November 2008

My fifteen-year-old son doesn't like to hear of my doubts about President-Elect Barack Obama.  He just wants for once in his young life to feel good about his president and his country.    But had I been among that Grant Park Chicago crowd at Barack Obama’s election-night victory speech when he announced, “If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible…”, courage would have required me to have raised my hand as one of the “doubters.”  But I was not in the crowd that night.  Instead I was home with my partner, our teenaged kids, along with the “he’s-not-my-boyfriend” boyfriend of the elder teen.  We had arrived back in the house just in time, ordering pizza in route, to arrive in front of the TV set as voting sites closed across California. 

Initially, we had tried to find a “crowd” with which to celebrate Obama’s election, but our brief trip to a gathering at an art center in San Francisco ended abruptly.  Upon entering the center, two giant screens displayed the CNN coverage of the elections and our son immediately gravitated to one.  Once the rest of us found our seats, however, the other screen began to display a series of colorful images of unspecified “Third World” peoples performing various ceremonial rituals.  Especially astute in manners of cultural appropriation, my partner, Linda, whispers into my ear impassively, “What does this have to do with the election?” 

Nothing as far as I could tell, but this was a Bay Area artists’ celebration, which implied “partying” could mean anything.  That night it urged the crowd of artists and arts aficionados to join a ritualized circle dance.  Lakota drum at its center, dozens of (mostly white) people joined the circle, bouncing up and down to a quasi- American Indian rhythm, some yelping out in a manner I imagined an untrained ear might consider primal.  And with that, my family and I rose from our seats and left. 

“Consciousness spoils your time,” I always say to my students; but, none of us were having a good time that night, including our kids who by now are used to these sudden conscienced departures from public events.  Even they, certainly old enough to begin to cultivate their own political views, were uncomfortable with the circle dance because as Chicanos they were raised to know what is Indian and what is not.

So, an hour later, we are back home in Oakland performing our own ritual of pizza and watching the election results on the tube.  (Yes, we still have a television with a tube.)  I am not eating pizza, as I am on the second day of a fast in solidarity with the “Fast for the Future” protesters down in La Placita in Los Angeles.  “Good.  More for me,” my son says irreverently, grabbing another slice from the box.  He loves it, just a little, that fifteen-year-old boy rebellion against his mother’s politics.  Then the moment we had been waiting for arrives, the announcement that Obama had secured enough electoral votes to win the election, as the landslide figures come tumbling in.  The kids are ecstatic, although the nineteen-year-old girl shows more reserve in front of the “not-boyfriend,” her feet snuggled under him on the couch.  I get a call from, first, my sister and then my Dad, but it’s my Dad’s words that hit me.  “I haven’t seen anything like this since 1940 and FDR’s landslide.”  This depression-era Democrat hasn’t been this optimistic in sixty-eight years, I think, with a brief reprieve in 1960 with the election of John F. Kennedy.

“Happy days are here again.” 

Hearing Obama’s words in our living room – [If there is anyone out there] “who still questions the power of our democracy”  -- the most “doubt” I visibly express is the side-long glance I give to Linda, who rolls her ever-critical eyes into her forehead as if to say, “I know.”  Somehow neither of us want to bring down the kids’ electoral high, their sudden sense of public membership in mainstream politics of the day.  After all, as family members in our Chicana-lesbian-headed household, they swallow the issues of political marginalization with their daily breakfast.  But in many ways, Linda’s and my doubt responds to the same inequity that made staying at that San Francisco artist celebration impossible – a multiculturalism that is not multicultural in that it is imagined and defined by whites.  The same could be said about the 2008 presidential campaign. 

Throughout Obama’s campaign, the needs of the urban poor, who for the most part are communities of color, were completely erased from the national debate.  To speak of poverty and the working poor in the United States, Obama would have had to face the barbed wired wall of racist inhumane immigration policies and the entrenched violence and resultant ever-expanding prison system that has emerged from the government’s full-scale abandonment of the inner-city.  In short, he would have had to bring “race” into the national discussion.  Since much of Obama’s campaign had been directed at reassuring middle class white Americans that although he may look Black, he’s really one of them, Obama could not afford to bring these issues directly into the debate and expect to win.

