When Barack Obama was pondering a run
for the presidency Michelle asked him what he thought he could
accomplish. He replied,“The day I take the oath of office, the world
will look at us differently. And millions of kids across this country
will look at themselves differently. That alone is something.” His
victory was indeed something. The world certainly looked at America
differently, though this had as much to do with who he wasn’t—George W.
Bush—as what he was, black, among other things.
Polls show that African-Americans indeed look at themselves
differently. A January 2010 Pew survey revealed huge optimism. The
percentage of black Americans who thought blacks were better off than
they were five years before had almost doubled since 2007. There were
also significant increases in the percentages who believed the
standard-of-living gap between whites and blacks was decreasing.
But for all the ways black America has felt better about itself and
looked better to others, it has not actually fared better. In fact, it
has been doing worse. The economic gap between black and white has grown
since Obama took power. Under his tenure black unemployment, poverty
and foreclosures are at their highest levels for at least a decade.
Millions of black kids may well aspire to the presidency now that a
black man is in the White House. But such a trajectory is less likely
for them now than it was under Bush. Herein lies what is at best a
paradox and at worst a contradiction within Obama’s core base of
support. The very group most likely to support him—black Americans—is the same group that is doing worse under him.
This condition was best exemplified by Velma Hart, the black chief
financial officer for a Maryland veterans organization, who backed Obama
in 2008. She told Obama at a town hall meeting in September, “I’m
exhausted of defending you…. My husband and I have joked for years that
we thought we were well beyond the hot-dogs-and-beans era of our lives.
But, quite frankly, it is starting to knock on our door and ring true
that that might be where we are headed again.” In November Velma Hart
was laid off.
If it were white Americans who remained this loyal to a Republican
president under whom they were doing this badly, the left would be
claiming false consciousness. If a Republican president were behind
statistics like these, few liberals would be offering that president the
benefit of the doubt.
So, how do we explain this apparent inconsistency? There would appear
to be three main reasons. The first is white people. Not all of them.
But enough. Half of white Americans in a Pew survey shared the birthers’
doubt that Obama was born in this country. After the president produced
his long-form birth certificate, Donald Trump demanded his college
transcripts (claiming he was not smart enough to get into the Ivy
League), and Newt Gingrich branded him the “food stamp president.” In
the face of such brazenly racist attacks, defending Obama’s right to the
office becomes easily blurred with defending his record.
Second, the post–civil rights era concept of corporate diversity,
which many black people have embraced, is central to his symbolism.
Racial advancement is increasingly understood not as a process of social
change but of individual promotion—the elevation of black faces to high
places. Instead of equal opportunities, we have photo opportunities.
“We have more black people in more visible and powerful positions,”
Angela Davis told me before Obama’s nomination. “But then we have far
more black people who have been pushed down to the bottom of the
ladder….There’s a model of diversity as the difference that makes no
difference, the change that brings about no change.”
Third and perhaps most important, the discrepancy reflects a mixture
of realism and low expectations. That black Americans are doing worse
than everyone else, and that the man they elected to turn that around
has not done so, does not fundamentally change their view of how
American politics works; almost every other Democratic president has
failed in a similar way. Conversely the fact that a black man might be
elected president, that enough white people might vote for him, that
nobody has shot him, really has changed their assumptions.
In the black commentariat, opinion is divided over whether
African-Americans should demand a more overt commitment to racial
justice from a black president or refrain from doing so because it would
weaken his appeal to others. The Rev. Al Sharpton insists that calling
on Obama to be a “black exponent of black views” is “just stupid,” since
it will embolden conservative attacks on projects black people need.
Princeton professor Cornel West insists that Obama has “a certain fear
of free black men” and “feels most comfortable with upper-middle-class
white and Jewish men.”
By concentrating so heavily on race, both sides detract from his
responsibilities. Obama should do more for black people—not because he
is black but because black people are the citizens suffering most. Black
people have every right to make demands on Obama—not because he’s black
but because they gave him a greater percentage of their votes than any
other group, and he owes his presidency to them. Like any president, he
should be constantly pressured to put the issue of racial injustice
front and center.
The day he took office, the world may have looked at black America
differently, but black America has taken some time to look at Obama
differently. When he went from being an aspiration to a fact of
political life, the posters that bore his likeness in socialist realist
style over single-word commands like Hope, Believe and Change should
have been replaced with posters bearing the single-word statement:
Power. As Frederick Douglass said: “Power concedes nothing without a
demand. It never did and it never will.”