The Illusion of Post-Racial America
by Aman Gill
This article originally appeared in The Indypendent.
An Obama victory would be a milestone, but could stall struggles against racism.
Forty-one years ago, racial tensions - festering since slave
times - burst into the Long Hot Summer in the tri-state area. Thirty-four died
in Newark, but the most dramatic upheaval came from Plainfield, N.J., a quiet
suburb 30 miles from New York City. Amid minor but widespread skirmishes
spreading across the region, a lone police officer beat and shot a black youth
in the boy's neighborhood. The boy survived, but the cop, quickly surrounded by
enraged community members, did not make it out of the neighborhood alive.
Ashanti Alston, a political prisoner activist with the Jericho Movement and former Black
Panther who was a teenager in Plainfield at the time, traced the escalating
plot for The Indypendent. "The thing about Plainfield that stood out
from all the other rebellions was that folks made their way to a gun
manufacturing place right outside of the city," Alston says. "They came back to
the community with rifles and it was a whole different ball game. It wasn't
until the National Guard came that they were able to retake the black
community."
Today, decades later, why does racial conflict no longer
generate the same kind of heat? Not for lack of ignition. In Queens in November
2006, an undercover vice operation turned into an execution. A 50-shot cop
fusillade killed Sean Bell, a young black man heading home on his final night
as an unmarried man, and injured two of his friends, all unarmed. The murder
won state sanction in April 2008, when a New York State Supreme Court judge accepted
at face value the officers' contention that they feared for their lives, making
their killing fully legal.
"Why does racial conflict no longer generate the same kind of heat?"
The verdict generated both outrage and despair. Hundreds of
people marched that afternoon and "Justice for Sean Bell" signs sprang up
throughout the boroughs. But an Al Sharpton-led civil disobedience action in
June that might have been the first in a line of battles instead turned out to
be the denouement. Things died down.
It's increasingly popular to argue that the fuel for unrest
has disappeared because the problem of racism has receded into America's past.
This idea has long held sway on the right, but, paradoxically, it's taken
Barack Obama's candidacy to elevate this persistent right-wing myth into
conventional wisdom.
Civil Rights Unfulfilled
"The history he [Obama] needs to know is the history he
rejects," says Lenore Daniels, editorial board member of the Black Commentator,
a weekly online magazine. "He rejects the whole Black Power movement: ‘Just the
civil rights were fine, we'll leave it at that, there was progress.' [But] the
Black Power movement is still relevant. That was a movement talking about
economic equality, where King left off."
Histories of struggles are written by the victors. The
movements of 40 years ago had winners and losers and, like any war, are remembered
more ideologically than objectively. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended Jim
Crow and for the first time in U.S. history granted black people formal
equality before the law, but failed to transform their lives day-to-day. After
1965, all wings of the movement turned to address this gap: King turned from
law and morality to economics; Malcolm X's militancy spread despite his
assassination, Black Power was born, and the movement moved north.
Obama's view of a united, post-racial America is in the
tradition of how the political establishment - Democrat and Republican -
responded to heightened militancy. There was forceful repression, but also a
more subtle, ideological response. The language of Jim Crow segregationism gave
way to political correctness and new coded terms like "war on drugs." Those who
were never allies of the oppressed lauded King and proclaimed the end of
discrimination. And black elites, once viewed with suspicion, were welcomed to
the table as long as they left their baggage behind. It was unsparing market
capitalism for the rest of the community.
"Those who were never allies of the oppressed lauded King
and proclaimed the end of discrimination."
The result, as Columbia University historian Manning Marable
puts it, is that "Jim Crow no longer existed, but in its place stood a far more
formidable system of racial domination, rooted within the political economy and
employing a language of fairness and equality." Racism in America may not look
like all-white police forces, dogs on black men or sound like speeches by white
supremacist politicians. It's more like a termite- infested house - political
correctness and black representation in business, media and politics compose a
nice-looking picture on the outside. But gashes in the façade expose structural
disparities as racially aligned as ever. Statistical measures on rates of
poverty, housing, employment and income are not far removed from their 1960s
levels.
