Stop-Obama

I’ve been asked by my colleagues to begin compiling Obama’s thoughts on varied subjects from his two books. Here I am presenting quotes about  race, from the Audacity of Hope.

What intrigued me the most in Audacity, was the difference from Dreams of my Father, Obama’s commentary on Katrina, and the programmatic nature of the work. It is extremely controlled, and gives off the impression really of hack work.

The difference between Dreams of my Father and Audacity of Hope, is that the first is written by what amounts to a moderate-Black Nationalist, the second, by a Presidential Candidate. The latter doesn’t have a great deal to say about race, other than trite observations related to discrimination laws which Obama believes will solve everyone’s problems.

Only salient moment I found, was Obama’s revision of his Katrina comments. Obama acknowledges that the media bandied about his observations that Katrina was a failure to deal with poverty, and not race, but adds that at a commemoration to Rosa Parks he second-guessed himself. Either the media didn’t understand him, or Clinton, speaking at the commemoration, struck Obama as inadequate. Obama devoted an entire three pages expressing his disappointment with America’s dealing with Katrina, on implicitly racial lines. Jamal, I have to give it to you.

It is in these pages devoted to Katrina and Rosa Parks,  that Obama uses for the first time the word “reconciliation” in a political sense.

Clinton’s ease with his black audience, their almost giddy affection for him, spoke of reconciliation, of forgiveness, a partial mending of the past’s grievous wounds. [134]

This reference to Bill Clinton, amid Obama’s skepticism about Katrina, makes me recall Jesse Jackson Jr. question where were Hillary’s tears when Katrina hit? (this was before any Bill Clinton “race-baiting” references to Jackson’s father winning South Carolina)

The book totals 217 pages in my electronic version, and the word “black” in a racial context comes up 186 times, and African-American 28 times; basically almost every other page. There is only one mention of Jeremiah Wright and Trinity Church, and no mention of Farrakhan. This is in stark contrast to Dreams from My Father.

Anyway, here are a couple of passages from Audacity on Race. Nothing shocking… especially compared to the quotes in my next post.

I can’t help but view the American experience through the lens of a black man of mixed heritage, forever mindful of how generations of people who looked like me were subjugated and stigmatized, and the subtle and not so subtle ways that race and class continue to shape our lives. [8]

… as much as I insist that things have gotten better, I am mindful of this truth as well: Better isn’t good enough. [137]

when I hear commentators interpreting my speech to mean that we have arrived at a “postracial politics” or that we already live in a color-blind society, I have to offer a word of caution. To say that we are one people is not to suggest that race no longer matters—that the fight for equality has been won, or that the problems that minorities face in this country today are largely self-inflicted. [137]

To suggest that our racial attitudes play no part in these disparities is to turn a blind eye to both our history and our experience—and to relieve ourselves of the responsibility to make things right. [137]

In general, members of every minority group continue to be measured largely by the degree of our assimilation—how closely speech patterns, dress, or demeanor conform to the dominant white culture—and the more that a minority strays from these external markers, the more he or she is subject to negative assumptions. [138]

If an internalization of antidiscrimination norms over the past three decades—not to mention basic decency—prevents most whites from consciously acting on such stereotypes in their daily interactions with persons of other races, it’s unrealistic to believe that these stereotypes don’t have some cumulative impact on the often snap decisions of who’s hired and who’s promoted, on who’s arrested and who’s prosecuted, on how you feel about the customer who just walked into your store or about the demographics of your children’s school. [139]

Few minorities can isolate themselves entirely from white society—certainly not in the way that whites can successfully avoid contact with members of other races. But it is possible for minorities to pull down the shutters psychologically, to protect themselves by assuming the worst. “Why should I have to make the effort to disabuse whites of their ignorance about us?” I’ve had some blacks tell me. “We’ve been trying for three hundred years, and it hasn’t worked yet.”
To which I suggest that the alternative is surrender—to what has been instead of what might be. [139]

Rightly or wrongly, white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America; even the most fair-minded of whites, those who would genuinely like to see racial inequality ended and poverty relieved, tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization—or race-specific claims based on the history of race discrimination in this country.
Some of this has to do with the success of conservatives in fanning the politics of resentment—by wildly overstating, for example, the adverse effects of affirmative action on white workers. [145]

