Jonathan Alter: Liberal Racist,
Obama Fan
by Paul Street
"Alter is a victim-blaming racist of the worst kind."
Newsweek's celebrated "liberal"
columnist Jonathan Alter is a victim-blaming racist of the worst kind - the
sort who cloaks his racially offensive comments in outwardly sensitive prose
claiming to express concern for racial justice and black America.
In January
of 2006, Alter epitomized the dominant culture's tendency to downplay racism in
the post-Civil Rights era in his review of Taylor Branch's latest volume on the
history of the civil rights movement (Branch, At Canaan's Edge: America in
the King Years). Identifying himself as the child of affluent white
North Side Chicago liberals who helped fund Martin Luther King Jr,'s efforts in
that city in 1966, Alter said that he was moved by Branch's book "to think
anew about how much life has changed for African-Americans living in places
like Chicago, and how little."
Claiming
that Chicago had become "a much healthier city thanks in part to Richard
M. Daley," his treatment of contemporary black experience in the city said
nothing about numerous examples - readily accessible to any serious journalist
- of ongoing racism functioning as a continuing barrier to black advancement
and equality within and beyond the Chicago area. Alter made sure to cite
the negative "consequences," but not the unmentionable systemic
causes, "of [black] family disintegration," "self-destructive
[black] behavior and the ‘gangsta' culture."
The
"big missing piece," Alter quoted a local black middle-class
community leader commenting on the plight of inner-city people, "is about
financial education" - the failure "of ghetto residents to put their
money [what little they posses, P.S.] in bank accounts and safe investments"
(Jonathan Alter, "King's Final Days," Newsweek, January 9,
2006).
Six months
before this fascinating judgment fouled magazine shelves across America, I
published an exhaustive study showing that a deep and many-sided institutional
racism was alive and well in and around Chicago, fed and reflected by (among
many other things) the racially disparate policies of the Daley administration
and the corporate financial industry. Societal racism, I demonstrated,
was the really big "missing piece" in such tepid post-Civil Rights
accounts of persistent black inequality as are given to us by nominally
progressive liberals at places like the Chicago Commission on Human Relations,
Newsweek, and the New York Times [1].
"Societal racism was the really big ‘missing piece' in
such tepid post-Civil Rights accounts of persistent black inequality."
I let
Alter's comment go, save for a passing reference in my book Racial
Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman &Littlefield,
2007), where I quoted him as a telling "liberal" example of the broad
"post-Civil rights" consensus that blames black Americans - not
objectively racist structural forces and policies - for their disproportionate
presence at the bottom of U.S. inequality structures.
Now I have
run across another and worse Alter comment in the process of researching a book
on the Barack Obama phenomenon. In a March 31st column titled "The Obama
Dividend," Alter goes beyond the standard reactionary praise (voiced by
such "conservative" right wing pundits as George Will and William
Bennett) of Obama for putting an end to supposedly obsolete and dysfunctional
complaints about racism. Alter voices his passionate belief that while
"Obama's unique assets" [a reference to the Senator's blackness and
multiculturalism, P.S.] have been viewed in international terms," the
presidential candidate's "most exciting potential for moral leadership
could be in the African-American community." Alter praises Obama for
having lectured a black audience in Texas on how African Americans are
producing endemic black childhood obesity by making poor diet decisions and
letting their kids watch too much television. Alter also applauds Obama
for telling blacks in Atlanta "that they need to stop being homophobic and
anti-Semitic." Jonathan Alter, "The Obama Dividend," Newsweek,
March 31, 2008, p. 37.
"Obviously,"
Alter pontificates, "not all black adults and children would suddenly
start doing exactly what President Obama tells then." Still, he
opined, "this is powerful stuff and would make him an important president
even if his legislation stalled...Barack Obama knows how to think big, elevate
the debate and transport the public to a new place."
There was
nothing in Alter's commentary about the way that the owners and managers of
full-service grocery stores fail to invest in concentrated black communities,
leaving their residents' dependence on small corner grocery-liquor stores
stocked with overpriced foods loaded with salt, starch, and sugar.
The great
"liberal." Societal racism, I demonstrated, was the really big
"missing piece" in such tepid post-Civil Rights accounts of
persistent black inequality or about the relative absence in those communities
of safe natural and recreational spaces and facilities.
"Alter's commentary says little about residents'
dependence on small corner grocery-liquor stores stocked with overpriced foods
loaded with salt, starch, and sugar."
He does not
comment on the relationship between the savage, racially oppressive absence of
economic opportunity and related high crime and violent childhood injury rates
in poor and highly segregated black communities - something that makes many
black parents understandably reluctant to let their children out of doors.
Alter
naturally says nothing about Obama's failure and reluctance to speak forcefully
against the persistent reality of institutional racism.
Alter does,
however, praise Obama for being a potentially "important president"
simply on the grounds that the Senator would tell "black adults and
children" to clean up their act.
The stark
and disturbing implication is clear as day: the United States is haunted by the
terrible specter of Dysfunctional Black Culture. Yes, Obama could
mishandle U.S. foreign or economic policy, fail in his tepid efforts to address
social problems at home, but...he would be a great success and leave a powerful
and important legacy if he could just get those "black adults and
children" - a category that technically includes every single African-American
human being - to think and act differently. Forget about the terrible,
dangerous, and structurally super-empowered culture and behavior of those who
stand atop America's simultaneously classist/capitalist, racist/white
supremacist, and imperialist/militarist institutional complexes.
The main
problem with the "deeply conservative" [2] Obama phenomenon isn't
Obama. It's his out of control middle and upper-class white supporters,
and Jonathan Alter is a particularly egregious and cynical example.
Alter
should be ashamed of himself. He needs to alter his culture and
behavior. This will take time. In the short term, he should find
out how much money his parents gave to Dr. King and write a check in its
inflation-adjusted amount to an organization working against the deep
institutional racism that lives on so powerfully beneath the national white
self-congratulation over being ready to vote for a technically black
presidential candidate. Alter can consider it a reparations down payment.
Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is a writer and
activist in Iowa City, IA. Street was research director at The Chicago
Urban League between 2000 and 2005. He is the author of Empire and Inequality:
America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm); Racial Oppression in
the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007); and
Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America (New
York: Routledge, 2005. Street is currently writing a book on U.S. political
culture and the Barack Obama phenomenon.
NOTES
1. See Paul
Street, Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black
Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Urban League,[2005]) - a comprehensive study that is
institutionally suppressed at the laughably corporate-captive and racially
accommodationist agency that received a considerable foundation grant to
produce it.
2.
Larissa MacFarquhar, "The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming
From?," The New Yorker (May 7, 2007).
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