Obama’s “A More Perfect Union Speech,” delivered on March 18 of this year in Philadelphia was the notable exception.  It came in response to the right wing media’s sound-bite portrayal of Obama’s former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright.  Accused of being anti-American and a terrorist sympathizer by association, Obama was required to directly address the subject of “Race in America.” The speech was in many ways a truly noble and compassionate attempt, on Obama’s part, to educate whites about African American’s justified anger and dis-identification with United States government.  His words in many ways proffered to white America a rare opportunity -- to be gently spoon-fed the bitter pill of American racism by an individual who had been reared within the context of middle-class White America, and therefore holds great empathy for it (and, most poignantly, even its prejudices).

At the same time Obama understands what it is to walk the “main streets” of this country marked by the color of his skin.  This, in turn, served to build in Obama a politic as a self-identified Black American, where racism factors integrally into questions of democracy.  Obama’s ability to speak bilingually in this way (the language of both white and black America) is not a product of his bi-raciality per se.  Had his background been the reverse, had he been fathered by an absent white man and raised within the context of an African American working class maternal family, Obama would not have been allowed the same intimate entrance into the white world and could not have emerged versed in the biculturalism needed to respond to a culturally segregated America. 

Obama’s own memoir acknowledges that, without familial role models, he had to learn to be a Black man in America.  His teachers were African American elders, students – men and women alike – as well as a cadre of Black political figures, community organizer mothers, and in their hopelessness, even those young men in the hood hanging out on street corners of Chicago.  His teachers were also found in the Black Church, most notably in the person of Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

The media circus surrounding Wright’s sermons illustrates that white Americans do not want to know how angry people of color are in this country and certainly do not want a President who in anyway relates to -- or worse, shares a politic with -- the raging discontents.  Many of us “discontents” secretly hoped that Obama really did agree with Wright’s position that United States foreign policy served to create the conditions for 9/11; and we excused Obama’s ultimate disavowal of Wright (as we did much of Obama’s politically moderate and conciliatory positions) with the mantra:  He is just trying to get elected first. 

The jubilant response to Obama’s election tells me one thing above all else, how disheartened the citizens of the United States have been; how eight years of the Bush regime has shattered a deep faith that the government of the United States truly represents the middle America’s economic interests.  For it was the shattered economy, as impacted by the unconscionable spending in Iraq, that ultimately tipped the electoral scale in Obama’s favor.  Unfortunately, race  -- that is, a true national reckoning with racial discrimination -- had little to do with it. 

Ironically, this seems to have been the best kept secret among liberal democrat supporters who, throughout the campaign, promoted the idea that Obama’s election as a Black American would mean the guarantee of a whole list of progressive political changes on capitol hill, especially equity for people of color.  Young folks, Latino and Black political organizations, and most of those two million on Obama’s now infamous database jumped on the bandwagon of this hope.

Days before the election, I scan You-Tube for images of the campaign, especially among Latino/a voters.  There are trios of músicos and mariachi groups singing corridos in Obama’s honor (“Obåmanos” la Raza cries!); images of the candidate sporting a ranchero style cowboy hat; sixties-esque black and white Chicago street shots of the Obama during his community organizing days.  In several videos, Obama appears in shirt-sleeves shaking hands with the populace; this image is spliced in with pictures of a serape-cloaked César Chávez at a United Farm Worker gathering, looking gaunt and Gandhi-like after an extended political fast:  all these emotionally evocative images for a candidate who has been virtually mute on the question of immigrant rights. There were dozens of other videos as well – especially those directed at young voters in MTV hip-hop format. Over and over again, the same tape replays – Obama pictured addressing crowds of thousands with Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech reverberating in the background. 

