Your Black World: President Elect Obama – America’s Struggle in Context

President Elect Obama – America’s Struggle in Context

By: Dr. Wilmer J. Leon III

With the election of Illinois Sen. Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States, Americans have taken a giant leap forward. It has taken this country 219 years to elect its first African-American president (George Washington was elected in 1789). It is imperative that this historic moment always be viewed within its proper historic context.

Since the United States of America was established with the signing of the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, America has been a country in conflict. Americans have struggled to live up to the fundamental precepts upon which America was founded.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

People of color have struggled for their self-evident equality and unalienable rights since the first "20 & Odd" Blacks arrived on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, in August of 1619. Those individuals were traded and/or sold into servitude for food and other supplies.

As I think about President-elect Obama and this historic event, my thoughts go to Mt. Vernon, Virginia, the home of the first president of the United States of America, George Washington. I wonder what it must have been like to live at Mt. Vernon in the 18th century. Not in Mt. Vernon as George or Martha, but at Mt. Vernon as one of their slaves. I don't think about the owner of Mt. Vernon; I think about the owned.

While the Washingtons lived there, they extracted from those enslaved people, those human beings, every ounce of effort and energy that they could. This allowed the Washingtons and those who looked like them to eat a little more, stay a little warmer, and enjoy themselves just a little bit more. Can the tortured souls of those slaves now rest a little easier with the success of a President-elect Obama?

As I think about President-elect Obama and this historic event, my thoughts go to the Constitution of this country and three specific provisions. First, Article 1, Section 2, which reads:

"Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."

This was better known as the Three-Fifths Compromise and was the law of the land until it was removed by the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868.

Second, Article 1, Section 9, which reads:

"The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person."

This provision was included in the Constitution as a compromise to the slave-holding states. The logic being, after 21 years the slave population would be sustainable by natural birth rates and the importation of slaves would no longer be necessary.

Third, Article 4, Section 2, which reads:

"No Person held to Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such Service or Labour, But shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such Service or Labour may be due."

This was better known as the Fugitive Slave Clause and was the law of the land until it was removed by the ratification of the 13th Amendment in 1865.

These constitutional provisions come to mind since they were the legal and conceptual foundations of the oppression that Africans in America, and later African-Americans, have been subjected to since the founding of this nation.

As I think about President-elect Obama's defeat of Senator John McCain and bask in the comfort of this historic event, I must also fear its backlash. History tells us that white supremacy dies hard in America and its proponents will not take America's victory lying down.

I think back to 1908 and Jack Johnson's defeat of Tommy Burns to become the first African-American boxing heavyweight champion of the world. This led to the search for the "Great White Hope," James Jackson Jefferies. Before Johnson fought Jefferies on July 4, 1910, the crowd chanted, "Kill the nigger." Johnson's defeat of Jefferies ignited numerous incidents of white violence against African-Americans. It set off some of the worst racial violence in American history.

As I think about President-elect Obama's victory in these depressed economic times, I reflect upon the Red Summer of 1919. There were 26 separate riots in communities and cities across the United States where African-Americans were the victims of physical attacks. The riots were sparked by postwar tensions of racism, unemployment, inflation and violence by radical political groups. I think about the Tulsa, Oklahoma, Race Riot of 1921; the burning of the Rosewood, Florida, community in 1923 and so much of the racial violence that was unleashed upon African-Americans from 1917 to 1923. America finds itself today in similar circumstances with wars on two fronts, historic housing foreclosures and record job loss.

As I think about President-elect Obama and this historic event, I remember Dr. King, Medgar Evers, President Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Malcolm X. I reflect upon Emmett Till, Goodman, Schwerner, Chaney; and Carol Robertson, Cynthia Wesler, Addie Mae Collins and Denise McNair, the four little girls who were killed September 15, 1963, when the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. All martyrs, who gave their lives as America struggled to live up to the fundamental precepts upon which America was founded. All martyrs, who gave their lives as America struggled to finally elect its first African-American president.

