Obama and the ghosts of racism

Obama embodies more than he can know. "Change" is his mantra, but the potential for transformation goes far beyond the kinds of policies pursued in Washington. Those policies are rooted in assumptions sunk deep into the national psyche, and into the structure of memory that gives it shape. War is not necessarily redemptive. Africans are not necessarily disadvantaged. African-Americans are not mere victims. Race, for that matter, need not be definitive. An old story is offered a new ending - which is the beginning America has been awaiting. The day has come.

My title is from this column by James Carroll in today's Boston Globe, from which I have just given you the final paragraph.  I think Carroll has put his finger on something unstated which may underlay the surge that Obama seems to be receiving in his favor.  

If you like, you can stop reading me and simply go read his column and see how it strikes you.  If you keep reading, I will offer what I think key about his column, and why I think he may have grasped something I have as yet not seen in the discussion.
Carroll begins as follows:

"THEY SAID this day would never come," Barack Obama declared in Iowa last week, and the ghosts of this nation nodded. With an African-American competing seriously for the presidency of the United States, the last act of a centuries-old drama begins. Obama's blood tie to the story of American slavery, ironically, comes through his white mother's ancestry, which apparently includes both slave owners and those who fought for the Union to end slavery.

Instead part of the American problem has always been the aftermath of our Civil War.  Too often, as Carroll points out, the narrative focuses on the simplistic and binary expression of freeing slaves and those that died in the war, and that the racial injustice that has continued for more than a century since 1865 was viewed as inevitable, so that

the nation has felt badly ever since that slavery's hangover includes discrimination against black people to this day.

What follows immediately is what grabbed my attention.  It is three extensive paragraphs which need to be read in their entirety, but which if I completely quoted would violated fair use.    He begins with examining the narrative, set a generation ago, by the word of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (remember "benign neglect"?), in which

Black people are socially disadvantaged, according to this narrative, because of the unhealed wound that was inflicted on them across the early centuries. Innately equal, yes, but they have been made a crippled people, which accounts for their still inferior position.

That resubjugation, embodied in a "reconstruction" bargain between North and South, according to which the other purpose of the Civil War, "union," was given priority over "freedom," led to the culture of Jim Crow, radical segregation, and the use of law to keep African-Americans in an assigned place. That actively nurtured system - not the crippling effects of a long-abolished injustice - defines the ongoing American crime.

Carroll rightly points out that African-Americans have not been passive victims in this ongoing tradition, which he rightly describes as "heinous."  And he acknowledges that the Civil Rights movement in which so many (and here I note, including whites of mine and earlier generations) strived, created the context in which a leader like Obama could arise.  

But his arrival, at a level below the surface of whatever policies he advances, calls into question the dominant way in which this nation thinks of itself - not only in terms of race, but in terms of war. After all, the American belief in the righteousness of mass killing for the sake of abstract values like "freedom" springs not from the Revolution, where the killing was relatively slight and the freedom limited to a merchant class, but from the Civil War, where a spirit of total killing was justified by a professed commitment to racial equality that simply did not exist.

Let me repeat that, a professed commitment to racial equality that simply did not exist.

I am 61.   My first awareness of discrimination occurred when in December of 1956 on a winter trip to Miami beach I saw segregated bathrooms in public facilities.  The following fall was Little Rock and my attention was drawn.  And, as noted, I participated albeit marginally in the Civil Rights movement, in my case largely during 1963: my final semester in high school, the summer including the March on Washington, and the first semester at Haverford.   By Spring my focus was already beginning to shift to Vietnam.  

I think the portrayal offered by Carroll points beyond his words.  We still teach the Civil War and Reconstruction in a way that perpetuates a paradigm in which the ideas of someone like Moynihan can persist.   That paradigm undergirds far too much of our political discourse, even as it remains unstated.  

Some of my students are, like Obama, not clearly African-American in the sense of having directly descended from those here before slavery was abolished.  Their parents were born in the Caribbean, or in Africa, and sometimes they themselves were.  Some of them have pointed out to me that th descriptions of Obama as "not black enough" are an elliptical reference that he is not part of the heritage that culminated in the Civil Rights struggle.   One could add to this that Obama thinks beyond the traditional paradigm, not merely in terms of black or white, in part because his background does not fit that binary model.  One might even see his rhetoric aof no Red America and no Blue America as a substitute for no Black America and no White America.   And here I would note that King had a similar vision, to which he was moving through his opposition to the war in Vietnam which had drawn my attention my freshman year of college.  

I think it is possible that a major part of the phenomenon surrounding Obama is that he represents a chance to break out of the binary mold of Black versus White, and not merely in terms of our understanding of race.  

I am not endorsing Barack Obama for president, although I think it likely that he will win the nomination, perhaps by securing a substantial victory in New Hampshire.  I am observing that what is happening with his candidacy goes beyond politics in ways of which we may not be consciously aware.   I think a careful reading of Carroll's column will challenge our preconceptions and broaden our own thinking.  I wanted to be sure more people were aware of the column, hence this diary.

Peace.

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