The Poetry, Essays and Personal Journals of Larry L. Dill
The Troubled Dreams of Barack Obama
by Larry L. Dill
In 1995 Benjamin DeMott published a curiously titled book, "The Trouble with Friendship: Why Americans Can't Think Straight about Race." The thesis of the book ran counter to the perceived wisdom of the day about racial inequality in America, exemplified most profoundly on the political stage by the collaboration of a liberal President, Bill Clinton, and a conservative congress and its ideological Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich to, as Clinton called it, "end welfare as we know it." The ideology behind that collaboration had been laid out in the Reagan years as a belief that government involvement in social issues like racial injustice, which may have done some good in the 60's and 70's was now doing black people (and America in general) more harm than good.
DeMott called his counter theory, "the friendship orthodoxy," and argued that the dismantling of a 400 year old racial caste system in America that began with the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960's had only just begun when the mood of the country began to turn away from affirmative action programs designed to correct the social inequities of race and gender in America. This mood swing (or "backlash" to the cultural excesses of the 1960s and 70s) became a perceptual "reality" through the melding of narratives in popular culture that focused on self-help, interracial friendship scenarios and the "can-do” spirit that had long been a part of the American Dream mythology of rugged individualism and "Manifest Destiny," as opposed to collective action and class struggle. "The Jeffersons" and "The Bill Cosby Show", portrayed an emerging black middle class that was no different than any other American middle class group. The evolution of black television programs from "Amos and Andy" through "Sanford and Son" to The Cosby Show" came to be seen as a true reflection of the evolution of black/white social justice. The curmudgeonly comedian Redd Foxx portrayed the old image of the lazy and inept black manipulator. His son, played by Demond Wilson, was the earnest, well spoken,, and, above all, hard working "new" black. In "The Jeffersons," a spin-off from "All in the Family," Sherman Hemsley played George Jefferson, an upwardly mobile dry cleaning mogul whose bumbling attempts to be "uppity" because of his business success were always brought under control by his wise and reasonable wife and his sharp tongued black maid in much the same way that the white Ozzie Nelson had been corralled by his wiser wife in the 1950's sitcom "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet."
These comic scenarios of black personal "growth" and black/white "sameness" were buttressed by more serious fare, most notably the highly acclaimed television epic "Roots" which DeMott pointed out was more about the "can-do" spirit and "bootstrap" individualism of black people than the ongoing injuries to the black race from the ongoing structural inequities of bottom caste existence in a caste like society that was and still is in denial about the true nature of its own systems of social stratification. DeMott quotes Columbia Professor Eric Foner as saying of "Roots,"
The central theme is the ability of a family, through unity, self-reliance, and moral fortitude, to face and overcome adversity. Much like the Waltons confronting the depression, the family in "Roots" neither seeks nor requires outside help; individual or family help is always sufficient.
The "friendship orthodoxy" appears in these narratives, both comic and dramatic, as black/white sameness, the moral high ground and utter lack of racism taken by "good and proper" whites and by the cooperative spirit and lack of bitterness by "good and proper" blacks. DeMott argues that by the time he was writing about race in the mid 90s, black/white "buddy" movies like "White Men can't Jump, "Pulp Fiction" and the Mel Gibson/Danny Glover series of "Lethal Weapon" films were the norm: very popular depictions of the "friendship orthodoxy" completely lacking any reference to the true historical context of the systemic caste like stratification that has been responsible for the economic, social and psychological plight of impoverished blacks from the days of slavery to present day conditions in inner city ghettos and the American prison gulag. Explaining his thesis at the beginning of "The Trouble with Friendship," DeMott says this:
At the heart of today’s thinking about race, lies one relatively simple idea: the race situation in America is governed by the state of personal relations between blacks and whites. Belief in the importance of personal relations reflects traits of national character such as gregariousness, openness, down-to-earthness. It also reflects American confidence that disputes can be trusted to resolve themselves if the parties consent to sit down together in the spirit of good fellowship--break bread, talk things out, learn what makes the other side tick.
These lines, remember, were published well over a decade ago. Nothing, however, makes them fresher or more salient today than the candidacy of Barack Obama for President of the United States. From his stirring keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in 2004 to his much lauded speech on race in Philadelphia just 3 months ago, Obama has presented himself as the living embodiment of the new promethean man. Neither black nor white he is the transformation of the bumbling heroes of Sanford and Son and The Jeffersons, the bible quoting black hit man in "Pulp Fiction," even the incendiary biblical prophecy of the real life preacher, his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, into the race neutral language of American exceptionalism. "Yes We Can!" At the 2004 Democratic Convention Obama said,
There is not a Black America and a White America and a Latino America and Asian America--there's the United States of America...We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
Two years later as he prepared to announce his candidacy for the presidency he published his best selling book, "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream," the title borrowed from a sermon by his erstwhile pastor, now nemesis, Jeremiah Wright. In that book Obama revisits his 2004 speech:
When I meet people for the first time, they sometimes quote back to me a line in my speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that seemed to strike a chord: "There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America--there is the United States of America." For them, it seems to capture a vision of America finally freed from the past of Jim Crow and slavery, Japanese internment camps and Mexican braceros, workplace tensions and cultural conflict--an America that fulfills Dr. King's promise that we be judged not by the color of our skin but by the content of our character.