As America celebrates a crowning achievement, the election of its first African-American president in 219 years, it is important to recognize that this did not take place in a vacuum. History is very important. It is a branch of knowledge that records and explains past events. We can not lose site of the history as we celebrate this historic event.

On August 10, 2008, The New York Times published an article by Matt Bai entitled "Is Obama the End of Black Politics?" What a ridiculous question. The popular vote was almost too close to call. In spite of all of the success that America has made in the context of race, Senator Obama ran a deracialized campaign for a reason. There are still miles to go before we sleep.

Dr. Wilmer Leon is the Producer/ Host of the nationally broadcast call-in talk radio program “On With Leon,” a regular guest on CNN’s Lou Dobb’s Tonight, and a Teaching Associate in the Department of Political Science at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Go to www.wilmerleon.com or email: wjl3us@yahoo.com.

© 2008 InfoWave Communications, LLC.

Your Black World: The Illusion of Post-Racial America

The Illusion of Post-Racial America

By: Aman Gill

An Obama Victory Would be a Milestone, but Could Stall Struggles Against Racism

Forty-one years ago, racial tensions — festering since slave times — burst into the Long Hot Summer in the tristate area. Thirty-four died in Newark, but the most dramatic upheaval came from Plainfield, N.J., a quiet suburb 30 miles from New York City. Amid minor but widespread skirmishes spreading across the region, a lone police officer beat and shot a black youth in the boy’s neighborhood. The boy survived, but the cop, quickly surrounded by enraged community members, did not make it out of the neighborhood alive.

Ashanti Alston, a political prisoner activist with the Jericho Movement and former Black Panther who was a teenager in Plainfield at the time, traced the escalating plot for The Indypendent. “The thing about Plainfield that stood out from all the other rebellions was that folks made their way to a gun manufacturing place right outside of the city,” Alston says. “They came back to the community with rifles and it was a whole different ball game. It wasn’t until the National Guard came that they were able to retake the black community.”

Today, decades later, why does racial conflict no longer generate the same kind of heat? Not for lack of ignition. In Queens in November 2006, an undercover vice operation turned into an execution. A 50- shot cop fusillade killed Sean Bell, a young black man heading home on his final night as an unmarried man, and injured two of his friends, all unarmed. The murder won state sanction in April 2008, when a New York State Supreme Court judge accepted at face value the officers’ contention that they feared for their lives, making their killing fully legal.

The verdict generated both outrage and despair. Hundreds of people marched that afternoon and “Justice for Sean Bell” signs sprang up throughout the boroughs. But an Al Sharpton-led civil disobedience action in June that might have been the first in a line of battles instead turned out to be the denouement. Things died down.

It’s increasingly popular to argue that the fuel for unrest has disappeared because the problem of racism has receded into America’s past. This idea has long held sway on the right, but, paradoxically, it’s taken Barack Obama’s candidacy to elevate this persistent right-wing myth into conventional wisdom.

CIVIL RIGHTS UNFULFILLED
“The history he [Obama] needs to know is the history he rejects,” says Lenore Daniels, editorial board member of the Black Commentator, a weekly online magazine. “He rejects the whole Black Power movement: ‘Just the civil rights were fine, we’ll leave it at that, there was progress.’ [But] the Black Power movement is still relevant. That was a movement talking about economic equality, where King left off.”

Histories of struggles are written by the victors. The movements of 40 years ago had winners and losers and, like any war, are remembered more ideologically than objectively. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended Jim Crow and for the first time in U.S. history granted black people formal equality before the law, but failed to transform their lives day-to-day. After 1965, all wings of the movement turned to address this gap: King turned from law and morality to economics; Malcolm X’s militancy spread despite his assassination, Black Power was born, and the movement moved north.

Obama’s view of a united, post-racial America is in the tradition of how the political establishment — Democrat and Republican — responded to heightened militancy. There was forceful repression, but also a more subtle, ideological response. The language of Jim Crow segregationism gave way to political correctness and new coded terms like “war on drugs.” Those who were never allies of the oppressed lauded King and proclaimed the end of discrimination. And black elites, once viewed with suspicion, were welcomed to the table as long as they left their baggage behind. It was unsparing market capitalism for the rest of the community.

