by James Thindwa
Given Barack Obama’s pro-corporate policies, overwhelming Black support for the president seems counterintuitive, since “throughout history, African Americans have been a critical part of dissent, advocacy and protest, and translating it into public policy.” Yet Black pride appears to have undermined historical Black politics. “Rather than spend time defending ‘the most powerful office in the world’ victims of economic injustice—and those who purport to care about them—should be fighting for social and economic redress.”
What Ails the Black Body Politic: Challenges to Movement Building
by James Thindwa
This article originally appeared in In These Times.
“Blacks must hold Obama accountable for his capitulation to corporate rightwing interests at their expense.”
The direction the Obama administration takes in the next two years depends in part on the sources of popular pressure. A key question to consider is: Can Black America, experiencing newfound pride in the first black president—and scared to death of Republicans!—challenge a Democratic Party in the grip of neoliberal orthodoxy?
It is a tragic irony of our time that those who suffer the most are the least politically agitated. This disjuncture is evident in the uncritical support President Obama receives from large swaths of the black body politic. Polls show that 9 in 10 African Americans approve of the president’s job performance, compared to 40 percent of white Democrats.
Measured against indices of economic well-being, black support for the president seems incongruous, even counterintuitive. Black unemployment is a staggering 16.1 percent. Home foreclosures will consume between 71 and 122 billion dollars from black communities. Homelessness has increased dramatically, with disproportionate impact on black adults and children.
This grim reality is mocked by historically high corporate profits, skyrocketing CEO compensation, and renewed corporate mergers and acquisitions, thanks to government bailouts. Juxtaposed with administration concessions to the right—tax giveaways to the wealthiest, a health bill stripped of its redeeming progressive elements, freeze on federal employee pay, moratorium on Social Security tax, unending wars, and expansion of the national security state—such a status quo should provoke anxiety, not approval.
To be sure, there is sympathy for the president across the board, with 71 percent of the electorate still blaming G.W. Bush for the economic crisis. Also, Obama inherited an economy in crisis, and has endured scurrilous, often racially charged torment from the right. And certainly, other progressive forces have been too willing to compromise—witness defeat of the Dream Act and collapse of comprehensive immigration, a watered down health reform bill, unrelenting wars, and failure of climate legislation.
The question of black political engagement must be raised because it is indispensable to the movement-building necessary for a real progressive alternative. Throughout history, African Americans have been a critical part of dissent, advocacy and protest, and translating it into public policy.
“Black support for the president seems incongruous, even counterintuitive.”
In the current environment, that tradition faces a challenge. There is resistance to criticizing the president. Black writer Ishmael Reed portrays white, liberal and left critics of Obama as affluent, racially insensitive and “out of touch” with Obama’s base of blacks and Latinos. The New York Times columnist Charles Blow berates the “far left” for “foaming at the mouth” over the 2010 budget compromise, with its dramatic tax giveaways to the rich and its threat to Social Security. In These Times columnist Salim Muwakkil recalls a caller to his radio show who mocks Obama's critics as fair-weather friends who abandoned Obama “when it got tough.”
There are black dissenting voices who feel stifled. CNN commentator Roland Martin describes fissures in the “complex relationship” between black leadership and President Obama. Martin recalls how black leaders were angered by Obama’s failure to seriously consider black women for the Supreme Court. But the leaders, he says, avoid direct criticism and aim at “those around the president” fearing they will be “cut off from the administration” or face community backlash.
Last July, seven prominent civil rights organizations announced their opposition to President Obama’s “Race to the Top,” citing the education plan’s overreliance on “competitive funding and hand-picking winners.” But that critique has since evaporated. Word has it that the White House quickly pressured these errant civil rights leaders to tow the line.
It is worth noting that the black electorate similarly indulged Bill Clinton, whose carefully managed stagecraft convinced many he was one of them. Though the racial dynamics were different, the results were just as tragic, as Clinton almost singlehandedly repositioned the Democratic Party to the right. That shift effectively jettisoned the party’s historical commitment to social and economic egalitarianism.
