“DRINKIN’ THE OBAMA JUICE”
By Gregory Wonderwheel
{“Obama, meanwhile, attracted legions of fervent volunteers. ‘People call it drinking the juice,’ Dan Shoman, the political director of Obama’s campaign, said. ‘People start drinking the Obama juice. You can’t find enough for them to do.’” – From New Yorker article “THE CANDIDATE”
by William Finnegan - URL below}
Barack Obama the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Illinois has been picked to give the keynote address in the upcoming Democratic Party National Convention on its second night, July 27. I support Barack Obama 100%! (Even if I don't agree with him 100%.) I think that he is the face of the future in many many ways.
But I was distressed to hear Amy Goodman say today on her nationally distributed program Democracy Now! that if elected Obama would be the fifth "Black" U.S. Senator. Why? Because Obama is not "Black," he is bi-racially mulatto. If we are going to engage in color-coded politics, which I think we SHOULD NOT do, we must at least state the colors accurately to know what we are saying. The old and accurate term, which is now in disfavor, is mulatto; it means a first generation person with a Negro and Caucasian parent.
Now why is this important other than the genetic accuracy? It is important because in the actual living realm of political projections Obama is not just the carrier of "Black" political aspirations. He carries the liberal/progressive projections of both "Whites" and "Blacks" just as his genetic heritage and family ancestry embodies both.
Whatever strict perfections of radical analysis Obama is lacking, he does represent the best in human aspirations for universal emancipation, liberty, and equality that I and all progressive people of European genetic ancestry share, so if any genetic ancestry is to be acknowledged, it is appropriate to acknowledge that progressive European genetic ancestry is also being embodied in the political character of Obama. He is not merely or accurately a "Black" or "African-American" politician because he is as much "White" and "European-American"; he is actually and factually whether he likes it or not, an American politician representing the best of the mixed genetic and political heritage of America. Let's not pretend otherwise.
There was a time that my genetic ancestry from Ireland, England, and France would have been perceived as coming from three distinct and separate "races" all bitterly racist in their hateful opposition to each other. I celebrate having such a mongrel genetic pool. We U.S. Americans should celebrate all of our mongrel heritage, and Barack Obama is a fantastic person upon whom we can project that celebration!
Genes do not tell the story. A person's identity is created by many experiences. Your identity is very different depending on your circumstances.
Barack Obama did not have your normal “Black community” experience. He was born in Hawaii. His father left the family to go to Harvard to finish his engineering education and from there returned to Africa when Barack was young. His mother stayed in Hawaii, so he never really knew his father except through letters. He grew up in Hawaii, Indonesia (his mother remarried to an Indonesian man when he was six), and back to Hawaii at age ten where he was mostly brought up by his Kansan grandparents. Until college, he never lived in a "Black" community. He now lives in and identifies with the African-American community of Hyde Park, Chicago.
He has a book, but I haven't read it yet, "Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" by Barack Obama
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/081292343X/103-4594105-3663847?v=glanceFrom reviews of the book, it sounds like Obama grew up with mixed up feelings and views about who he was due to his mixed heritage and absent father.
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Here's a reader's review from the Amazon website:
"The writing is thoughtful and interesting, and the subject matter unique. The book follows Barack Obama as he grows up and defines himself and his view of the world, as he finds the community that he wants to count himself a member of. In the end that "community" is really the community of humanity, but this book takes you on Barack's journey.
"The author examines his heritage of white, Midwesterners on his mother's side and later in the book explores the world of his father, a Kenya of the Luo tribe who came to the U.S. to study. Three parts of the book I found especially well done. First, the evocation of what it was like to be in Barack's head as a young black man with few black role models in his life and the difficult philosophical (internal) conversation of the African-American community defining itself in white America. Second, his work as a community organizer in Chicago really dealt well with the complex problems of declining inner cities. Third, the idealization of his absent father by both himself and his mother and the gradual discovery of the real character of his father and grandfather.
"Overall, this book was about his struggle to be true to himself and to figure out what that meant."
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My point is that we need to take Obama for who *he* is, understanding that we all, including "Blacks," want to pin on him our labels for our own purposes. Obama proudly wears the title of "first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review." But that is understandable given today's political realities. When he started out in politics there were "Blacks" on the South Side of Chicago who said he wasn't "Black" enough with his light skin and fancy Harvard education.
When one listens to him speak and to his "message," it is clear that Obama is not attempting to speak for one segment of society, such as a "Black" representative, and instead he is speaking *to* and *for* all of us, especially in a return to the New Deal populist mode to working people. He opposes NAFTA. BTW, Studs Terkel is a big supporter of his in Chicago.