Black and White
At times, Obama sounds more like Richard Nixon than someone
concerned with racism. At the 1968 Republican National Convention Nixon
proclaimed, "To those who say law and order is the code word for racism, here
is a reply: Our goal is justice for every American." Obama's response to the
persecution of the Jena 6 nearly 40 years later sounded a similar note:
"Outrage over an injustice like the Jena 6 isn't a matter of black and white.
It's a matter of right and wrong."
Obama did not dwell on the marks of racism, so clear to many
of us, in the demography of disaster left by Hurricane Katrina. "I do not
subscribe to the notion that the painfully slow response of FEMA and the
Department of Homeland Security was racially based," he said. "The ineptitude
was color-blind." And Obama did not object to the Sean Bell ruling, saying,
"The judge has made his ruling, and we're a nation of laws, so we respect the
verdict that came down."
"It's taken Obama's embrace of post-racialism, and
concurrent distancing from traditional civil rights-style black leadership, to
lend viability to his campaign."
Obama's candidacy is seen as an indication that racial
barriers no longer exist in the United States. Indeed, the election of a black
president would be an undeniable milestone in American history, forcing many
white Americans to confront latent fears and distrust of black people. And many
see progress in the fact that a black man can run a campaign in which race is
incidental. Yet it's taken Obama's embrace of post-racialism, and concurrent
distancing from traditional civil rights-style black leadership, to lend
viability to his campaign. Some activists see him as the culmination of a trend
over the last 40 years of black leaders moving away from the communities
they've traditionally served and closer to the political and corporate power
that dominates the Democratic Party.
Movement Politics vs. Electoral Politics
Alston feels that since the 1970s, the face of mainstream
black activism has moved from a base in communities to big money and corporate
sway. "No longer do you have the real radical movement folks that were coming
out of grassroots movements," Alston says. "You have people tied to money, or
tied to established political power. What I look at today is that the
Sharptons, the Barack Obamas, the Jesse Jacksons and even a lot of these mega-preachers
now are not leaders from the grassroots. They're system leaders that were
chosen by either political forces or corporate forces."
After attending Columbia University, Obama put in three
years as a community organizer working on a range of neighborhood issues in the
largely black Southside of Chicago. But his trajectory afterward - Harvard Law
School and a stint as a law professor at the University of Chicago - looks more
like the record of black politicians rising up in municipal politics in the
1980s and 1990s than the résumé of earlier leaders like King, Stokely
Carmichael or Angela Davis. As he entered politics, he increasingly relied on
allies culled from the Chicago elite - after the 2000 Census, he had his state
senate district redrawn to make it, according to Ryan Lizza of The New
Yorker, "wealthier, white, more Jewish, less-blue collar and better
educated." The connections he cultivated with his new well-to-do constituents
were vital to his successful 2004 campaign for a U.S. Senate seat.
As Democratic dominance of national-level black politics
accelerated, communities' sense of action eroded into the passive
live-with-your-fate mode that presently defines U.S. democracy. "When we go
back to the 1950s and 1960s," Alston says, "that was the period when people
were not relying on the Democratic Party, the party that black folks are so
tied to [today]. People were in the streets, people voted through their civil
disobedience and direct action and organizing."
The key question is whether much of the agenda in the fight
against racial inequality remains unfulfilled. If so, there's plenty to drive
modern-day movements, taking outrages like the Sean Bell verdict to illuminate
the living economic inequality untouched by 1960s activism. If not, then what
happened to Sean Bell is just an aberration that could have happened to anyone,
of any class and any race, in a country that has finally fulfilled its
egalitarian ideals. That may be an America to hope for, but it's not the one we
have today.
Aman Gill is a frequent contributor to The
Indypendent, the newspaper of the NYC Independent Media Center.
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