Our Man in the Middle: Obama and Race

Boy! That was good! This guy is hitting on all cylinders. Barack Obama is a master mediator: he observes and listens to Party A; he observes and listens to Party B; he then eloquently and passionately sums up the contention in ways that gives credence to stories A and B, and in those crucial moments, while each party savors their own recognition in the recap, the good mediator closes on the goodwill that comes from simple recognition, and shifts the burden of reconciliation to each of the parties, neither of whom want to be held responsible for failure. The problem with mediation, however, is that it is incapable of addressing the inequities of power unless the powerful gives it's full consent. In the zero-sum game, the powerful close like a hungry tiger in the woods hunting antelope on a quiet sunny day.

So it was, the "Perfect Union" speech by Obama. The historical and contemporary Black struggle in this country was superbly recounted and acknowledged in personal terms that even the layperson, Black and White, could understand and appreciate. But in the end, it was the Black community with the burden of just getting over its "bitterness" and "anger", because those sentiments are "distortions" that "denigrate" the "greatness and the goodness of our nation", and are counter productive in American public life, causing division and resentment. If we Black folks hold our truths to be self-evident, well, that's just part of the story that has to be whispered in the barbershops and on the street corners out of range of "polite company".

And so goes Black in America with the ascendancy of Barack Obama. The country listened, acknowledged, and is moving on to its post-Black story: land of the deserving with opportunity for all that are willing to forget, forgive and forsake.

Barack Obama, as the Grand Mediator, is proposing a racial settlement agreement, Black folks get acknowledgment of our historical struggles, and recognition of that legacy's impact on our condition; White society, for its willingness to listen, gets a cease and desist of the criticism of America's racial past, and full allegiance to a White ethnocentric version of the future. That's the best deal Black folks can get, which isn't much different than the deal that A. Phillip Randolph and other pioneers in the struggle against White oppression were able to wrest from America during similarly challenging times of war. Here we are 60 or so years later having the same discussion, coming up with the same compromises: Black acquiescence to a relationship of terminal dependency in exchange for White society's sympathetic ear and enlightened largess.

The problem isn't what we think about each other, or the reference point from which we draw our personal conclusions. The problem is Black dependency in a game that most people acknowledge is designed as zero-sum. Barack Obama's candidacy and this speech, should represent to us an opportunity to get serious about breaking the psyche of dependency that is at the heart of the Black community's non-competitiveness, and the struggle to overcome the economic and social vulnerability that makes it impossible for us to ascribe value to our story.

We cannot allow the Black American Narrative to be criminalize or dismissed. We have absolutely earned the right to tell our story in terms and language that expresses the intensity of the ancestral pain, and the urgency with which we need to move beyond dependency. We will not be bullied into changing the substance, tone or tenor of that story.

Rev. Jeremiah Wright's critique of White America is not new, or shocking in the community of Black people that I have been a part of for 40+ years. His "views", even expressed as wolf-tickets (referred to by Barack as "incendiary"), are a part of our story that would've been considered mild and barely worth commenting on back in the day. The ruling elite, however, sees this as an opportunity. America has exhausted its patience with Black dissatisfaction, ingratitude, and Barack Obama represents a rhetorical and moral truce that allows them to keep all the land, all the water, and rights to the air. They are anxious to say that its over with; Barack Obama, his candidacy and his story, has become the symbolic end of the discussion.

You cannot dismiss Rev. Wright's comments as a "profoundly distorted view of this country," without discounting the entire Black narrative in these United States. Barack is trying to discount our narrative but not repudiate our community. Unfortunately, a "community" without a narrative, isn't a community at all. It is simply a collection of "individuals" from which the powers that be can choose a few through which to manage the aspirations of the many. Not a bad business plan; not new, but it works.

There is nothing insane, or distorted or offensive about a Black man in America being suspicious about the sudden appearance of a deadly HIV/AIDS epidemic that is devastating Black communities disproportionately, given the history of the Tuskegee Experiment, and the pervasive availability of mind-altering drugs to a restive population in near total social revolt during the 1960's of J.Edgar Hoover. Certainly the questioning of America's "special" relationship with Israel and the oppressive legacy of America's relationship with authoritarian Middle Eastern regimes, should not be considered distorted but profoundly democratic, and honest.

America is asking the Black community for another pound of flesh for the candidacy of Barack Obama. In order to get along with White America, we must suppress the supremacy of our own narrative and adopt the supremacy of a White narrative that understandably wants to "elevate what is right with America" over what is wrong. The "views" and opinion of the Black street aren't what "denigrates" the "greatness and goodness" of America. It has been the consistent and concerted actions of an American ruling elite that devised and executed a devastatingly effective plan for racial hierarchy that rested on the inferiority and total subjugation of the Black race. Now, if you're Black, where should that story be anchored in the historical narrative of your community? And how does it inform a rational response that will allows us as a people to move forward?

Are the only things that get considered racially "divisive" the things that speak to the essentials of the Black story? Why isn't it considered to be racially divisive to be in a city where 45% of the population is African American but only five percent of the men that get paid to fight fires are Black. Why isn't it considered racially divisive for the Black community to have an unemployment rate that is almost triple that of White America's? Or racially divisive that a super majority of the good, high paying jobs always seem to be over populated with White folks (with over four million Black people with college degrees, there are only 600,000 or so Black people making $92,000+ per year, and that includes the uneducated sports and entertainment money)?

Well, the truth is that these things are racially divisive. The Black community is being asked to be quiet about those things, and keep a stiff upper lip. Keep a stiff upper lip while solid Black families get downsized out of opportunity, and chased out of the Harlem's of the nation by yuppies financed with White dispensation money (came out of our asses directly). Keep a stiff upper lip and waive goodbye not just to those nostalgic manufacturing jobs, but to the Next jobs of the 21st Century as they get outsourced to a smarter, faster and cheaper version of yourself, while the largely White "market makers" get paid-in-full from schemes against public money too big for any one person to go to jail.

Barack is right, it isn't something you talk about in mixed company; it isn't something you would bring up on your job, in front of people that have your livelihood in the palm of their hands. What divides the races is that Black people are in a state of total dependency, but have to conduct ourselves as if we were somehow engaged in a fair game with equal chances at opportunity. Our views are not "distorted"; the source of the distortion is in the images and realities being transmitted into our psyche, our soul, by a superior competitor that keeps trying to hide behind the sheepish clothing of conciliation, while simultaneously continuing to beat us down in every indice of social mobility and community prosperity. We see the distortion quite clearly.

So there we have it. Right back where we started. A stirring, soul searching and frank discussion about the distortions in all of our lives caused by a system of dominance and devaluation. We are suppose to feel better about one another. We should feel good about the possibilities. We do. Despite all the evidence, Black people do feel optimistic about our ability to survive. And like gladiators thrown into a zero-sum arena not of our own choosing, we see and embrace our story not as the end all and be all, but, as prologue to the future story we are preparing ourselves to tell. In the lion's den, there is no mediator.