"The content of our character" is of course a line from Martin Luther King, Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. It is also the title of an award winning book by the conservative black historian, Shelby Steele, first published in 1990 with the subtitle "A New Vision of Race in America." DeMott saw Steele's book as an artful articulation of the bootstrap, can-do philosophy displayed in "Roots" and other narratives of sameness and friendship orthodoxy. In the context in which King's "I Have a Dream" speech was delivered, the phrase, "content of our character," implied that whites, no matter what their economic circumstances, were judged by their morality and character traits. Blacks, on the other hand, no matter what their morals or character, were judged first and foremost by the color of their skin. Steele's book argued that as long as whites "coddled" blacks with affirmative action and other deferential programs blacks were handicapped against achieving economic parity with whites and the independence to develop a high moral character.
"The Content of Our Character" was published at the height of the controversy among policy makers over whether or not America was now "coddling" its black citizens. Written as it was by an educated black intellectual it may have appeared to many whites to be the long awaited blessing needed to go forward with the dismantling of government programs designed to help poor blacks get ahead. It was praised by liberals and conservatives alike and won that year the National Book Critics Circle Award. DeMott's view of the book as an intellectual rationalization of the "friendship orthodoxy" makes it an interesting coda for understanding the speeches and writings of Barack Obama. The fact that Steele, like Obama, had a black father and a white mother may or may not have something to do with such a firm belief in the doctrine of black/white sameness that DeMott sees so clearly articulated in pop cultural narratives of the post-civil rights era, and this writer sees as central to Barack Obama's phenomenal appeal today.
"Before the sixties," DeMott quotes Steele as saying, "race set the boundaries of black life. Now, especially for middle-class blacks, it is far less a factor, though we don't always like to admit it. Though we have gained equality under law and even special entitlements through social programs and affirmative action, our leadership continues to stress our victimization."
These themes of friendship orthodoxy, DeMott explains again, are ,
"black-white sameness, the decline of racism and the advent of one-on-one interracial goodwill, and the relative inconsequence both of history and of the collectivist struggle by African Americans against the white majority."
One possible reason that John Edwards was twice unsuccessful in his bid for the democratic nomination for president may have been that the message he kept repeating in his stump speeches that there were 2 Americas--the haves and the have-nots--did not resonate in the minds of enough middle-class whites (or blacks) because the friendship orthodoxy has finally been set in concrete as the only politically correct view of race or class in this country. I believe that DeMott (who died in 2005) might have agreed with this assessment of Edwards' continued allusions to the historic grievances of the poor of all races and his challenge to the leadership of corporate America and the American government itself for its responsibility for the exploitation and indifference that is at the root of America's continuing (and clearly worsening) economic injustice. It is worth noting here that when Ralph Nader was asked if any of the contenders for the Democratic nomination this year merited his praise, the only one he named was John Edwards. Edwards' clarity in delineating the obvious existence of vast economic disparities in this country is precisely what is missing in Barack Obama's amorphous message of "hope" and "change."
In his most detailed book of policy prescriptions to date, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama cannot seem to bring himself to say that fundamental structural change at the highest levels is what is needed to continue to correct historic racial and class injustice (a good example of what Nader--who otherwise praises Obama for his intelligence and inspirational leadership--calls Obama‘s “self-censorship”). When Obama does speak of structural change it tends to be the kind of regressive change that is borne of white resentment and Republican demagoguery rather than real world social injustice. In his chapter on race, Obama has this to say:
We should also acknowledge that conservatives--and Bill Clinton-- were right about welfare as it was previously structured: by detaching income from work, and by making no demands on welfare recipients other than a tolerance for intrusive bureaucracy and an assurance that no man lived in the same house as the mother of his children, the old AFDC program sapped people of their initiative and eroded their self respect. Any strategy to reduce intergenerational poverty has to be centered on work, not welfare--not only because work provides independence and income but also because it provides order, structure, dignity and opportunities for growth in people's lives.
