Obama's acceptance (and more than occasional worship)

by droves of liberal and centrist whites is strongly

predicated on the sense that he's "not all that black"

and his willingness to run a "race-neutral"

campaign that bends over backwards to be "white-friendly"

The closer Barack Obama gets to the White House, the quicker some white folks are to declare that the United States is a "self-correcting" nation that is miraculously curing itself of racism.

They are encouraged by Obama, himself, who has shown a disturbing propensity to see the racism that oppresses and angers black America as purely a function of past injustice.

Far too many Americans fail to understand and/or refuse to acknowledge cold realities reflecting the perverse color politics of the post-Civil Rights age of neoliberal racism.

The rise of Obama has given white America yet one more "shining opportunity to congratulate itself

Obama Cloaks the Deeper Racism [Source]

"Oh please," I can hear conservatives and liberals alike moaning in unison, "what's with all this negativity at this glorious shining moment? Surely even a radical like you is going to have to admit real advancement here.

"This country is taking a giant forward step with Obama, a sign of amazing racial progress. And besides, what is Obama supposed to do...NOT run for president because you claim there's still racial inequality and oppression in America?

"That's not fair. Should John Edwards or Ralph Nader not run for president because you think there's still class oppression in the U.S.? Should Hillary or Sarah Palin not run because you think there's still gender oppression?

"Why don't you just let him get in there and start building on this great victory against racism to heal the remaining racial divisions in this country, okay? Get with the program."

If only things were so simple, so black and white.

Yes, there is some progress in the fact that millions of Caucasians are apparently willing to vote for somebody despite the fact that he is technically half-black. No doubt about it. I've never denied this obvious fact. It's not 1968. Okay.

But racial "correction" celebrators fail to understand and/or refuse to acknowledge cold realities reflecting the perverse color politics of the post-Civil Rights age of neoliberal racism.

Obama's acceptance (and more than occasional worship) by droves of liberal and centrist whites is strongly predicated on the sense that he's "not all that black" and on his willingness to run a "race-neutral" campaign.

One that bends over backwards to deny the continuing role that numerous and interrelated forms of institutional racism play in producing savage racial inequalities in the U.S. (and in shaping an imperial U.S. foreign policy that he aggressively embraces).

Obama is being used by white political and cultural authorities to "prove" that racism is no longer a meaningful barrier to black advancement and equality in America and that the only remaining obstacle to black success is the personal and cultural failure of black people.

Obama's race and nomenclature have proved attractive to a 99 percent white U.S. ruling class that seeks to put deceptive new rebel's clothing on its global capitalist-racist hyper-Empire - a world-supremacist project that deepens class and racial inequality across American communities (a project that Obama strongly endorses).

Key parts of that ruling class find the deeply conservative Obama's skin color and the strongly race-related illusion of his special progressivism to be very useful in terms of inhibiting black and Left resistance to Empire and Inequality at home and abroad.

They also figure that a black candidate and president will be particularly restricted (largely by toxic white fears and stereotypes relating to the threat posed by the "angry black male") in his ability (even if he had any propensity in this regard) to fight aggressively both for black rights and for the multicultural working class Many against the predominantly white rich and powerful Few.

Meanwhile, the rise of Obama has given white America yet one more shining opportunity to congratulate itself on its at least partial transcendence of primitive and open racial bigotry while rendering structural, societal, and institutional racial oppression yet more tragically and maddeningly invisible.

"What Us Racist?," much of white-America asks, Alfred E. Neuman-like. "You can't be serious," Alfred E. Whitefolks insist: "millions of us are voting for Obama, along with more than 90 percent of black voters."

Meanwhile the basic underlying policies and practices of "state-of-being racism" (Joe Feagin's term) are as alive as ever, given new freedom to reign guilt-free by the gloriously "post-racial" Obama phenomenon.

It's not glass half-full (the partial defeat of open racial bigotry), half empty (the persistent problem institutional racism).

It's a situation where white-national celebration over the part-full part is crowding out public attention to the all-empty part.

I say "part-full" because Level 1 race bigotry's continuing life may still catapult the dangerous proto-fascist John McCain and his ludicrous hard-right hit-lady Sara Palin into the executive branch next January.

Obama's Complicity

Obama's role in all of this racial perversity has been more than inadvertent and collateral. He has been an active agent in the perpetuation of post-Civil Rights racial oppression and confusion.

He has repeatedly exaggerated the depth and degree of black advancement, once even praising the Civil Rights generation for bringing Black American "90 percent" of the way to equality.

