Has Obama Backed Off of a Big Opportunity to Heal America's Racial Divide?

[Orwellian_Ghost]

Has Obama Backed Off of a Big Opportunity to Heal America's Racial Divide?

By Naomi Klein, The Guardian. Posted September 15, 2009.

The summer of 2009 was all about race, and Obama has little to lose by using this brief political window of racial animus to heal a few of the country's racial wounds.


Americans began the summer still celebrating the dawn of a "post-racial" era. They are ending it under no such illusion. The summer of 2009 was all about race, beginning with Republican claims that Sonia Sotomayor, Barack Obama's nominee to the US Supreme Court, was "racist" against whites. Then, just as that scandal was dying down, up popped "the Gates controversy", the furore over the president's response to the arrest of African American academic Henry Louis Gates Jr in his own home. Obama's remark that the police had acted "stupidly" was evidence, according to massively popular Fox News host Glenn Beck, that the president "has a deep-seated hatred for white people".

...

The undercurrent of all these attacks was that Obama, far from being the colour-blind moderate he posed as during the presidential campaign, is actually obsessed with race, in particular with redistributing white wealth into the hands of African Americans and undocumented Mexican workers. At town hall meetings across the US in August, these bizarre claims coalesced into something resembling an uprising to "take our country back". Henry D Rose, chair of Blacks For Social Justice, recently compared the overwhelmingly white, often armed, anti-Obama crowds to the campaign of "massive resistance" launched in the late 50s – a last-ditch attempt by white southerners to block the racial integration of their schools and protect other Jim Crow laws. Today's "new era of 'massive resistance'," writes Rose, "is also a white racial project."

There is at least one significant difference, however. In the late 50s and early 60s, angry white mobs were reacting to life-changing victories won by the civil rights movement. Today's mobs, on the other hand, are reacting to the symbolic victory of an African American winning the presidency. Yet they are rising up at a time when non-elite blacks and Latinos are losing significant ground, with their homes and jobs slipping away from them at a much higher rate than from whites. So far, Obama has been unwilling to adopt policies specifically geared towards closing this ever-widening divide. The result may well leave minorities with the worst of all worlds: the pain of a full-scale racist backlash without the benefits of policies that alleviate daily hardships. Meanwhile, with Obama constantly painted by the radical right as a cross between Malcolm X and Karl Marx, most progressives feel it is their job to defend him – not to point out that, when it comes to tackling the economic crisis ravaging minority communities, the president is not doing nearly enough.

For many antiracist campaigners, the realisation that Obama might not be the leader they had hoped for came when he announced his administration would be boycotting the UN Durban Review Conference on racism, widely known as "Durban II". Almost all of the public debate about the conference focused on its supposed anti-Israel bias. When it actually took place in April in Geneva, virtually all we heard about was Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's inflammatory speech, which was met with rowdy disruptions, from the EU delegates who walked out, to the French Jewish students who put on clown wigs and red noses, and tried to shout him down.


...

http://www.alternet.org/rights/142630/has_obama_backed_off_of_a_big_opportunity_to_heal_america's_racial_divide/?cID=1322218#c1322218

[cali]

1. yes, yes. Obama should have waved his magic wand and

amd vamquished racism from the kingdom.

And Durban II like Durban I was a total waste of time and all about posturing on Israel to the exclusion of other very real problems concerning racism, sexism and homophobia that afflict hundreds of millions.

[Orwellian_Ghost]

2. Reactionary comment

No discussion of Klein's ideas?

Just a silly unrec and foaming at the mouth without even a hint of a thoughtful response. I guess that's what passes for audacity?

[cali]

3. nothing reactionary about it. And you never discuss anything

you're simply a cut and paster. Your attempt to falsely portray my post as "foaming at the mouth", is a cheap tactic aimed at discrediting what I said- and what I said about Durban was a substantive comment.

Now why don't yhou discuss Klein's ideas? Why not respond to my substantive comment about Durban?

[geek tragedy]

7. This from the biggest knee-jerk, cut-and-paste Obama-basher at DU.

Too funny.

[rurallib]

4. I think Klein underestimates how deep seated and virulent the racial

divide is. It really makes no difference what Obama does it is wrong. Once he won the train was heading down the track.

[Igel]

5. I agree with you on the big point.

The racial divide is intractable.

However, Obama would never address it, not this late in the election cycle.

Why?

Because he'd have to say some pretty unpleasant things to his supporters (who would tune him out as a turncoat) and to his opponents (who would just tune him out). Even as it is, he says some pretty mild things and they're deemed earth-shaking. You don't mess with group identities and honor, you just don't, at least not of group honor is really important. You don't challenge long-standing assumptions.

It prevents any meaningful discussion at all because the fault always has to be the other's.

The racial divide also frequently provides a nice all-purpose defense and is just too danged useful to allow anybody to dispose of it. For example, the second part of your post.

[geek tragedy]

6. Privileged white woman asks: Is Obama black enough?

More garbage from the Obama-hating peanut gallery.