Thanks for Trump, Obama, Part 2

Failing Black America and Reducing Black Turnout with Neoliberal, Victim-Blaming “Race Neutrality”

Read Part 1 here

…It wasn’t just the white working and middle classes that Obama helped depress and demobilize, making them wonder why the Hell they should bother to mark ballots for another Neoliberal- Democratic fake-progressive in 2016.  The officially “race-neutral,” objectively white-supremacist Obama presidency depressed the Black vote as well.

Some background. Again and again during the Obama years, racism-denying whites told me that Obama’s presence in the White House was “proof” that anti-Black racism wasn’t really a thing in the U.S.  anymore. Obama’s face in a very high place became a common white excuse for ignoring and denying the gaping Black-white wealth gap, huge racial income and health inequalities, the massive underfunding and ill-equipping of persistently segregated Black schools, widely documented anti-Black hiring and real estate discrimination, and the racially disparate mass arrest, imprisonment, and felony branding of Black men. Obama’s ascendancy was the last nail in the coffin of many whites’ already slender willingness to look seriously at their country’s racial disparities and oppression and at societal and institutional racism deeply understood.

One of the great ironies of this was that Obama did nothing or next to nothing to substantively address those disparities and that oppression. There probably would have been more federal movement against racial inequality and oppression in a Hillary Clinton or a John Edwards presidency, maybe even more under a John McCain presidency, than there was under Obama, who oversaw an epic increase in racial disparity and said essentially nothing about it or about the ugly and often violent racism that spread across the land during his time in the White House (more on this below).

“The Price of the Ticket”

The charitable interpretation of that inaction and silence is that Obama correctly understood that the simple bare fact of his nonwhite presence in the White House already triggered much of white Amerika into a kind of racial psychosis and that he would have tipped millions of whites into revanchist rebellion if he had seriously confronted the nation’s deeply embedded racial injustice.

There was some truth in this perspective. The Harvard Law graduate Obama was no fool. He knew very well that standing back from a real fight for Black equality was part “the price of the [his] ticket” (title of a book by the Black academic Frederick Harris) to power and glory atop the US Empire. That’s why he ran as the “Black but not like Jesse” candidate – as the technically Black but white-friendly presidential contender who promised to let Caucasians feel less racist by voting for him without threatening their white privilege in any serious way. As Obama and his advisers knew, he was particularly constrained in his ability to substantively and meaningfully tackle the nation’s race problems deeply (and thus properly) understood

That was the strategic reality behind candidate Obama’s instantly heralded “Philadelphia speech” on race in March of 2008.  Titled “A More Perfect Union,” Obama’s white-pleasing oration denounced his “controversial” former Black preacher Jeremiah Wright for holding “a profoundly distorted view of this country -- a view that sees white racism as endemic.” In throwing his former pastor under the bus, Obama grossly exaggerated the extent of Black advancement in the US and waxed rhapsodic about how his own life as the son of a Black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas showed that racial divisions were being overcome in a supposedly  “more perfect union.”

But the “price of the ticket” interpretation too easily lets Obama off the hook for his deep conservatism. For one thing, it raises the question of why he should have run for president in the first place when the harsh reality is that a Black president can do even less for Black people and other people of color than a white president can. If acquiescence to and accommodation of white chauvinism and privilege is “the price of the ticket” to the White House, then why take the trip in the first place, especially when the existence of a Black president is likely to trigger a virulent white reaction that makes the Black situation in America worse than it already was. Why become president then, other than out of sheer narcissism, a critical part of Obama’s makeup, and/or, to suggest another and related Obama trait, a belief that he was specially qualified and situated to oversee the global American Empire and indeed to fake-progressively re-brand that empire after the mass-murderous clumsiness of Iraq occupier George W. Bush[1].

For another thing, the “price of the ticket” analysis falsely assumes that the half-white Obama wasn’t himself an objective white supremacist who blamed masses of Black people for their disproportionate presence at the bottom of the nation’s steep socioeconomic hierarchy. That Obama was in fact such a victim-shaming person as that was strongly suggested by his recurrent  presidential lecturing of Black people for their own alleged personal irresponsibility and cultural failures – his admonishment of “Cousin Pookie” for sitting on her couch and his shaming of poor Black parents for allegedly feeding their children Popeye’s Chicken for breakfast, for example.  

“No Excuses” (2013)

President Obama trafficked heavily in the white-supremacist claim that Blacks’ economic difficulties were largely the result of Blacks’ own “self-defeating and dysfunctional behavior.” In one of many examples of this recurrent Black bourgeois Obama narrative, he told the 2013 graduates of historically Black Morehouse College that young Black men had “no excuses,” and placed blame for Black difficulties in America at the feet of absentee fathers.  This was consistent with a revealing June 2008 episode: then candidate Obama went to his pretend “hometown” of Chicago’s South Side to give an arrogant Father’s Day speech shaming poor Black men for shirking their parental obligations – never mind the savage deindustrialization of hyper-segregated Black communities and the racist police state’s ubiquitous arrest, incarceration, and felony branding of working- and lower-class Black men.