The result, as Columbia University historian Manning Marable puts it, is that “Jim Crow no longer existed, but in its place stood a far more formidable system of racial domination, rooted within the political economy and employing a language of fairness and equality.” Racism in America may not look like all-white police forces, dogs on black men or sound like speeches by white supremacist politicians. It’s more like a termite- infested house — political correctness and black representation in business, media and politics compose a nice-looking picture on the outside. But gashes in the façade expose structural disparities as racially aligned as ever. Statistical measures on rates of poverty, housing, employment and income are not far removed from their 1960s levels.

BLACK AND WHITE
At times, Obama sounds more like Richard Nixon than someone concerned with racism. At the 1968 Republican National Convention Nixon proclaimed, “To those who say law and order is the code word for racism, here is a reply: Our goal is justice for every American.” Obama’s response to the persecution of the Jena 6 nearly 40 years later sounded a similar note: “Outrage over an injustice like the Jena 6 isn’t a matter of black and white. It’s a matter of right and wrong.”

Obama did not dwell on the marks of racism, so clear to many of us, in the demography of disaster left by Hurricane Katrina. “I do not subscribe to the notion that the painfully slow response of FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security was racially based,” he said. “The ineptitude was color-blind.” And Obama did not object to the Sean Bell ruling, saying, “The judge has made his ruling, and we’re a nation of laws, so we respect the verdict that came down.”

Obama’s candidacy is seen as an indication that racial barriers no longer exist in the United States. Indeed, the election of a black president would be an undeniable milestone in American history, forcing many white Americans to confront latent fears and distrust of black people. And many see progress in the fact that a black man can run a campaign in which race is incidental. Yet it’s taken Obama’s embrace of post-racialism, and concurrent distancing from traditional civil rights-style black leadership, to lend viability to his campaign. Some activists see him as the culmination of a trend over the last 40 years of black leaders moving away from the communities they’ve traditionally served and closer to the political and corporate power that dominates the Democratic Party.

MOVEMENT POLITICS VS. ELECTORAL POLITICS
Alston feels that since the 1970s, the face of mainstream black activism has moved from a base in communities to big money and corporate sway. “No longer do you have the real radical movement folks that were coming out of grassroots movements,” Alston says. “You have people tied to money, or tied to established political power. What I look at today is that the Sharptons, the Barack Obamas, the Jesse Jacksons and even a lot of these mega-preachers now are not leaders from the grassroots. They’re system leaders that were chosen by either political forces or corporate forces.”

After attending Columbia University, Obama put in three years as a community organizer working on a range of neighborhood issues in the largely black Southside of Chicago. But his trajectory afterward — Harvard Law School and a stint as a law professor at the University of Chicago — looks more like the record of black politicians rising up in municipal politics in the 1980s and 1990s than the résumé of earlier leaders like King, Stokely Carmichael or Angela Davis. As he entered politics, he increasingly relied on allies culled from the Chicago elite — after the 2000 Census, he had his state senate district redrawn to make it, according to Ryan Lizza of The New Yorker, “wealthier, white, more Jewish, less-blue collar and better educated.” The connections he cultivated with his new well-to-do constituents were vital to his successful 2004 campaign for a U.S. Senate seat.

As Democratic dominance of national-level black politics accelerated, communities’ sense of action eroded into the passive live-with-your-fate mode that presently defines U.S. democracy. “When we go back to the 1950s and 1960s,” Alston says, “that was the period when people were not relying on the Democratic Party, the party that black folks are so tied to [today]. People were in the streets, people voted through their civil disobedience and direct action and organizing.”

The key question is whether much of the agenda in the fight against racial inequality remains unfulfilled. If so, there’s plenty to drive modern-day movements, taking outrages like the Sean Bell verdict to illuminate the living economic inequality untouched by 1960s activism. If not, then what happened to Sean Bell is just an aberration that could have happened to anyone, of any class and any race, in a country that has finally fulfilled its egalitarian ideals. That may be an America to hope for, but it’s not the one we have today.

Originally Appeared In The Indypendent