via Andrew Sullivan, read this huge read at The Atlantic. Wow.
image: Bill Sanderson via The Atlantic
Fear of a Black President
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.
The whole article is powerful, but this got me:
Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye. Hence the old admonishments to be “twice as good.”
… Obama’s first term has coincided with a strategy of massive resistance on the part of his Republican opposition in the House, and a record number of filibuster threats in the Senate. It would be nice if this were merely a reaction to Obama’s politics or his policies—if this resistance truly were, as it is generally described, merely one more sign of our growing “polarization” as a nation. But the greatest abiding challenge to Obama’s national political standing has always rested on the existential fact that if he had a son, he’d look like Trayvon Martin. As a candidate, Barack Obama understood this.
“The thing is, a black man can’t be president in America, given the racial aversion and history that’s still out there,” Cornell Belcher, a pollster for Obama, told the journalist Gwen Ifill after the 2008 election. “However, an extraordinary, gifted, and talented young man who happens to be black can be president.”
Belcher’s formulation grants the power of anti-black racism, and proposes to defeat it by not acknowledging it. His is the perfect statement of the Obama era, a time marked by a revolution that must never announce itself, by a democracy that must never acknowledge the weight of race, even while being shaped by it. Barack Obama governs a nation enlightened enough to send an African American to the White House, but not enlightened enough to accept a black man as its president.
And this …
While Beck and Limbaugh have chosen direct racial assault, others choose simply to deny that a black president actually exists. One in four Americans (and more than half of all Republicans) believe Obama was not born in this country, and thus is an illegitimate president. More than a dozen state legislatures have introduced “birther bills” demanding proof of Obama’s citizenship as a condition for putting him on the 2012 ballot. Eighteen percent of Republicans believe Obama to be a Muslim. The goal of all this is to delegitimize Obama’s presidency. If Obama is not truly American, then America has still never had a black president.
Read this brilliant article (it’s worth your time) at The Atlantic
– P
PS I see this thought: “Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others” applied in politics in this country all the time. I call it ‘sectarianism’ or ‘extreme partisanship’ in other contexts, and refer to it here from time to time. It’s just as much bigotry as racism … which we also indulge in New Zealand.
If Colin Powell had chosen run for President for the Republicans, would he have won? We can only speculate on this now, but I think that he would have had a good chance. George W Bush Republican presidency had both Mr Powell and Ms Rice in senior positions.
Irrespectively, Mr Obama became the first black president, and I would concede that given US history, this was an important symbolic milestone.
Alas, Mr Obama’s term strikes me as revolving around a personable if ineffective politician in the vein of Mr Carter’s presidency.
Personally, I suspect that Mr Obama is probably favourite to win the next election.
If he loses the next election, I suspect that this will be less to do with his blackness or Mr Romney’s Mormon faith, and more due to a bad economy and high unemployment. To portray this otherwise could be seen as unhelpful? You are either for the black man, or you are a racist?
This is not to say that some people will never vote for a black person, or vote for some other minority. Yet I sense being black is not the main or even a major reason why Mr Obama might lose.
For every redneck racist that he loses (or much more likely never had, despite winning the last election by landslide), he probably picks up half a dozen sickly liberal’s still guilt ridden for crimes of days gone by.
I think that Mr Obama’s main challenge at the next election is not his blackness. I suspect that Mr Obama’s main problem is that has been in charge for four years, and he hasn’t done a particularly good job on the economy. For sure, this is not all his fault. Nonetheless, Mr Obama does strike me as someone who believes in running a very big centralised government system.
This election is not a referendum about the justice of the CivilWar, in my view. It will more likely be centered on a key issue – who is more likely to lead the US (and possibly then the world) out of recession. Portraying all opponents to big ventralised government / low economic growth policies as racists doesn’t help anyone much, in my view.
Rgds,
*p*
If obama loses (and he will) it will be because he did the opposite of what he promised to do … he bent over and took it up the fundamental orifice from every sector of corrupt power from the Fed to the Banks and beyond – and did nothing to curb their excesses.
They will end up with another moron in power – and the rest of the world will be in imminent danger of being completely engulfed in America’s unwillingness to recognise that its foreign policies reflect the corruptness and ineptness, of its own internal situation.
The yanks are the only ones who can show any moral leadership to the world – can China? – can Europe? Will they miss their chance??
Obama was long on promise – short on delivery. They cant look after their own let alone police the world (or dictate to it).
No – its nothing to do with race, colour etc etc … its to do with Obamas lack of delivery against all his promise.