Cornel West: “A Brown-Faced Clinton” (2014)

Obama again showed his racism-downplaying and White-Whispering essence during the remarkable Black Lives Matter uprising that took place in the wake of the vicious racist police murder of the young Black man Mike Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in the summer of 2014.  Behold the Black philosopher and activist and current presidential candidate (quite popular among Paul Street Report commenters) Dr. Cornel West reflecting in August of that year on the deep racial conservatism of the nation’s first Black president, who West described to Thomas Frank as “a brown-faced Clinton” and “another neoliberal opportunist:”

Frank: Let’s talk about Ferguson. All I know about it is what I’ve been reading in the newspapers; I haven’t been out there. But I feel like there’s a lot more going on there than this one tragic killing.

West: Oh, absolutely. I mean…this is a systemic thing. This thing has been going on and we can hardly get a word out of the administration in terms of the arbitrary police power. I’ll give you a good example: [the leading Revolutionary Communist activist]Carl Dix and I, three years ago, we went to jail over stop and frisk. We had a week-long trial, and we were convicted, we were guilty. While the trial was going on, President Obama came into New York and said two things: He said that [New York City Mayor] Michael Bloomberg was a terrific mayor even though he had stopped and frisked over four and a half million since 2002. Then he went onto say that [the former racist New York City mayor] Ed Koch was one of the greatest mayors in the last 50 years. This is right at a time when we’re dealing with stop and frisk, arbitrary police power, and Bloomberg is extending stop and frisk and proud of it….in Ferguson we’re talking about arbitrary police power, and this particular instance of it has been going on for a long time. The Obama administration has been silent. Completely silent. All of a sudden now, you get this uprising and what is the response? Well, as we know, you send out a statement on the death of [the white comedian] Robin Williams before you sent out a statement on brother Michael Brown. The family asked for an autopsy at the Federal level, they hold back, so they [the family] have to go and get their own autopsy, and then the federal government finally responds…”

Calling the Racist Charleston, South Carolina  Mass Shooter an Agent of “God” (2015)

When a crazed white racist murdered nine Black parishioners in a Charleston, South Carolina church in 2015, Obama arrived to sing “Amazing Grace” and to advance “religious mysticism absolutely inappropriate for a US president and cheap moralizing platitudes. To the extent that any political issues were addressed,” the World Socialist Web Site reported:

“Obama sought again to separate racism from its historical and political roots in order to obscure the social issues underlying the horrific mass murder…In relatively short remarks, Obama referred to ‘our Christian faith’ and invoked the words ‘God’ 17 times, ‘grace’ 35 times, and speculated about the causes of ‘salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings.’…In a country founded on a revolution that upheld the separation of church and state as a basic democratic principle, there is something deeply reactionary about all of this…Bizarrely, Obama declared that the man who shot nine unarmed people at the church he was speaking at was somehow carrying out God’s will. While the killer was hoping to ‘deepen divisions,’ the president declared, ‘God works in mysterious ways. God has different ideas. He didn’t know he was being used by God.’”

William Darity, Jr. on “How Barack Obama Failed Black Americans” (2016)

In a December 2016 essay titled “How Barack Obama Failed Black Americans,” the Black scholar William Darity wrote with barely concealed disgust about what he had seen and heard from a Black president who refused to advance policy solutions to the numerous and interrelated barriers to racial equality in the US while blaming US racial inequality largely on Black people:

“It has been damaging to have Barack Obama, a black man speaking from the authoritative platform of the presidency, reinforce the widely held belief that racial inequality in the United States is, in large measure, the direct responsibility of black folk. This has been the deal breaker for me: not merely a silence on white physical and emotional violence directed against black Americans, but the denial of the centrality of American racism in explaining sustained black-white disparity.”

Darity noted the deep irony of the one and only Obama program designed specifically for Black Americans—a foundation-backed self-help program rooted in the idea that racial disparity is largely about Black behavior:

“There is one major initiative that the Obama administration has inaugurated that is black-specific, but it is the exception that proves the rule. It exposes all the issues at play. My Brother’s Keeper is a program premised on the view that young black men constitute a social problem and need interventions that will alter their outlook and actions. The focus is on reforming young men rather than directly increasing the resources possessed by them and their families and removing the constraints they face. Again, the underlying ideological motivation is the belief in black cultural deficiency, and, again, this type of initiative is another expression of failure to pursue bold policies that confront the fundamental causes of racial disparity in American society.”

Obama’s failure to fight meaningfully for Black equality and racial justice beyond the symbolic fact of his own presence in the White House was all the more depressing in light of the unpleasant fact that that presence sparked a white racist backlash that especially targeted Black Americans who did not share the Obamas and other bourgeois Blacks’ status and protection. Obama did nothing, or close to it, to advance or protect ordinary Black Americans while setting them up for intensified hatred and assault from whites who predictably took Obama’s presidency to mean that Blacks and other non-whites were “taking over the country” and “replacing” whites – an absurd belief that Donald Trump was more than happy to fan and exploit.

