I have never bought into the delusional conceit about there being black issues that should never be aired in “public”. This is why I took exception to fellow blacks who criticized director Spike Lee for exposing the intra-racial prejudices between light-skinned and dark-skinned blacks in his film School Daze, and writer Lawrence Otis Graham for chronicling the shameful legacy of light-skinned blacks passing as whites in his book Our Kind of People.
These same self-appointed guardians of our “dark” secrets lamented the airing of a fuss that began among black academics and political pundits when Barack Obama declared his candidacy for president of the United States. The issue then was whether Obama was “black enough”.
Never mind that those insisting that he was not were only proffering this self-abnegating nonsense because they had a vested interest in Hillary Clinton’s candidacy that dated back to her husband’s presidency. Indeed, nothing demonstrated how politically expedient this racial declaration was quite like the swift and unsentimental way virtually all of these blacks (who had pledged to deliver “the black vote” to Hillary) switched their allegiance to Obama once he became the Democratic nominee.
But now a variant strain of this fuss about Obama’s blackness has reared its ugly head. And it’s more than a little ironic that the person most responsible for spreading it is Professor Cornel West. After all, he distinguished himself by being an early, ardent and active Obama supporter at a time when, as indicated above, most in the black establishment were supporting Hillary as if the future of the black race depended on it.
In the interest of full disclosure I should note here that I too was a very early Obama supporter, having jumped on his bandwagon in October 2006 – long before most in the black establishment even knew his name. However, I should also hasten to disclose that I share the professor’s progressive political leanings, which puts us both far to the left of Obama on the ideological spectrum.
That said, I disagree with the professor’s criticism of Obama’s political agenda. And I take profound exception to the way he’s infusing this criticism with psychobabble about the president’s race consciousness.
His criticism stems from what he considers to be the president’s failure to address the concerns of poor and working people. Specifically, that:
Love and trust and justice, concern for the poor, that’s being pushed to the margins and you can see it… You can see it in terms of the obsession on Wall Street with not just profits but greed, more profit, more profit.
(NPR, August 2, 2010)
This, of course, is easy for the professor to proffer from the ivory tower he inhabits at Princeton University; not least because, unlike the president, he has no constitutional responsibility to ensure that his words and policies promote the general welfare of all Americans. Not to mention that the surest way for Obama to have doomed his presidency from day one would have been for him to focus on the concerns of poor and working people instead of doing all he could to rescue the U.S. economy from the brink of a second great depression.
More to the point, though, nobody in his right mind doubts that Obama did the right thing in this regard by bailing out not just New York banks to preserve the profits of rich folks, but also Detroit car companies to save the jobs of the very poor and working people whose concerns the professor purports to champion.
Beyond this, there’s the passage of Obama’s American Recovery and Reinvestment Act 2009 (aka the stimulus package) and Affordable Care Act 2009 (aka historic healthcare reform), both of which were designed to help poor and working people (especially black folks) more than anybody else in America. And let us not forget that it was this president who finally settled a $1.15 billion discrimination suit that black farmers filed against the U.S. government over a decade ago (in 1997) and an even earlier $3.4 billion trust mismanagement suit that Native Americans filed (in 1996).
I could cite more initiatives to refute the professor’s criticism, but that would amount to beating a dead horse. I just hope this partial citation suffices to counter suggestions by his defenders that blacks like me are disagreeing with the professor simply because we believe Obama can do no wrong; i.e., that we naively consider the fact that he is the first black president of the United States accomplishment enough and regard any criticism of him as an act of racial betrayal.
Crazy, I know. But this is what no less a person than talk show host Tavis Smiley, the professor’s intellectual protégé and most devoted defender, is insinuating. Of course, regular readers will find this insinuation ironic, if not laughable, in my case because many of them have spent the past two years sending me exasperated emails asking why I was “constantly criticizing our president”. (I’ve been unsparing, for example, in criticizing his decision to send more kids to die in that unwinnable war in Afghanistan.)
But instead of ascribing this provincial racial motive to those of us who disagree with the professor, perhaps Tavis can explain what motivated him to mark Obama’s inauguration by publishing a political guidebook entitled Accountable that he claims will “hold President Obama’s feet to the fire”. For one could just as easily ascribe to him a provincial racial motive for holding this first black president to a standard that it clearly never occurred to him to hold any of the previous (white) presidents to. But I digress….
Instead, here is the wholly dispositive way Obama himself refuted the professor’s criticism long ago:
The most important thing I can do for the African-American community is the same thing I can do for the American community, period, and that is get the economy going again and get people hiring again. I think it is a mistake to start thinking in terms of particular ethnic segments of the United States rather than to think that we are all in this together and we are all going to get out of this together.
(USA Today, December 3, 2009)
With that I hereby urge the professor to get off this misguided crusade and join the rest of us progressives who are keeping our eyes on the prize. Specifically, we are doing all we can to support Obama now because we realize that a generally successful first term will enable him to be re-elected to a second term, during which he will be free to govern more like a progressive without pragmatic political considerations limiting his actions.
Now, from the sublime to the ridiculous: and be warned that what follows might amount to little more than a rambling attempt to find some socially redeeming explanation for the professor’s psychobabble about the president’s race consciousness.
All the same, I can assert quite categorically that whatever legitimacy his criticism about the president’s political agenda might have is completely undermined by this:
[Obama is] a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats… I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men… It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin…
He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want….