As someone old enough to have actually witnessed the civil rights and farm worker movements, the juxtaposition of the often politically moderate Barack with César and Martin, two figures of proven heroism and political courage, stunned me. The images are meant to suggest that Obama is a man of the people, of the poor, of the disenfranchised -- assertions which remain profoundly untested.  Their vacuity, on one hand, reflects the measure of our desire for political change; on the other, as someone who cut her suspect-the-government teeth on books like George Orwell’s 1984 and The Selling of the President (Nixon), they expose the alarming susceptibility of a generation of people (consumers) accustomed to viewing the computer monitor and television screen as ‘real.’

True confession:  I want to believe, as Obama prompts, that “Yes, we can.”  Or as Dolores Huerta, Vice President of the UFW, who originated the phrase during Chavez’ 1972 fast put it, “Sí se puede.”  Since the election of Obama, I have been keeping a file of emails of all the constituencies that have “hopes” for the President Elect.  They are my Sister, who as a public school teacher and then principal for over thirty years, waits expectantly for Obama to reverse the discriminatory effects of Bush’s “no-child left behind.” They are artists eager to see the censorship inherent in the increasing privatization of the arts turn around into a period of expanded artistic expression through publicly funded support.  They are generations of Cuban Americans and their allies anxiously awaiting the end to the economic embargo against Cuba. They are environmental groups, hoping to reverse the Bush administration’s efforts to dismantle the power of the EPA.  They are California Indian Tribes struggling for federal recognition; as they are the more than one hundred Chicano youth who held a twenty-one day hunger strike in front of the downtown Los Angeles Placita Church to urge Latinos to vote. Their hope?  That the president elect will halt through executive order all Immigrant and Customs Enforcement raids. 

I was heartened in the final weeks before the election to finally see Raza organizing along their own list of “hopes” or better stated “mandates” for their would-be president.  Maybe one of the greatest disappointments to me in the 2008 presidential campaign is how the national dialogue reduced race and racism to a Black and White issue.  The specific concerns of East and West Asian-Americans, Latinos and Indigenous peoples were seldom specifically addressed in campaign speeches.  Instead our communities were relegated to a kind of roll call of generic “others.”  The campaign in many ways laid bare what most non-African American people of color already know, but seldom acknowledge publicly, that when the this country thinks about “race,” it thinks Black and back, but not back far enough because it never gets to what Indian people remember.  The bitter history of Black slavery that shaped what Obama has called that “imperfect” union still haunts the collective psyche of White America.  For better or worse, Black people represent White America’s greatest fear and loathing as well as its greatest hope for moral redemption.  Other people of color as a whole remain invisible or are perceived as of little political consequence, except as the scapegoats for economic and national security anxiety.

How can the national consciousness of a country profess to detest its history of slavery while slave methods continue to exist just beneath the radar of civic awareness?  How else to explain a political leadership and a majority citizenry that allows undocumented indigenous American workers (from México, El Salvador, Guatemala) to be hunted down like dogs in the night, when all they are trying to do is to free themselves from the slavery of U.S.-induced poverty? How is it that ordinary immigrant Muslims are still held in detention camps as never-tried would-be/could-be terrorists? How to account for a genocidal death rate within Native America, where a man of fifty-five is considered an elder within his tribe because statistics predict he’s not likely to see sixty?  How does Anglo America allow a detained and pregnant undocumented worker to wear an electronic ankle bracelet on one leg while her children still cling to the other?  This is the racism that falls between the cracks of the Black and White divide.  This is the crack in the world that runs along the southern border and within broken treatied territories of a very flawed America. 

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Throughout Obama’s campaign I have been thinking long and hard about his theme of the “audacity of hope,” which he used as the title of his second book and drew from one of Reverend Wright’s impassioned sermons.  It is a beautiful phrase, really, suggesting that the conditions of our times are such that it takes great daring to still believe that this country really belongs to its people. 

