Healing Postponed ("Obama may be helping to postpone the arrival of a post-racial America")! [View All]

[Apollo11]

This article is published in the March 2008 issue of Prospect, a current affairs monthly magazine published in London, England.

The writer, Trevor Phillips, is a well-known black British political commentator (previously elected to represent the Labour Party in London) and is the first chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (an official body set up and supported by the British government).

The article draws on a lot of ideas from Shelby Steele's new book: A Bound Man — Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win.


Healing Postponed

by Trevor Phillips

For all his lofty talk of national unity, Obama may actually put back the arrival of a post-racial America

(...)

There are, Steele says, two kinds of influential black figures in US public life. The "challengers" — Garvey, Malcolm X, Jackson — wield power by making whites feel guilty about the old crime and only allowing the guilt to be relieved in return for concessions of one kind or another: a project here, a political sinecure there. (...)

Steele identifies another, more successful group, which he calls "bargainers." These are black leadership figures who strike quite a different deal by saying to white America: "I will not use America's horrible history of white racism against you, if you will promise not to use my race against me." That way, everybody wins; whites feel flattered and win back what Steele calls their "racial innocence." Blacks acquire freedom from the cage of their colour. Starting with Louis Armstrong, a series of black icons have sustained a brilliant crossover bargain: Poitier, King, Bill Cosby and, quintessentially, Oprah Winfrey. Both they and America have prospered from it.

Obama is a natural bargainer. (...)

For white America, this separation makes the guilt associated with slavery an everyday reality. But if Obama can succeed, then maybe they can imagine that King's post-racial nirvana has arrived. A vote for Obama is a pain-free negation of their own racism. (So long as they don't have to live next door to him; Obama has yet to win convincingly in white districts adjacent to black communities. While winning in still-segregated South Carolina, he lost in states where blacks and whites are more likely to share offices and public transport—New York, California.)

For the black underclass and beyond Obama may be the latest messiah, but there is anecdotal evidence that where blacks have prospered to the extent that they are grimly competing for jobs and property with whites, they don't buy "Obamania." I would guess that this is because the people who actually experience just how far America remains from post-racial harmony are those blacks who work with whites.

(...)

Both challengers and bargainers offer a strategy that needs the racial divide to stay at the centre of US life. In truth, Obama may be helping to postpone the arrival of a post-racial America, and I think he knows it. If he wins, the cynicism may be worth it to him and his party. In the end he is a politician and a very good one; his job is to win elections. He may even beat Hillary to the nomination (though I'd be surprised). But the harbinger of a post-racial America? I don't think so. Obama's boosters compare him with JFK (see below). But I think he has a more recent role model, whose charm, skill and ruthless cynicism he may come to emulate. I'm talking, of course, of William Jefferson Clinton.


Read the full article here:
www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10043

More about Trevor Phillips:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Phillips