Obama's disregard for the true nature of the wage slavery available to most bottom caste women in this country, the kind of educational and health care opportunities that an adequately funded and fairly administered welfare program might have provided during the Reagan, Bush and Clinton years, and the growing problem of poverty, homelessness and unemployment that exists among vast numbers of the American populous who have never been on welfare at all, suggests the kind of naivete and/or remoteness from the real human misery in this country that, elsewhere in his book, Obama lays at the feet of the Bush administration in general and their handling of the Katrina tragedy in particular. Obama's apparent blindness to institutional racism as opposed to the personal kind-- the only kind acknowledged to exist in the friendship othodoxy-- leads him to say without irony that "I appeared on the Sunday morning news shows, rejecting the notion that the Administration had acted slowly because Katrina's victims were black--'the incompetence was color-blind,' I said--but insisting that the Administration's inadequate planning showed a degree of remove from, and indifference toward, the problems of inner-city poverty that had to be addressed."
Adopting in such a casual way the reactionary pejorative use of "welfare" as code for lazy black people who need to be put to work and the audacity to believe that if Katrina had struck a city of impoverished white people the relief response of the federal government would have been no different are just two examples of Barack Obama's internalization of the myth of the friendship orthodoxy and of his denial of the existence of intractable, caste-like elements in the lower stratas of black culture in America today. Writing in the May 2008 issue of The Progressive Magazine, Adolph Reed, Jr., a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania offers this analysis of Obama as politician:
His political repertoire has always included the repugnant stratagem of using connection with black audiences in exactly the same way Bill Clinton did--i.e., getting props both for emoting with the black crowd and talking through them to affirm a victim-blaming “tough love” message that focuses on alleged behavioral pathologies in poor black communities. Because he is able to claim racial insider standing, he actually goes beyond Clinton and rehearses the scurrilous and ridiculous sort of narrative Bill Cosby has made infamous. Obama's style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It's like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists. They get themselves onto a stage that's so big that they can't hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they've told different people. And Obama's belonging to Wright's church in the first place was quite likely part of establishing a South Side bourgeois nationalist street cred because his political base was with Hyde Park/University of Chicago liberals and the foundation world.
Adolph Reed on the left and Shelby Steele on the right seem to agree on the protean nature of Obama's character. Neither think he can win the general election and both believe it so not so much because of racism out there as because of his own shape-shifting personality. Both men weighed in early on the problem: Reed with his November 2007 article in The Progressive, "Sitting This One Out," in which he mostly voiced his disappointment over the right leaning tendencies of all the supposedly left wing major candidates (including Obama) and Steele with a book length essay published the next month (December, 2007) entitled "A Bound Man: Why We're excited about Obama and Why He Can't Win." Steele, who, you remember, Benjamin Demott considered, back in 1995, to be one of the most important ideologists of the friendship orthodoxy, appeared on Bill Moyers' Journal in January 2008 in connection with the publication of his new book. Here is a portion of that exchange:
Steele: My gut feeling is that he's going to have a difficult time. The reason I think that is we don't know him. We don't yet quite know what his deep abiding convictions are. And he seems to have, you know, almost in a sense kept them concealed. And a part of the I think infatuation with Obama is because he's something of an invisible man. He's kind of a projection screen. And you sort of see more your--the better side of yourself when you look at Obama than you see actually Barack Obama.
Moyers: You say in here that his supporters want him not to do something, but to be something.
Steele: Yes.
Moyers: To represent something. What do you think they want him to be?
Steele: I think to be very blunt about it, in a lot of that support is a desire for convergence of a black skin with the United States Presidency, with power on that level--the idea is that to have a black in that office leading a largely white country would be redemptive for America.
Moyers: Redemptive?
Steele: Redemptive. Would take us a long way. Would indicate that we truly have moved away from that shameful racist past that we had.
Moyers: That's perfectly logical isn't it?
Steele: Yes it is.
Moyers: And desirable. You seem to...
Steele: I want it.
Moyers: And you write that "the black identity that Obama longs for means that you must join a politics that keeps alive the idea of white obligation to blacks." You think that Obama's mission, is to keep alive the white obligation to blacks?
Steele: I think that's what he tells blacks. I think that when he speaks as he did in Selma, as he did in Harlem not long ago, he puts on the challenger's mask...Sometimes Barack Obama is John F. Kennedy. Sometimes he's Martin Luther King. Sometimes he's Stokely Carmichael in 1968. He has these different masks that are tailored to the audience that he's in front of. And he does it with such facility that you, one, cannot help but wonder who's the real---what's his voice? What's his inflection?
The cult like status that Obama's successful primary campaign has achieved is much easier to understand through the various lenses presented by Steele, DeMott and Reed. And though Geraldine Ferraro who supports Hillary Clinton has been pilloried and ostracised for her remark that Obama is where he is in the campaign because he is black and not in spite of it, these analytical lenses go a long way toward supporting her controversial contention.