Indeed, Clinton ushered in the era when Democrats would pay only lip service to labor rights, promote “free trade” deals that flout human rights, environmental and labor standards to the disadvantage of American workers, impose neoliberal “welfare reform” that further marginalized the poor, champion financial deregulation—such as collapse of Glass-Steagall—that gave way to the current financial crisis, enact crime legislation that catalyzed the prison boom, and ratify American imperial adventurism. For their loyalty, black people saw a Democratic Party in flight from core progressive principles.
“Black people saw a Democratic Party in flight from core progressive principles.”
To be sure, then, as now, key Democratic Party constituent groups opposed the party’s rightward slide. The minority caucuses, for example, opposed Nafta, “welfare reform” and other Clinton policies they deemed insufficiently progressive, if not regressive. Many caucus members have expressed misgivings about President Obama’s concessions to the GOP on health care reform, extension of Bush-era tax cuts, moratorium on Social Security tax and freezing of federal workers’ pay, his lackluster support for progressive immigration reform, and the escalation in Afghanistan. And earlier in the term, they criticized, albeit in measured fashion, the president’s choice of Larry Summers and Tim Geithner as economic advisers, and the retention of Ben Bernanke as Federal Reserve Chair.
Other black leaders and opinion makers, including writer-educator Michael Eric Dyson, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert and veteran civil rights activist Harry Belafonte have also criticized the president for policies weighted toward Wall Street. Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford warned during the 2008 election that Obama was a “corporate politician” not committed to a progressive agenda. Television host Tavis Smiley has criticized “Race to the Top” and warned that education “is not a race but a right” [emphasis added]. Invoking how Frederick Douglass relentlessly pressured Lincoln to free the slaves, Smiley is challenging black Americans to “…push Obama to address issues important to them.” Great presidents are not born, he says, “Great presidents are made.”
When scholar-activist Cornel West told NPR he had “second thoughts” about President Obama and questioned his “obsession” with Wall Street, he said Obama “talked to me like I was a cub scout and he was the pack master.” West laments that too many black folk are too “well-adjusted to Obama's presidency” and worries they might be “well-adjusted to injustice.” He is flabbergasted that the president does not talk about “the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex.”
Thus, a critique of the left’s opposition to Obama focused on white critics, though pertinent at times, belies a long history of broad, multiracial opposition to conservative tendencies within the Democratic Party. The party’s flight from progressive values—not racial insensitivity—drives much of the left’s criticism of President of Obama. Surely Reed and others are not suggesting the president’s black and Latino critics are racially insensitive!
“Cornel West is flabbergasted that the president does not talk about ‘the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex.’”
But surely, there is a way for African Americans to celebrate the momentous symbolism of Obama’s presidency and still honor the rich tradition of protest and agitation that has enriched this country’s social, economic and political life. By inhibiting criticism, Obama’ defenders insinuate a false choice that damages that tradition. But even more troubling, they ignore serious shortcomings in the way Obama has governed: his team of top economic advisors does not include blacks or progressives; Guantanamo is still open for business, and extraordinary rendition is alive and well; an official policy of impunity has shielded Bush-era crimes from investigation (contrast that with FBI raids against antiwar demonstrators or WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange); the White House is lukewarm toward any gun control, even in the aftermath of Arizona tragedy; now Obama is reviewing the role of regulations in stifling job creation—a standard canard of the right.
Then there is the reluctance to acknowledge and talk about the disproportionate impact of the economic crisis on African Americans. But the statistics are so overwhelming they speak for themselves. If he is uncomfortable with a race-specific discourse, the president could still make case for targeted action based on the unimpeachable economic data.
At critical moments, Obama has failed to capitalize on the mandate of 2008 to stand up to the GOP and drum up public support for his policies. To the dismay of progressives and others who had hoped for a real fight against an increasingly radical and marginal Republican Party, Obama resorted to the same backdoor horse trading that has turned off so many voters. Instead of rallying voters in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Nebraska to get their senators to stop opposing the public option, Obama obliged the obstructionist lawmakers and showered them with gifts.