Old habits die hard, and there is always a fear on the part of many minorities that unless racial discrimination, past and present, stays on the front burner, white America will be let off the hook and hard-fought gains may be reversed. I understand these fears—nowhere is it ordained that history moves in a straight line, and during difficult economic times it is possible that the imperatives of racial equality get shunted aside. [146]

Rather than evoke our sympathy, our familiarity with the lives of the black poor has bred spasms of fear and outright contempt. But mostly it’s bred indifference. Black men filling our prisons, black children unable to read or caught in a gangland shooting, the black homeless sleeping on grates and in the parks of our nation’s capital—we take these things for granted, as part of the natural order, a tragic situation, perhaps, but not one for which we are culpable, and certainly not something subject to change. [149]

For black Americans, such separation from the poor is never an option, and not just because the color of our skin—and the conclusions the larger society draws from our color—makes all of us only as free, only as respected, as the least of us. [150]

As black businesses and commercial strips struggled, Latino businesses thrived, helped in part by financial ties to home countries and by a customer base held captive by language barriers. Everywhere, it seemed, Mexican and Central American workers came to dominate low-wage work that had once gone to blacks—as waiters and busboys, as hotel maids and as bellmen—and made inroads in the construction trades that had long excluded black labor. Blacks began to grumble and feel threatened; they wondered if once again they were about to be passed over by those who’d just arrived. [154]

if we stand idly by as America continues to become increasingly unequal, an inequality that tracks racial lines and therefore feeds racial strife and which, as the country becomes more black and brown, neither our democracy nor our economy can long withstand. [157]

With words, with rules, with procedures and precedents—with law—Southern senators had succeeded in perpetuating black subjugation in ways that mere violence never could…The filibuster hadn’t just stopped bills. For many blacks in the South, the filibuster had snuffed out hope. [48]

A disclaimer here: For a three-year span, from the time that I announced my candidacy for the Senate to the end of my first year as a senator, I was the beneficiary of unusually—and at times undeservedly—positive press coverage. No doubt some of this had to do with my status as an underdog in my Senate primary, as well as my novelty as a black candidate with an exotic background. [72]

In such a life I, too, might have contented myself had it not been for the particular attributes of the historically black church, attributes that helped me shed some of my skepticism and embrace the Christian faith. [122]

For one thing, I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change. Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation. [123]

They sensed what I’d come to know from a lifetime of experience: that whatever preconceived notions white Americans may continue to hold, the overwhelming majority of them these days are able—if given the time—to look beyond race in making their judgments of people. [??]

None of us—black, white, Latino, or Asian—is immune to the stereotypes that our culture continues to feed us, especially stereotypes about black criminality, black intelligence, or the black work ethic. [138]

It’s the added weight that many minorities, especially African Americans, so often describe in their daily round—the feeling that as a group we have no store of goodwill in America’s accounts, that as individuals we must prove ourselves anew each day, that we will rarely get the benefit of the doubt and will have little margin for error. Making a way through such a world requires the black child to fight off the additional hesitation that she may feel when she stands at the threshold of a mostly white classroom on the first day of school; it requires the Latina woman to fight off self-doubt as she prepares for a job interview at a mostly white company. [139]

….trust between the races is often tentative. It can wither without a sustaining effort. It may last only so long as minorities remain quiescent, silent to injustice; it can be blown asunder by a few well-timed negative ads featuring white workers displaced by affirmative action, or the news of a police shooting of an unarmed black or Latino youth. [140]

Obama’s solutions to all these problems?

We might start with completing the unfinished business of the civil rights movement—namely, enforcing nondiscrimination laws in such basic areas as employment, housing, and education. Anyone who thinks that such enforcement is no longer needed should pay a visit to one of the suburban office parks in their area and count the number of blacks employed there, even in the relatively unskilled jobs, or stop by a local trade union hall and inquire as to the number of blacks in the apprenticeship program, or read recent studies showing that real estate brokers continue to steer prospective black homeowners away from predominantly white neighborhoods. Unless you live in a state without many black residents, I think you’ll agree that something’s amiss. [143]

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