There is no denying the power of Barack Obama’s oratory both in style and in substance.  In many ways, Obama is the poet that our American author-laureate, Toni Morrison, professes -- a man who understands the art and power of language, eloquently and precisely rendered. Where the Republican Party spoke generically of “Joe Six Pack” and “Joe Plumber,” Obama -- with the support, of course, of skilled speechwriting craftspeople – utilized the one story, the intimate detail, the nuanced single life, as a way to enter the collective heart of millions. 

This is real political genius, as is the story of Ann Nixon Cooper, the 106-year-old African American woman, whom Barack employs as the cornerstone of his victory speech.  If in one life time, a single person can emerge from origins wherein she was denied the vote – as a woman and a negro – to arrive at a moment in history where her vote helps elect the first African American president, her story tells us that hope for change in America can be realized for each and every one of us. 

This is how we are meant to understand her story, that we too will be uplifted by the resurrected moral character of this country.  Through the story of Ann Nixon Cooper, the issue of racism finally re-emerges in Obama’s campaign, but this time we have triumphed over it.  Through the election of Obama, all of us -- Black, White, Asian, Native – are absolved of its past inequities, its unspeakable violences, its requisite rage.  The power of Obama’s rhetorical style, even this mandate of hope, is not original to him, but nonetheless skillfully executed. It emerges from the tradition of the President Elect’s greatest oratory teachers -- the Black Church – the Church of the emancipated American slave --  with just the right touch of 21st century cool. 

Had I been present at Obama’s victory speech, I would have had to raise my hand as “doubter” because the truth is, despite the United States’ rhetoric of democracy, despite a federal house of elected representatives, a “free” public school system, a system of checks and balances, a bill of rights and a constitution inspired by the Iroquois; despite that ever-argument –“ well at least in America you have the right to speak up” – this country is riddled with societal inequities.  It teaches consumer citizenship over social responsibility; espouses the pursuit profit as an American ethos; privileges the lives of U.S. citizens over “foreigners” domestically and abroad; and still operates as if it had time and options about global warming.

I’d raise my hand as a “doubter” because as Fidel made clear in his brief remarks hours before the election of Obama,  “(Obama) supports his system and he will be get support from it.”  And, of course, the system has never represented the needs of the most disenfranchised in this country – the non-citizen, the indigenous, the property-less, the impoverished ill, the ethnic/racial minority, the disabled -- and, as such, it remains a compromised democracy. 

Years ago in the late 1970s and during the brief and minor-scale heyday of women of color feminist movement, my political activism was in many ways inspired by a small group of Boston-based Black women, many of them lesbians, called the Combahee River Collective.  In 1974 they produced a manifesto on Black feminism, one line of which clarified for me the purpose of progressive political activism in this country.  It read, “If Black women were free it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.

This idea that the litmus test for democracy is not measured by the rich, nor the so-called majority middleclass (which Obama’s campaign suggested) but by the condition of the disempowered poor (especially women and children of color), has carried me ideologically through the last thirty years of political activism.  All along I (we) have witnessed the passage of anti-affirmative action and English only measures, legislation against reproductive rights for women, the increased criminalization and dehumanization of undocumented immigrants and militarization of the border, the virtual disappearance of a whole generation of young men of color to gang warfare and the prison industry, and the illegal invasion and occupation of a foreign sovereign nation resulting in more than 4,000 U.S. military deaths and over 90,000 documented civilian deaths.  The list goes on.  Still, as the slogan for my NBA home team, The Golden State Warriors, espoused when as underdogs they managed to make their way into the 2008 playoffs, “We Believe.”   But a life of political engagement is not a basketball game nor is the presidency about rock stars; it is about political practice.

