======================================================================
Rule #1: YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
======================================================================
(A pretty decent article by an Obama supporter in 2008.)
http://www.thenation.com/article/160782/paradox-hope-obamas-presidency-breaks-racial-barrier-most-black-americans-are-worse
The Paradox of Hope: Obama's Presidency Breaks Racial Barrier, But
Most Black Americans Are Worse Off
Gary Younge | May 18, 2011
When Barack Obama was pondering a run for the presidency Michelle
asked him what he thought he could accomplish. He replied,“The day
I take the oath of office, the world will look at us differently.
And millions of kids across this country will look at themselves
differently. That alone is something.” His victory was indeed
something. The world certainly looked at America differently,
though this had as much to do with who he wasn’t—George W. Bush—as
what he was, black, among other things.
Polls show that African-Americans indeed look at themselves
differently. A January 2010 Pew survey revealed huge optimism. The
percentage of black Americans who thought blacks were better off
than they were five years before had almost doubled since 2007.
There were also significant increases in the percentages who
believed the standard-of-living gap between whites and blacks was
decreasing.
But for all the ways black America has felt better about itself
and looked better to others, it has not actually fared better. In
fact, it has been doing worse. The economic gap between black and
white has grown since Obama took power. Under his tenure black
unemployment, poverty and foreclosures are at their highest levels
for at least a decade.
Millions of black kids may well aspire to the presidency now that
a black man is in the White House. But such a trajectory is less
likely for them now than it was under Bush. Herein lies what is at
best a paradox and at worst a contradiction within Obama’s core
base of support. The very group most likely to support him—black
Americans—is the same group that is doing worse under him.
This condition was best exemplified by Velma Hart, the black chief
financial officer for a Maryland veterans organization, who backed
Obama in 2008. She told Obama at a town hall meeting in September,
“I’m exhausted of defending you…. My husband and I have joked for
years that we thought we were well beyond the hot-dogs-and-beans
era of our lives. But, quite frankly, it is starting to knock on
our door and ring true that that might be where we are headed
again.” In November Velma Hart was laid off.
If it were white Americans who remained this loyal to a Republican
president under whom they were doing this badly, the left would be
claiming false consciousness. If a Republican president were
behind statistics like these, few liberals would be offering that
president the benefit of the doubt.
So, how do we explain this apparent inconsistency? There would
appear to be three main reasons. The first is white people. Not
all of them. But enough. Half of white Americans in a Pew survey
shared the birthers’ doubt that Obama was born in this country.
After the president produced his long-form birth certificate,
Donald Trump demanded his college transcripts (claiming he was not
smart enough to get into the Ivy League), and Newt Gingrich
branded him the “food stamp president.” In the face of such
brazenly racist attacks, defending Obama’s right to the office
becomes easily blurred with defending his record.
Second, the post–civil rights era concept of corporate diversity,
which many black people have embraced, is central to his
symbolism. Racial advancement is increasingly understood not as a
process of social change but of individual promotion—the elevation
of black faces to high places. Instead of equal opportunities, we
have photo opportunities. “We have more black people in more
visible and powerful positions,” Angela Davis told me before
Obama’s nomination. “But then we have far more black people who
have been pushed down to the bottom of the ladder….There’s a model
of diversity as the difference that makes no difference, the
change that brings about no change.”
Third and perhaps most important, the discrepancy reflects a
mixture of realism and low expectations. That black Americans are
doing worse than everyone else, and that the man they elected to
turn that around has not done so, does not fundamentally change
their view of how American politics works; almost every other
Democratic president has failed in a similar way. Conversely the
fact that a black man might be elected president, that enough
white people might vote for him, that nobody has shot him, really
has changed their assumptions.
In the black commentariat, opinion is divided over whether
African-Americans should demand a more overt commitment to racial
justice from a black president or refrain from doing so because it
would weaken his appeal to others. The Rev. Al Sharpton insists
that calling on Obama to be a “black exponent of black views” is
“just stupid,” since it will embolden conservative attacks on
projects black people need. Princeton professor Cornel West
insists that Obama has “a certain fear of free black men” and
“feels most comfortable with upper-middle-class white and Jewish men.”
By concentrating so heavily on race, both sides detract from his
responsibilities. Obama should do more for black people—not
because he is black but because black people are the citizens
suffering most. Black people have every right to make demands on
Obama—not because he’s black but because they gave him a greater
percentage of their votes than any other group, and he owes his
presidency to them. Like any president, he should be constantly
pressured to put the issue of racial injustice front and center.
The day he took office, the world may have looked at black America
differently, but black America has taken some time to look at
Obama differently. When he went from being an aspiration to a fact
of political life, the posters that bore his likeness in socialist
realist style over single-word commands like Hope, Believe and
Change should have been replaced with posters bearing the
single-word statement: Power. As Frederick Douglass said: “Power
concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
________________________________________________
Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu
Set your options at:
http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com