Here's a another bit from the New Yorker article by William Finnegan (URL further below):
“Obama began by saying, as he often does, that people were always getting his name wrong, calling him ‘Alabama’ or ‘Yo Mama.’ The crowd roared with laughter. In Swahili, he said, Barack means ‘blessing.’ Then he took the question of racial difference head on, declaring, ‘We have shared values, values that aren’t black or white or Hispanic—-values that are American, and Democratic.’”
This is his official website:
http://www.obamaforillinois.com/index.asp?Type=NONE&SEC={8683FB66-C0DB-4FAB-85C7-2FBCF770436E}
Here's a cute story, also from the New Yorker article, about President Bush's first encounter with hearing his name:
Jan Schakowsky told me about a recent visit she had made to the White House with a congressional delegation. On her way out, she said, President Bush noticed her “OBAMA” button. “He jumped back, almost literally,” she said. “And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a ‘b.’ And I explained who he was. The President said, ‘Well, I don’t know him.’ So I just said, ‘You will.’”
Also quoted in a blog site with many Obama info links:
http://www.chicagoist.com/archives/2004/05/25/barack_obama_or_is_that_barak_obama.php
Obama’s going to get a lot of scrutiny in the next few weeks and much more is likely to come out about his background.
In his article in The Black Commentator, http://www.blackcommentator.com/45/45_dixon.html Bruce A. Dixon questions why Obama has toned down his rhetoric now that he won the primary. Dixon points out the apparently new association that Obama has with the Democratic Leadership counsel and wonders if that bodes ill for Obama’s relation to his political base:
“It is the mission of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to make it financially attractive to Democratic candidates and office holders to take stands diametrically opposed to the interests of their constituents, to sound and vote more like corporate friendly Republicans.”
Dixon points out that Obama made a tremendously well received speech opposing the war in Iraq and had previously and prominently displayed it on his website, but now the speech is no longer on the website and a toned down and tepid statement takes its place. Dixon appropriately worries, “There are definitely multiple voices in Obama's ear right now. On the one hand, there are the DLC/New Democrats, the right wing corporate funded arm of the Democratic Party. Their consistent advice is to shut up and support the president's war at home and abroad, to get away from the concerns of ‘special interests’ like minorities, working Americans, environmentalists and the uninsured, and peel off some not-too-conservative Republican swing votes.”
Perhaps it was language like this in Obama’s Iraq speech that turned off the DLC corporate advocates: “You want a fight, President Bush? Let's fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.”
In Finnegan’s New Yorker article a witness to Obama’s Iraq speech who is a lifelong Democratic activist, now in her late sixties, said, “It was the best antiwar speech I have ever heard, bar none.” That's the Obama Juice talking, and I agree it is great oratory. I also agree with Dixon about tampering with it and hope Obama will listen to Dixon, Studs Terkel, and Jesse Jackson, Jr.. Obama needs to keep his juice 100% without the additives of the DLC diluting it. On July 27 at the Democratic Convention, we will all get the opportunity to taste the Obama Juice for ourselves.
A large section of Obama’s Iraq speech is recapped in Dixon’s article, once again, at http://www.blackcommentator.com/45/45_dixon.html
Here’s an Economist article about Obama written during the primary:
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=2502397
As promised, here's the very good New Yorker article by William Finnegan written after the primary but before Obama’s rival for the Senate seat Republican Jack Ryan had dropped out: http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040531fa_fact1
Coda:
The term mulatto has a negative connotation from history because both "Whites" and "Blacks" have viewed mulatto people with prejudice and hateful discrimination. The mongrels and "half-breeds" of every variety are always hated because they challenge the very foundations of racial identity in the relations of dominant culture and subservient culture, whether those cultures are "White" and "Black", "French" and "German", "Japanese" and "Korean," etc. That is why I willingly and enthusiastically identify with being a European mongrel, rather than identifying with a national heritage, and celebrate the mixtures of genetic diversity rather than such false notions of racial purity as being "Black" or "White." I fervently hope that Barack Obama will be the face of the future and that through him all people will be able to celebrate their own mongrel heritage with joy and no shame whatsoever. Because, to say is plainly, in the ultimate analysis the greatness and the glory of the United States of America derives directly from the interbreeding of the diverse breeds, creeds, and strains of our genetic, ethnic, philosophical, religious, and political heritages.
Gregory Wonderwheel
Santa Rosa, California
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