Obama
And The Hunger
For A Black President
By Rudolph Lewis
26 May, 2007
Black
Agenda Report
"We prefer symbols
to the real substance of black liberation."
The
hunger for a Black President is rather silly, superficial black politics.
It shows our political immaturity and our desperate lack of a real black
leader. It shows we prefer symbols to the real substance of black liberation.
It shows that we have more faith in political operatives and political
collaborators than real black leaders. It shows also the fear these
operatives have of being a black leader - poverty, imprisonment, flight,
assassination. That is the tragic history of real black leaders; these
extreme deficiencies (penalties) of leadership are the burdens of true
leaders of the oppressed.
Such black leaders must essentially
threaten the "Peculiar Institution" of America, long thought
of by scholars as American slavery, which Virginia now "profoundly
regrets." But slavery (as hereditary bond-laborers) has been dead
since 1865 and Jim Crow (racial segregation) has been essentially dead
since 1965. Yet African Americans remain an oppressed people, suffer
daily from racism in every aspect of American life. Bond servitude,
which was visited upon European Americans as well as Native Americans,
however, was not the "Peculiar Institution."
The "Peculiar Institution,"
Theodore Allen argues, was rather the official institution of the "white
race" at the beginning of 18th-century America, around about 1705
in the State of Virginia during the reign of Governor William Gooch.
Speaking against a genetic origin of racism, Allen explains, "The
ruling class took special pains to be sure that the people they ruled
were propagandized in the moral and legal ethos of white-supremacism
. . . the laws mandated that parish clerks or churchwardens, once each
spring and fall at the close of Sunday service, should read ("publish")
these laws in full to the congregants" (Invention of the White
Race, vol. 2, 251).
These 1705 and 1723 legislative
acts of Virginia were instituted to "separate dangerous free whites
from dangerous slave blacks." They were a ruling class means to
avoid another interracial Bacon's Rebellion against the bourgeois planters,
whose primary interest was the lowering of labor costs, the engrossment
of land, and the concentration of capital ownership. That is, Gooch's
intent was to "make race, not class, the distinction in America's
social life."
"The ‘white
race' invention by Virginia established the ‘contours of American
history.'"
The Virginian ruling classes
thus instituted for the first time in the history of America (and possibly
in the world) preferences based on "whiteness": "no free
African-American was to dare to lift his or her hand against a ‘Christian,
not being a negro, mulatto or Indian'; that African-American freeholders
were no longer to be allowed to vote; that the provision of a previous
enactment [1691] was being reinforced against the mating of English
and Negroes as producing ‘abominable mixture' and ‘spurious'
issue; that, as provided in the 1723 law for preventing freedom plots
by African-American bond-laborers, ‘any white person . . . found
in company with any [illegally congregated] slaves' was to be fined
(along with free African Americans or Indians so offending) with a fine
of fifteen shillings, or to ‘receive, on his, her, or their bare
backs, for every such offense, twenty lashes well laid on'." (Invention
of the White Race, vol. 2, 251).
The creation of this "white"
buffer between the ruling classes and African Americans (bond and free)
took hold, spread from town to town, county to county, state to state.
This "white race" invention by Virginia established the "contours
of American history." The racial castes of "blacks" at
the bottom and "whites" above and the privileging of skin
in social status, in trades, land ownership, capital accumulation, in
professions remain with us today in every sector of American life. Racism
is thus at "the essence of American bourgeois democracy."
This "safety valve of white skin privilege," a three-century
old "incubus" has thus, says Theodore Allen, "paralyzed
laboring class European Americans in the defense of their class interest
vis-à-vis those of the ruling class" (Invention of the White
Race, vol. 2, 259).
Many of today's black leaders
(businessmen, educators, politicians, and others of the professional
classes) neither possess nor promote this historical deliberate view
of America's institutionalizing racism and racial oppression as a corporate
means of making profit and concentrating wealth. Too many have anti-working
class biases and believe that rednecks founded racism and armed themselves
for racial oppression on their own behest of eliminating competition.
Others believe that racism is in the genes. Still others believe that
liberation can come merely by a mental adjustment of attitudes. Thus,
in this context, we have plenty of entertainers - black political entertainers
and black political pundits - all of which have made their deals with
the wealthy and the powerful and have become, as individuals, wealthy
and powerful.
It is also in this context
that we have an African American running to be the Democratic Party's
choice for president of the United States. Mainstream electoral politics
is not "the" solution, for black liberation, especially in
how it is presently conceived and used. Mainstream electoral politics
cannot for us be an end in itself. We will not be a free people unless
we are willing to withhold our vote from mainstream parties. Most black
leaders are tied, however, inextricably to the mainstream parties, even
the Nation of Islam. These ties by individual black leaders lead to
political corruption, which is a serious barrier to substantive efforts
toward black liberation. Those political ties only serve individual
blacks, rather than the masses of blacks.
"We have plenty
of entertainers - black political entertainers and black political pundits
- all of which have made their deals with the wealthy and the powerful."
The masses of working class
blacks have lost faith in this mainstream strategy, which has been in
operation for more than two decades and thus they do not go to the polls.
In effect, they are boycotting the polls. I am with them in this rejection
and support their non-participation. But our leaders have not taken
political advantage of this non-participation, rather they have castigated
this political act (as ignorance), for it runs against their collaboration
with these parties in the oppression of the general black population
and it undercuts their influence with these parties and thus their payoff.
