From Eduardo Bonilla-Silva: We Are Still The (Dis)United States of America

Eduardo posted this piece on ABSdiscourse. With his permission I post it here.
RGN

We Are Still The (Dis)United States of America: Why an Obama’s Presidency may not do as much for the cause of racial justice in America as we think?

We have all heard Obama’s speeches and seen the spell-bound crowds. We have heard them cheer, “Obama, Obama, Obama” and “Yes we can. Yes we can. Yes we can.” We have all felt inspired, proud, and a few, like MSNBC commentator Chris Mathews, have even felt a “thrill going up (their) leg.” And we all have heard conservative, moderate, and liberal pundits alike state how much they like Obama, how much they love his message of hope, and how much they respect his post-race approach to politics.

Moreover, the consensus among observers seems to be that if Obama becomes the next President of the United Sates, this will be a watershed moment in our history that will symbolize that our country- -a country with an atrocious racial history--has finally gotten over its racial hump.

Unfortunately, the so-called movement behind Obama’s candidacy, the policies Obama advocates, and the pronouncements on race Obama has issued so far may not produce the change we all want and that his campaign has taken as a slogan. The Obama phenomenon, I argue, reflect a number of things that are not as clean and pure as many of us believe.

First, Obama is not leading a true social movement, that is, Obama is not part of a group of people mobilized around a set of policies, concerns, or a program. Obama is being propelled by something that has been on the air for a while: the dissatisfaction of Americans with “politics as usual” and with the two-party system. And although this dissatisfaction is quite healthy, throwing ourselves behind a charismatic leader who talks about the promised land may not the solution to our concerns. And, to be clear, neither is the idea of following Clinton’s appeal to “experience” as her experience has been as a traditional politician doing traditional politics.

What we need today more than ever is a grassroots movement for social, racial, and gender justice with leaders (the plural is important) that will help us advance the politics necessary to effect real institutional change. Social movements are not backed by big money and almost all the people in this race are. Readers should check the data of the Center for Responsive Politics which shows that both Clinton and Obama are being funded big time by Goldman Sachs (413K for Clinton and 421 for Obama), Lehman Brothers (241 for Clinton and 250 for Obama), and the like. This is disturbing, but we must not be blind and must ask our leaders to explain to us what does this mean.

Second, none of the policies Obama (or Clinton) offers on the crucial issues of our time is truly radical and likely to accomplish the slogan he has adopted as the core of his campaign: change. For instance, his health care plan (as well as that of Clinton) is nothing more than a reorganization of the failed market-based approaches to health care. He, as well as Clinton, has balked at what America needs: a single- payer system of national health insurance. And we need this because, among other things, about 25% of every dollar we spent on medical care goes to the private insurance industry. The overhead of Medicare, in contrast, is about 3%. We indeed need universal health care (as Clinton has argued), but the universal care cannot be attained in a way that keeps HMOs fat cats fat, period.

Third, Obama has reached the level of success he has in large part because he has made a strategic move towards racelessness; towards a soft approach to race matters. For example, Obama invokes his rags to riches story and how his story could only happen in America in almost all his speeches (and the crowd goes wild when he says this nonsense).

Furthermore, Obama stated in a speech in Selma, Alabama, that the Moses generation (the Civil Rights generation) took us “90% of the way there” and that the job for his Joshua generation (in truth, he seems to suggest he is Joshua-like) is to finish closing the 10% gap to reach racial parity. Is Obama kidding us or what? Who, except for the truly confused and ignorant of the facts, believes we are 90% on the road to equality? The data shows the racial gap in income, education, and wealth between whites and nonwhites is huge and that old- and new-style discrimination is alive and well. Obama needs to get better advisors on race and get his facts straight!

And the most important factor behind the Obama phenomenon is that his campaign seems to mean and evoke different things for his white and non-white supporters. For whites, Obama is the first black leader they feel comfortable supporting because he does not talk about racism, because he is so “articulate” (as Senator Biden and, more recently, Karl Rove, stated), because he is talking about national unity (Obama says in every speech that he does not see a black or a white America, or a liberal or a conservative America, but a UNITED States of America), and because he, unlike black leaders such as Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Maxine Waters, and, of course, Minister Farrakhan, makes them feel safe and not guilty about the state of racial affairs in the country. Thus, for whites, Obama is proof we are beyond race and they support him because he is a leader they believe will be able to deal with the “real” problems afflicting the country.

In sharp contrast, for nonwhites, particularly for blacks, Obama is a symbol of their possibilities; he is indeed their Joshua and the leader they hope will take them to the promised land of milk and honey. They read in between the lines (probably more than is truly there) and think he has a strong stance on what Du Bois called a hundred years ago “the problem of the 20^th century (and now of the 21^st century).” He is, for many in the old generation and for most in the new generation, the new Messiah following on the footsteps of Martin, Malcolm, and the Jesse of the 1980s.

But which Obama is likely to be our President if Obama is indeed elected? Will Obama be the Obama whites see and hope for? Will he push a colorblind agenda that will silence those who suffer from racial inequality and oppression? Or will Obama be the President who delivers those who have endured the whip of American racism for 300 years?

The only way Obama will become “all he can be,” to borrow the phrase from the U.S. Army, is if he is pushed hard by a real people’s movement. That movement must demand that our brother be strong and clear on race, and class, and gender issues. On race issues, for instance, we must pay for the operation he needs to cure him from his acute case of colorblindness. Then he will clearly see that unfortunately we still have a black and a white, a Latino, and an Asian America. We must work even harder to make him and his University of Chicago advisors understand we are not 90% on the road to racial equality. Although thanks to the social movements of yesteryears we have indeed come a long way, we are at best 50% on the road to racial heaven and the victories of the past are, at this very moment, under attack making this a curious moment of racial retreat in America when a black man may become President.

We know many of his advisors are telling Obama, "Avoid talking about race. Say that you want strong enforcement of the Civil Rights and the like. Say that affirmative action by class may be better than by race and that if we do things right, we may be able to end all race- based policy in 25 years (he hinted these things in his interview with George Stephanopoulos). And if you do all these things, you have a chance to be elected and then do what you think is right!" The problem with this is that when one compromises views and positions, it is almost impossible to get back to them later on in a clean way. Furthermore, because Obama does not have a social movement behind him but is riding the tide of a conglomerate of social forces that see and project onto him what they wish, hope, and dream, it is hard to see how he will be able to convince most of his white supporters of the need for strong race-based social policy after he has been telling them for a year that there is no black, white, Latino, or Asian America but a United States of America.

We still live in the(Dis)United States of America and we want (actually, we desperately need) Obama to understand this fact so that we can fight the good fight to make sure our country becomes a truly United States of America in this century. Only if we, those who suffer the ravages of class, gender, and racial oppression in America, force Obama to truly represent our interests, will his election represent a victory for us. But if we—and I focus here on race issues albeit the same applies to other areas—give Obama a blank check (and Dr. King told us way back about checks with "insufficient funds"), we may be digging our own hole by having an America led by a black President but where whites believe we are beyond race while people of color remain as second-class citizens.

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

Professor

Sociology Department

Duke University