“Juan Crow” is what journalist, Roberto Lovato, has called the current Latino experience of the same segregationist policies exhibited during Jim Crowe.  What brought an end to Jim Crowe in the South?  Protest.  As protest also brought an end to the Vietnam War, the resignation of a United States president (Nixon), and the formation of the United Farm Workers Union and ethnic studies programs throughout the country.  More youth turned out to vote in this election than they had since 1968.  But in 1968, that youth vote required an end to the war and a government responsive to growing demands of communities of color.  This was the period of the Black Panthers and the American Indian and Chicano Movements.  In 1968, Democrats lost that election to Richard Nixon, upon the assassination of their lead candidate, Robert F. Kennedy.  Two months earlier Martin Luther King had also been assassinated. MLK’s death sentence was written the moment he connected the civil rights struggle to the Anti-war movement, and specifically to the corporate profit being gained through the Vietnam War.

So, if you ever wonder what the price of radicalism is in a Corporate “Democracy,” it is death; the death of our most fierce and courageous leaders.   In that respect, maybe Obama is wise to have played it safe thus far in his election.  But we all know he is not safe.  His visibility as a president that can singularly inspire and perhaps enact social and economic changes that threaten Corporate America’s pocketbook puts his life in danger.  That combined with a fundamental racism that still pervades the institutional structures and private mind-sets of many a red state creates a lethal prescription for sanctioned assassination. There is no question about the courage required of Obama to step into such a vulnerable site of international exposure.

Possibly the knowledge of such fragility – that a single life is just that, one life that can easily be extinguished – brought an air of soberness to Obama’s victory speech.  There was a profound sense of the deep burden he was about to assume as president of the United States.  There was little elation on his part, as he stood before thousands with what appeared to be real humility in the face of the awesomeness of the task before him.  Long gone was the cowboy old boy bravado which we had become accustomed to seeing by his predecessor.  All this gave me some measure of confidence in Obama and indeed, hope.  But mostly what gave me hope was that the President Elect gave the “victory” back to us, reverberating what he had said at the Democratic Convention; that his election was not about himself, but about us.  His effectiveness as a President ultimately depends not just on the electorate but the people of the United States  -- all of us who make our lives here within these borders -- what we require of our leadership and of ourselves in the effort to change the very meaning of American “citizenship.”  One life can be easily extinguished, but a movement of many cannot.

As a teary-eyed Jessie Jackson stated after Obama’s victory speech, his election was not a singular feat, but the result of the enduring and courageous efforts of those who had come before.  He mentioned Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King. To that list of courageous predecessors I would add Jackson’s own name, along with Shirley Chisholm and, of course, (the unmentionable during Obama’s campaign) Malcolm X.  “Because they broke down walls,” Jessie Jackson adds,  “Obama is able to build bridges.”

It is the tenacity of shared hope that prevails.  This is what can make a grown man cry: an insistent faith held by full generations of people who preceded Obama and who today, in small numbers, continue to demonstrate the courage of protest.  This is my hope that amid this symbolic act of change -- which is all we can really say for sure about the election of Barack Obama -- those numbers are, at last, growing; for hope is tenacious and contagious; and cynicism, ultimately useless to our children and those who follow them.

A few days after the election, my fifteen-year old son approached me with a question: "Do you still have that book about Obama?"  I had read and recommended “Dreams of My Father” to him several months earlier.  My son, brown-skinned and middleclass, living a short but complex distance from his hometown barrio, may very well suffer some of the same questions about racial identity that the young Barack experienced.  I thought the book might be good for him.  At the time, Rafa had politely declined my offer, always preferring a basketball to anything remotely resembling a book.  Months later, he stands at my office door requesting to read the man's words.

Cynicism aside, the gesture gave me hope; that my son -- and by extension a new generation of youth of color --  may be interested in finding a language of self-reflection for their own rocky road in a 21st century America.  "Post-Race" we are not.

"We'll see what he does once in office," I say with predictable critical caution, as I hand him the worn-edged paper edition.  "You're so radical," he responds.  Still, I swear I detect a hint of familial pride in his smile as walks out the door towards his future.