“To Erase the Social From the Language of Public Life”

Obama’s refusal to seriously confront the problem of racism, deeply understood, was well matched to the individualism of the capitalist-neoliberal ideology that he embraced[2].  A key thing missing in the “price of the ticket” apology for Obama’s racial conciliationism is the capitalist-imperialist Obama’s neoliberal world view, which collapsed the nation’s “pervasive racial hierarchies,” in the words of Henry Giroux, “into power-evasive strategies such as blaming minorities…for not working hard enough” and “refusing to exercise individual initiative.” Even as an insidious racism “functions” as “one of the deep and abiding currents in everyday [American] life,” Giroux notes, “neoliberal discourse” works “to erase the social from the language of public life so as to reduce all racial problems to private issues [of]…individual character and cultural depravity.” Neoliberal ideology “can imagine public issues only as private concerns.” It sees “human agency as simply a matter of individualized choices, the only obstacle to effective citizenship being the lack of principled self-help and moral responsibility” on the part of those most victimized by structural oppression and super-empowered actors atop the nation’s steep and interrelated hierarchies of class, race, gender, nationality, and empire.

A 1995 Foretaste: “Impeccable Do-Good Credentials” Linked to “Vacuous to Repressive Neoliberal Politics” and “Small Scale Solutions”

The Obama presidential catastrophe was in a way foretold by the Black socialist political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr. back in a January 1996 Village Voice reflection on an unnamed Obama after the future president won his first election in Illinois:

“In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program—the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance…I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else the International Monetary Fund has sway.”

“Small scale solutions”? In the fall of 2002, in my role as (believe it or not) the research director of the Chicago Urban League, I published a major grant funded study titled The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation. The study was a searing dissection of the racist US  mass incarceration and criminal branding system, paying special attention to felony records as a major Black employment barrier. The Vicious Circle was rolled out at a day-long conference whose keynote speaker was then Illinois state senator Obama, who used the study to work with his Republican friends in the Illinois legislature to pass a fake-progressive measure that pretended to significantly enhance job prospects for ex-prisoners by granting a small portion of “nonviolent” ex-offenders “certificates of good conduct.”

Message to Black Americans in Contested States and Across the Country: Why Vote?

But I digress. By 2016, the Obama presidency was for many Black  and other Americans a great demonstration of the empty promises and disingenuous lethality of the Democratic “inauthentic opposition” Party and the bourgeois-democratic ballot. The 44^th US president’s Audacity of Racially Promising and Progressive Hope was revealed to be the Mendacity of Neoliberal and White-Pleasing Nope. And, in a badly underestimated part of the story of how Hillary Clinton lost, his vapid, neoliberal, and objectively white-supremacist presidency contributed to a significant reduction in Black voter turnout in the big cities of the contested states that Trump won: Milwaukee, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Charlotte, Miami. 

The Obama-Hillary demobilization of the urban Black vote in the absurdly small number of states where US presidential elections are decided under the ridiculous US Electoral College system was certainly far more significant than Russian Facebook ad-buys in tilting the election Trump’s way.  Vladimir Putin and the late Yevgeny Prigozhin did not engineer depressed Black voter turnout in the 2016 US presidential election. The neoliberal “race-neutral”/racism-denying Dems led by Hillary and Obama did.

It was no small drop-off.  As the Pew Research Center noted:

“A number of long-standing trends in presidential elections either reversed or stalled in 2016, as black voter turnout decreased, white turnout increased and the nonwhite share of the U.S. electorate remained flat since the 2012 election… The black voter turnout rate declined for the first time in 20 years in a presidential election, falling to 59.6% in 2016 after reaching a record-high 66.6% in 2012. The 7-percentage-point decline from the previous presidential election is the largest on record for blacks. (It’s also the largest percentage-point decline among any racial or ethnic group since white voter turnout dropped from 70.2% in 1992 to 60.7% in 1996.)”

Many “progressive” Obama apologists blame the neoliberal nothingness and whiteness of Hillary “bring the super-predators to heel” Clinton for this falloff, but the two-term Obama presidency’s demonstration of how little was to be gained for Black folks from electing a dismal corporate-imperialist Democrat – even a “charismatic” Black one – likely contributed more to the  reduced Black turnout. 

Notes

+1. For a deep empirical dive into Obama’s foundational US imperialism, see Chapter 4, titled “How Antiwar? Obama, Iraq, and the Audacity of Empire,” in my 2008 book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (New York: Routledge, 2008).

+2. See Chapter 1 (titled “Obama’s ‘Dollar Value’”) in Street, Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics and Chapters 1 (“Business Rule as Usual”) and 3 (“Corporate-Managed ‘Health Reform’”) in Paul Street, The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (New York: Routledge, 2010).