(truthdig.com, May 16, 2011)
I wish I could begin by expressing shock and dismay that a black person of the professor’s stature and influence would speak – on the record no less – so irresponsibly, disrespectfully, and ignorantly about any other black person, let alone one who is the president of the United States. But after reading about the way Harvard Professor Skip Gates went all gangsta on that Boston cop (remember that spectacle – complete with a White House beer summit?!), my expectation of what is becoming of someone like the professor was lowered considerably.
But, truth be told, this psychobabble reflects nothing more than the black-on-black racism that has beset black consciousness in America since the days of slavery. Hell, the professor might as well had come right out and called Obama an “Uncle Tom“. It also reflects the insidious strain of anti-Semitism that has caused far too many blacks to make enemies of Jews who, in fact, have always been some of our most empathetic and enabling political allies.
But I’m heartened that a number of black academics and political pundits are taking the professor to task for sounding even more racist than a Donald-Trump birther or Tea-Party nutter on this score. Most notable is Professor Melissa Harris-Perry, one of his colleagues at Princeton, who was quoted saying that this racial attack on Obama was:
…utter hilarity coming from Cornel West who has spent the bulk of his adulthood living in those deeply-rooted, culturally rich, historically important black communities of Cambridge, MA and Princeton, NJ… Harvard and Princeton are not places that are particularly noted for their liberating history for black men.
(USA Today, May 19, 2011)
Far more telling, however, is how the professor’s own words betray his antic and wannabe-gangsta disposition towards the president. For here is the account he gave of what some are suggesting was the precipitating incident, which occurred when Obama seized an opportunity last year to correct the professor’s narrow-minded and myopic criticism of his political agenda:
Well, I’ll tell you, I had not talked to my dear brother since the Martin Luther King gathering in South Carolina, and very briefly Super Tuesday. But he did come and make a beeline to me after his speech … and he was deeply upset. He talked to me like I was a Cub Scout, and he was a pack master, you know what I mean?
I said, well, my mother and father raised me right. I respect my dear brother, but I don’t like to be demeaned and humiliated in that way, and I didn’t get a chance to respond to him. And I hope maybe at some time we can. But it was very, it was a very ugly kind of moment, it seems to me, and that disturbs me because then it raises the question for me: Does he have a double standard for black critics as opposed to white critics?
(NewsOne for Black America, August 3, 2010)
In other words, the professor’s personal feelings were hurt because the president showed that he was not impressed by his criticism, not intimidated by his intellect, and not flattered by his support.
But this seems too petty a slight to cause even this peacock of a professor to turn on Obama; especially since he could soothe his bruised ego with the mollifying fact that he’s just one of many self-important critics who Obama has left seething with indignation after their encounters with him.
In fact, it is instructive that none other than Reverend Jesse Jackson was caught on camera venting similar psychobabble about Obama’s race consciousness after Obama dressed him down. Here is how I put his hissy fit into context back then:
I am stupefied by all of the psychoanalysis media outlets are devoting to the fact that Reverend Jesse Jackson’s was “caught on tape” saying the following about presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Senator Barack Obama:
‘See, Barack been, um, talking down to black people on this faith based … telling niggers how to behave … I wanna cut his nuts off.’
Frankly, I am neither surprised by the fratricidal rage inherent in what he said nor by the vulgar way in which he said it. After all, in a December 11, 2007 article entitled Bill Clinton has had more black women than Barack Obama…so what?!, I was moved to pose the following rhetorical question:
‘What’s behind this open conspiracy [among old-fashioned black leaders like Jackson and Andrew Young] to commit racial fratricide against Obama?’
The question was rhetorical, of course, because the answer was (is) so obvious: old-fashioned jealousy.
(Jesse is to Barack’s campaign … a saboteur, The iPINIONS Journal, July 11, 2008)
Finally, reports are that the professor is merely executing a vendetta because he did not get the VIP tickets to the president’s inauguration to which he believes he was entitled.
In fact I heard him admit just last week, during a painfully self-indulgent and enabling interview with his boy Tavis, that after attending as many as 65 campaign events as a VIP surrogate for candidate Obama, he felt truly dissed by this oversight. And, knowing the way this Washington game is played, I am constrained to concede that he had (and I repeat, had) just cause to be upset.
But that was over two years ago. More to the point, the professor must realize that holding a grudge against the president for this oversight is not only unfair, but inherently self-immolating.
In a similar vein, I cannot take seriously reports that all of this is just the professor’s way of expressing solidarity with the resentment Tavis feels because, when Obama was a candidate, he refused to attend Tavis’s annual symposium on the State of the Black Union.
For as much as he may love and admire Tavis, I think this is all about the professor’s own feelings. Not least because he was supporting Obama at the very time when Tavis was the pied piper of establishment blacks who were doing all they could to rally black support for Hillary.
Nevertheless, because I can think of no political, cultural or racial explanation, I have to conclude that the professor’s criticism of Obama’s political agenda, as well as his psychobabble about the president’s race consciousness, stems from a confluence of personal slights. What is certain, however, is that the way he’s dealing with this is doing more to betray the professor’s presumed intelligence than it’s doing to undermine Obama’s presidency.
Related commentaries:
Jesse is to Barack’s campaign…
Record of Hillary and Bill on black civil rights