There is a general trend
that promotes voting regardless. That is, voting for the less of two
evils. These cynics used the strangest of arguments to support this
waste of energy, time, and political clout. They will use history of
the struggle for voting rights and one's ancestors to demonstrate the
obligation to vote. They derisively attack the ignorance of non-voters
who refuse to support one set or other of their corporate and political
oppressors. Well, such arguments do not set us on the path of liberation.
It walks away from true political responsibility to our people. If we
are truly a free people each has not only a right to vote, but each
also has a right not to vote. Voting for the less of two evils forces
each black person to play their oppressors' game. It is like voting
whether my slaveholder is more benevolent than your slaveholder. Whatever
the vote slavery remains and subjects all to an outrageous and abusive
system.
That kind of political action
does not lead to the parting of the sea or the crossing over to Jordan.
It does not cause the walls to fall down. This philosophical view is
at the heart of the criticism of black leadership. One has to commit
oneself with one's feet; that is, one must be willing to walk away from
the choice of two evils. None has formulated this as the essential problem
of black politics today. Rather there is a labor to keep the masses
in the dark, voting blindly and mechanically. These mainstream leaders
do not want to formulate non-voting into a potent political message.
"Voting for the
lesser of two evils forces each black person to play their oppressors'
game."
If African Americans truly
desire full liberation they cannot be a slave to the Democratic Party
and Republican parties, or any mainstream party that stands pat with
the status quo of racism and skin-privileging. If we wish to use the
full force of the black vote, we must consider other options; that is,
if we seek an end to racism and racial oppression in America's social,
economic, and political life. The Democratic Party cares less whether
Negroes are racially oppressed or not. What they care first and foremost
about is winning.
We as a people must be at
least free in our thinking to do whatever is necessary to bring pressure
to bear for our overall interests and those of the nation. If that mean
disrupting the normal course of electoral politics by boycotting the
polls, then that is what we must do. Otherwise, the Democrats will continue
to play to white middle class issues and white middle class interests
which have a subtext of white-skin privileging. That's bad news for
us as a people. The Democrats will play to those concerns in their competition
with the Republican Right. And black people's issues will be pushed
into a dark corner.
That is the essence of what
has happened since Reagan came on the scene in the 1980s and our elected
black leaders have played this piecemeal game, and lost. They have negotiated
behind closed doors (with corporate executives and congressional politicians)
for tokens of full liberation. That strategy in the last two decades
of being a slave to the Democratic Party has brought us political and
economic losses rather than gains.
This is a new age. We can
no longer recognize political gains by the symbolic counting of "black
faces in high places" or in political offices. That's simple-minded
black politics, the crudest form of a political philosophy or black
perspective. Obama's presidential candidacy is just another way of pulling
African Americans back into voting for the Democratic Party once again.
It is a sham tactic; it is a distraction. It pulls us away from our
basic concerns as a people, that is, our issues of (poverty, unemployment,
education, criminalization, discrimination, etc.) produced by a regime
of white-skin privileging. These consequences are sometimes referred
to as the "Black Agenda."
"We can no longer
recognize political gains by the symbolic counting of ‘black faces
in high places' or in political offices."
What is worse in these days
is that our present mainstream leaders will not even go so far as to
present a "Black Agenda" or a "Black Platform" to
the Democratic or Republican parties. There is not one mainstream black
insider willing to demand one. That shows us how superficial the black
connection is with the Democrats. For they know, that Negroes are so
pleased to have the right to vote that they will vote for the Democrats,
regardless; for obviously the Republicans know that they can win without
the Negro vote and so they do not have to negotiate whatsoever.
Spiro Agnew asked us back
in 1967, who else are you going to vote for if you don't vote for me?
That's the attitude of the Democrats today. Recall what Agnew did when
he became governor of Maryland. In April 1968, after the Baltimore riots,
he told the mainstream black leaders that they were not responsible,
that they had neglected their duty to keep the Negroes in line, that
they had allowed the "militants" to get a foothold within
the communities to cause havoc and damage. He talked to them as if they
were his children or personal slaves. And then he went on to become
Vice-President of the United States.
Aren't we yet tired of these
kinds of political machinations? Don't our people deserve more? Doesn't
America deserve more? We must go beyond "black agendas" and
demand an end to racism and racial oppression in every aspect of American
life. There are indeed secondary and tertiary issues made more prominent
than the primary understated class antagonisms that exist here in America,
with the wealthy becoming more shamelessly wealthy and the poor becoming
more desperately poor. Racism and racial oppression are the major means
by which this obfuscation of class antagonisms continues its three-century
reign in American history and politics. That individuals are bogged
down in their individual agendas to attend to this fact is regrettable.
As long as that remains the
case, the worst will be for all of us - black and white, whatever our
individual agendas may be. Our food will not taste as it should. Our
class comfort will not be quite as comfortable. Our professions will
not be so enjoyable. Our reflections of whatever type will not be as
clear as it might. For each of us will have avoided with great energy
the key issue that has colored our existence in America - racism and
racial oppression, a system that has broadened the social gap between
the Titans of Capital and the common people, with the masses of blacks
remaining at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder.
Our true black leaders must
be willing to take a new path, create a new rhetoric, support more radical
politics-withdraw from mainstream electoral parties, boycott the presidential
elections, etc.-until our liberation is achieved. If that means we must
leave some of our black brothers behind in the Democratic and Republican
parties, then let it be. We will join hands with others - European Americans,
Asian Americans, and Hispanic Americans - to make a new America that
is not dependent on racism and racial oppression as a means of lowering
labor costs, seizing control of land, and concentrating capital as a
means of producing the highest rate of profit.
Rudolph Lewis
is publisher and editor of ChickenBones: A Journal for Literary &
Artistic African-American Themes. He can be contacted at [email protected]This
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