As if that was not enough, the president turned his sights on Dennis Kucinich, the Ohio Democrat who held out on principle against his health plan. An ardent champion of single payer or Medicare-for-all type program, the congressman opposed the plan because it did not include a public option. But Kucinich caved after Obama held a huge rally in his district and urged the crowd to support his health care plan. Having arrived at the rally on Air Force One as the president’s guest, how could Kucinich resist? If the president could go to such lengths to strong- arm Kucinich, why couldn’t he similarly target those defiant Blue Dog Democrats. It is obvious the president knows how to use his bully pulpit. Sadly, he uses it against the wrong targets—progressive critics.
“If he is uncomfortable with a race-specific discourse, the president could still make case for targeted action based on the unimpeachable economic data.”
Instead of believing that a more progressive vision is achievable, too many of Obama’s black defenders are accepting limitations. They will not question the wisdom of a president making an ideologically consequential budget deal without consulting his own party’s elected representatives. They will not question why Obama failed to strong arm recalcitrant legislators by rallying their constituents. Nor will they question why a crucial policy debate was subjected to last minute, end-of-year brinkmanship.
The right is disingenuous when it labels Obama “elitist” But it is arrogant for any president to declare exclusive knowledge of the parameters of a public policy debate, based on his observations. But, question we must. Blacks, who are disproportionately affected by regressive tax policy, must hold Obama accountable for his capitulation to corporate rightwing interests at their expense. Now, how will Democrats let Bush-era tax cuts and the freeze on Social Security taxes expire in 2012—a presidential election year?! How will they overcome the predictable charge of “Democrats want to raise your taxes?”
The issue of Bush-era tax cuts is more than just a short-term political debate. Tax policy sits on the ideological fault line between progressive and conservative political philosophy, and cuts to the core of what Democrats should stand for. Compromising on it not only cedes ground on a core principle, but it also gives legitimacy to a discredited “trickle down” economic theory. The verdict on that theory—what George Bush Sr. famously derided as “voodoo economics”—has been rendered. George W. Bush’s massive tax cuts yielded a meager 1 million jobs. By contrast, in one of its redeeming accomplishments, the Clinton administration created 22.5 million jobs after raising taxes.
In this moment, it is worth recalling Martin Luther King’s declaration of the “Poor People’s Campaign: "We are going to bring the tired, the poor… those who have known long years of hurt and neglect...to demand that the government address itself to the problem of poverty.”
“Racial pride cannot be a substitute for the material benefits—food, clothing, shelter—and dignity that come from struggle.”
King was going to Washington to demand a reorientation of the nation’s priorities towards jobs and economic justice. Today, he would be outraged by the obscene wealth divide, chronic joblessness, homelessness, endless wars and bloated military budgets, racism, and alienation of undocumented immigrants. And he would certainly wonder how, in such an environment, anyone would discourage protest.
Thirty years of conservative dogma—regressive taxation, privatization, deregulation, unbridled free trade, deficit fundamentalism, assault on labor unions, frayed social safety net, environmental roll back, hyper-incarceration, and imperial adventurism—have taken a toll, and urgent action is needed. Rather than spend time defending “the most powerful office in the world” victims of economic injustice—and those who purport to care about them—should be fighting for social and economic redress.
It is a cruel hoax that those on the margins of society should derive vicarious pleasure from the image of a black First Family, no matter how compelling, when their material condition continues to decline. Racial pride cannot be a substitute for the material benefits—food, clothing, shelter—and dignity that come from struggle. As King said, "If a man doesn't have a job or an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists."
Progressive critics of president Obama are following a rich tradition of challenging authority championed by King and others. Like King, they should not let anything—not racial solidarity, fear of the rightwing, or the administration’s self-preservation interests—stand in the way of the hell-raising, marching and organizing needed to transform our world for the better.
The stakes are simply too high.
James Thindwa is a member of In These Times Board of Directors.