September 02, 2008

OBAMA'S SOFT CORE RACISM

“It was usually an effective tactic, another one of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as you were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfied; they were relieved –such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn’t seem angry all the time.” Barack Obama

Is any of what you see of Barack Obama what you get? Is it all good manners and show? What does he really believe? If you read his first book, the memoir “Dreams from My Father: a Story of Race and Inheritance,” would you recognize today’s confident charmer, the Jedi Knight, the post-racial candidate for the Presidency of the United States? Probably not.

Does it matter? Doesn’t everyone have a public face and a private one? Isn’t hypocrisy ubiquitous, especially in politicians? Sure enough, but….the politics of the last three or four decades have shocked and disillusioned the electorate—Watergate, leading to Nixon’s resignation; Clinton’s naughtiness and impeachment; and, more recently, Governor McGreevey’s revelation and resignation and Elliot Spitzer’s petty criminal behavior—all these make us suspicious of appearances and wanting some kind of authentication of our candidates’ hearts and minds.

Obama is a man of curious paradoxes. He was raised for the most part by white grandparents and a white mother who protected him from the experiences of humiliation, segregation, and prejudice that many black boys encounter in America. He lived in environments in Hawaii and Djakarta where his own skin color did not stand out. Despite this escape from racial insult and injury he became “traumatized” by reading a magazine article when he was about eight or nine about a black man who tried to lighten his skin. Obama became obsessed by variations in skin color. This preoccupation continued and became a powerful focus for his youthful identification as a “black man.” Thus his memoir describes his development as a black man struggling to define his place in the black community.

Currently his “blackness” has been bleached away like that of the man in the “traumatic” magazine article that excited him as a child. Pastor Wright has been put on ice, Michelle has been put back in the kitchen for a while, and no one dares to talk about race, racism, and Obama’s history as a black activist. That would be fine if he were Colin Powell and did not have such a history—a history and commitment lasting ten or fifteen years—as a community organizer, voting organizer, and state legislator for a largely black constituency. But the history exists and the question is whether there has been a real transformation from being a black leader to being a post-racial president or whether the charmer in the Brooks Brothers suit is a clever political imposture like the high moral tone of Elliot Spitzer, Richard Nixon, and William Jefferson Clinton, or the heterosexuality of Jim McGreevey.

From start to finish, Obama’s memoir is a racial tract. Every page recounts events and opinions seen through “black” racial lenses. And in that sense he is a racist—a soft, sophisticated racist to be sure, but a racist nonetheless. “The stories that I had been hearing…hadn’t simply arisen from struggles with pestilence, or drought, or even mere poverty. They had arisen out of a very particular experience with hate. That hate hadn’t gone away; it formed a counter-narrative buried deep within each person and at a center of which stood white people—some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives.”

The journey of Obama from a middle-class child with a privileged education to a black activist had another peculiar twist. If one reads his life carefully one can see that he has a very special definition of “black.” No matter what your skin color, you can only be a member of the brotherhood or sisterhood if you are poor and oppressed. Middle-class, suburban, professional blacks are not “black.” These are people who have sold out and who deserve his soft contempt.

Not even love could penetrate Obama’s racial armor. During the several years he lived in New York City he fell in love with a white woman from a wealthy, New England WASP family. One weekend she invited him to meet her family at their country house. The parents were “very nice and gracious,” and the weekend was lovely. “The house was very old, her grandfather’s house….The library was filled with old books and pictures of the grandfather with famous people he had known—presidents, diplomats, industrialists….Standing in that room, I realized that our two worlds…were as distant from each other as Kenya is from Germany. And I knew that if we stayed together I’d eventually live in hers.”

So what happened? “I pushed her away. We started to fight. We started thinking about the future, and it pressed in on our warm little world. One night I took her to see a new play by a black playwright. It was a very angry play, but very funny…The audience was mostly black, and everybody was laughing and clapping and hollering like they were in church. After the play was over my friend started talking about why black people were so angry all the time. I said it was a matter of remembering—nobody asks why the Jews remember the Holocaust…and she said that’s different, and I said it wasn’t, and she said anger was a dead end. We had a big fight, right in front of the theater. When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn’t be black, she said. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. She could only be herself, and wasn’t that enough.” Evidently it wasn’t.

Barack Obama wrote his softly racist memoir in 1995 as a young man of 34. When he re-issued it in 2004, he wrote, “I cannot honestly say … that the voice in this book is not mine—that I would tell the story much differently today than I did ten years ago….”

The problem is that Obama wants it both ways—like his ambivalence about Pastor Wright. He never really allowed himself to be questioned deeply about his relationship with Wright and Wright’s church. After all there is a very wide theological spectrum of black churches—some more religious, some more Black-activist—to choose from. Why did he choose Wright’s racist theology?

His memoir is characterized by a refined, even literary racism which is often followed by what appears to be remorse and self-criticism. But after many such ambivalent expressions one begins to get the idea that Obama is enjoying both the racism and the self condemnation a little too much.

The American people need to know who Obama really is and what he stands for.