topeka, Kansas, in Philadelphia, Mississippi, and Selma, Alabama." In concluding Lewis contended:

Democracy is not a state. It is an act. It is a series of actions we must take to build what Martin Luther King Jr. called the beloved community—a society based on simple justice that values the dignity and the worth of every human being.

Lewis could have added that these are "American values."

The foregoing should not imply that I believe in a great man or great woman school of history. I tell the students in my course on Martin Luther King that Vernon Johns, King's predecessor at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was more educated than King, was a better preacher, and a fearless advocate of equality who had tried to integrate the buses in Montgomery—yet few have heard of him. Yet certain individuals and events come to symbolize the hopes and prayers of large groups of people. The events I have recounted here mark periods of racial progress in our nation's history. In fact, I believe with Philip Klinkner, Rodgers Smith, and others that such periods are relatively rare occurrences in our past, with the racial status quo being the norm. Three periods of racial progress have been identified in the past and I believe Obama's election as president marks the beginning of a fourth. The analysis undertaken in this work along with some lessons from periods past enables us to speculate on how long the current period might last and what direction it might take. Unfortunately, these periods of racial progress come on the heels of national crises—wars—that destabilize the status quo and allow for the emergence of new ideas and leaders.

The first such period followed the Revolutionary War. Although the American Revolution has been called a "conservative" revolution that changed the political framework but not the social framework, as did the French, Russian, and Chinese revolutions, it still provided a philosophy and language that would come to support Black freedom and equality. Black slaves and their ancestors as well as the founders of the republic would use the natural-rights language so prominent in the Declaration of Independence and the words of leaders like Sam Adams and Patrick Henry. Lacking a legitimate basis in English common law for justifying the revolution, Jefferson, Madison, and others turned to Locke, Rousseau, and the doctrine of natural rights.

Although the language of natural rights was extended in theory though not in practice, it had a real impact. Voluntary manumissions reached their peak during this period with an estimated ten thousand Blacks freed in Virginia in the 1780s. It is possible that one of my own ancestors achieved his freedom during this time and became the keeper of the natural bridge at Jefferson's Monticello. Massachusetts's state supreme court abolished slavery in 1783 and Pennsylvania passed a law providing for gradual emancipation in 1780. It was British action to enlist Blacks that spurred Washington and the revolutionists to make a similar offer to Blacks promising—although not always delivering—freedom at the end of their service. And it was the British who insisted in the Treaty of Paris that slaves under their control not be returned at the end of the war. As a result, Virginia lost thirty thousand slaves and South Carolina twenty-five thousand.

Natural-rights fervor was not lost in the Black community. The Black Quaker and ship owner Paul Cuffee used the argument of "no taxation without representation" to win the first voting rights case in the state of Massachusetts in the 1780s. Absalom Jones, one of the founders of the Black Church, appealed to Enlightenment liberalism in his petition to Congress on behalf of four freemen who were in danger of being re-enslaved in 1797. Congress would refuse to accept his petition as it would all other petitions of behalf of slaves for several decades. In fact, the language of political and civil rights that justified the revolution was considered too dangerous to continue and would not become current again until the post-World War II era.

This disappearance of rights language coincided with a shift in White justifications for slavery at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This change from apologetic support for slavery best illustrated by Jefferson's famous phrase about fearing the wrath of God over its continuation (much like Rev. Wright's "God (will) damn America") to seeing slavery as a positive good helped to polarize the country and led to the Civil War. Perhaps the most notable reaction was the rise of radical abolitionism by roughly 1830, symbolized by David Walker's Appeal and Nat Turner's insurrection. This radical abolitionism was more inclusive (women and Blacks), more willing to justify force, and more immediate.

The second period of racial progress began with the Civil War and ended with the compromise of 1877. Lincoln believed the Emancipation Proclamation was the central act of his administration and the most important governmental action of the nineteenth century. Yet it was in the Gettysburg Address that he sought to re-remember the nation's founding as more inclusive. Garry Wills contends that Lincoln not only put the Declaration of Independence in a new light as a matter of founding law, but put its central proposition, equality, in a newly favored position as a principle of the Constitution (which as the Chicago Times noticed, never uses the word). Of course, the problem Lincoln and his allies faced was that the military victory by the North did not mean an ideological victory over the South despite the reframing. Moreover, no White political leader, North or South, prior to the Civil War had imagined a nation of Blacks and Whites coexisting as free and equal citizens. Lincoln himself, until the middle of the war, saw colonization of Blacks as the only viable solution.

The struggle of the Freedmen's Bureau to survive and the failure of the government to carry out any sort of reparations plan—Sherman's forty acres and a mule—doomed the freedmen to debt peonage well into the twentieth century. Without an economic base, Blacks were unable to protect the political gains of radical Reconstruction.

Despite its brevity, Reconstruction provided some valuable political lessons for Blacks in general. For example, the issue of whether integrated or separate schools were best for Black children was a hotly debated topic, as it would be nearly a hundred years later. Black political leaders were spoken of as "representatives" of their race not because of any particular political position but because their accomplishments were emblematic of Blacks' essential equality.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Publication date: 2011
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0252078225
• ISBN 13: 9780252078224
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344