I got up and the question was asked, “Why do you think Barack Obama is in the place he is today as the party's delegate front-runner?” I said, in large measure, because he is black. I said, Let me also say in 1984 -- and if I have said it once, I have said it 20, 60, 100 times -- in 1984, if my name was Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would never have been the nominee for vice president.
Looking at Ferraro's remarks through the lens of Benjamin DeMott's "Friendship Orthodoxy" of black/white sameness, Shelby Steele's redemption theory and Adolph Reeds' "con-man" theory, they don't seem racist at all. Two of these writers are black--one liberal, one conservative. DeMott was white and of course was not writing about the man, Barack Obama, in 1995. But the subtitle of his book, "Why Americans can't think straight about race," suggests that the media attacks on Geraldine Ferraro were the result of an unsophisticated critical understanding of the true psychological, and ideological complexity of race relations in this country and the counterintuitive nature of its current trends.
One of the cultural narrative artifacts DeMott uses in "The Trouble with Friendship" to illustrate the deeper psychoanalytic features of a serious critique of black/white relations in this country is the play by John Guare, "Six Degrees of Separation." Written and performed on the New York stage in the early 90’s and later made into a film starring Will Smith, “Six Degrees” is based on the true story of a young black con-artist who insinuates himself into the posh apartment of two wealthy white art dealers by pretending to be friends with their children who are attending Harvard. The main character, Paul, claims to be the son of Sidney Poitier and until and even after his fraud is revealed the white couple continue to be enthralled with and ambivalent toward the smooth talking young black.
"The play’s lesson is twofold," DeMott argues: "first, when whites are drawn into friendship and sympathy, one on one, with blacks, they will go to extreme lengths to suppress vexations and the sense of injury; second, once blacks are awarded unconditional white friendship, as individuals, they cease to harbor any sense of vexation or injury that would need suppressing.
"The message confirms, for the right-minded, that racism is one-dimensional--lacking, that is, in institutional, historical, or political ramifications. And the quantity of similar confirmation elsewhere in popular entertainment is, speaking matter-of-factly, immense.
"Incessantly and deliberately, the world of pop is engaged in demonstrating, through images,, that racism has to do with private attitudes and emotions--with personal narrowness and meanness--not with differences in rates of black and white joblessness and poverty, or in black and white income levels, or in levels of financing of predominantly black and white public schools.”
The outrage of media pundits and many Obama supporters over Geraldine Ferraro's, Bill Clinton's and Hillary Clinton's candid assessments of why Obama is winning the nomination race instead of Clinton, is a clear example of what happens if anyone challenges the friendship orthodoxy by trying to expose its effects on something as serious as voter motivation. In fact, since one of Hillary Clinton's strongest voting blocks has turned out to be less educated whites who live, particularly, in "backward regions" like Appalachia where I live, her candidacy is being increasingly explained away as the last vestige of racism in America--having to do with nothing more than the "personal narrowness and meanness" of the ruthless Clintons and their unenlightened supporters.
Whether Barack Obama turns out to be the New Hope for American Democracy or a con-man selling snake oil to uncritical blacks who believe his ascent to power will bring an end to institutional racism and economic injustice in this country or white yuppies who believe his election to the presidency will bring them redemption for the sins of their fathers, an end to war, corporate hegemony, and American imperialism, remains to be seen.
I don’t mean to imply that I believe that Obama is a con-man on the order of the con-man character in Six Degrees of Separation even if the black/white relationships in the play bear an eerie resemblance to real world events in this political season. I do, however, believe that the socialist vision of peace and justice best viewed in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. is a far cry from the tepid, corporate-driven, “Middle-Class-R-Us” mentality of the Obama campaign.
Because he is a black man, does Barack Obama owe us the sensibilities of black visionaries like Martin Luther King any more than, say, a white middle-class female politician owes it to us? Surely not. But I truly believe that, having all but won the Democratic nomination, now, whether or not Obama goes on to win the general election in the fall, a lot of hearts are going to be broken. Including, perhaps, my own.
--Larry L. Dill
Rabbit Rock, N.C.
June 1, 2008
New Sightings in this issue:
Obama’s Speech on Race in Philadelphia March 18, 2008
The video and the transcript as published on the HuffingtonPost.com website.
Obama's Audacious Deference
An excellent critique of Barack Obama's political philosophy as expressed in his 2006 book, "The audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream " written by the left wing historian Paul Street and originally published January, 24 2007 on Znet.org.
Bill Moyers interviews Shelby Steele, author of The Content of Our Character and The Bound Man: Why We're Excited about Obama and Why He Can't Win PBS, Bill Moyers' Journal, January 11, 2008
Complete Sightings Index
A New Poem by Larry L. Dill:
Conversation With An Owl
The May, 2008 edition of the New Hope Journal
Complete Site Index
larrydill@newhopejournal.com
www.newhopejournal.com
copyright 2008 by Larry L. Dill