His conservative 2006 campaign book "The Audacity of Hope" defined the racism that plagues American history in terms of psychological prejudice, not institutional and structural practices and policies.

It told a nice and heartwarming story about his friendly reception in the legendarily racist downstate Illinois town of Cairo.

It did not mention that the savage under-representation of blacks in good-paying Cairo city jobs contributes to stark racial disparities in the town that made the technically half-white and thoroughly bourgeois Obama feel personally welcome.

Black median household income ($14,591) is less than half of white median household income ($32,500) in Cairo and the black poverty rate (42 percent) is nearly three times the white poverty rate there.

Obama has shown a special propensity for lecturing lower-class blacks like "cousin Pookie" (a name he made up for use in a self-righteous speech to black listeners at Selma, Alabama's Brown Chapel last year) on the need to clean up their culture and behavior to take full advantage of what he considers the great opportunities afforded to all by glorious American "free market" capitalism.

He has no parallel lectures on personal responsibility for middle and upper-class whites, whose rampant personal and cultural depravity - including the widespread persistent practice of racial discrimination in U.S housing and labor markets.

Also, in the making of criminal justice policy - survives intact without of racially disparate mass incarceration and other forms of discriminatory and collective punishment for Caucasians.

"The Anger and Bitterness of Those Years"

Along the way the "race-neutral" Obama has shown a disturbing propensity to see the racism that oppresses and angers black America as purely a function of past injustice.

In his celebrated March 18th Race Speech in Philadelphia, Obama gave a sharply historical explanation for why many blacks seemed to share his "angry" and now "former" pastor Jeremiah Wright supposedly 's "divisive," "distorted" "inexcusable" take on America.

According to Obama last March, at the height of the national racial melodrama:

We...need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

....A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened.

And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us."

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. T

They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted.

What's remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them."

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn't make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination.

That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future.

Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways.

For the men and women of Reverend Wright's generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years.

Later in his speech, Obama claimed that Wright's "offending speech" had erred in failing to see "change" - that is progress - in America's troubled racial history. By Obama's account, his own candidacy was proof of that positive transformation:

"The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society.

"It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past."

Obama's Philadelphia speech won immediate accolades across the "mainstream" U.S. media and political spectrum for contributing to "racial healing."

But the oration ignored the fact that institutional and structural racism remains widespread in the United States.

It remains deeply entrenched in how U.S. real estate and labor markets operate, how the U.S. education system functions, how home mortgages are marketed, how credit is extended, how the U.S. criminal justice system works, how economic development is directed, how health care is structured, and much more.

Obama accurately captured the facts that many, maybe most white Americans no longer see it as politically correct to be openly race-prejudiced in the U.S. and that white America is now much less consciously and intentionally racist than it was in the days of Wright's youth.

But Obama failed to make the important distinction between overt racism (largely defeated) and covert racism (still endemic). He failed to distinguish personal and psychological white racism from (endemic) societal and institutional racism.

He did not deal with the crucial difference between "state-of-mind racism" and "state-of-being racism."

And he naturally failed to acknowledge that post-Civil Rights America's constant self-congratulation over dropping level-one (overt, deliberate, and conscious) racism (expressed among other things in a new white willingness to vote for at least a certain kind of black presidential candidate) can actually further entrench the policies, structures, and practices of (often ostensibly color-blind) institutional racism.

America's Institutional Racism

In calling for Americans to put race aside in the quest for unity in pursuit of shared solutions to social and economic problems, Obama did not explain to blacks how they were supposed to drop "racially charged sentiments" when the all-too forgotten reality of institutional racism still consigned a grossly disproportionate share of the nation's black populace to the deep bottoms of the nation's steep socioeconomic and institutional wells.

Besides continuing his longstanding avoidance of the deeper racism, his celebrated Philadelphia race speech continued his related tendency to understate racial disparities when he said that "race" is "a part of our union that we have yet to perfect."

"Yet to perfect" was more than a bit mild in a nation where a shocking 1-to-11 black-to-white wealth gap afflicts black American households and one in three black males possess a felony record and blacks make up 12 percent of the population but nearly half of its more than 2 million prisoners.

The most disturbing aspect of Obama's Philadelphia speech was its unmistakable portrayal of the racism that creates black American anger as a function mainly of the past.

As he delivered his speech there was plenty of living and active, ongoing racial oppression and discrimination sparking rage among black Americans of all ages, including a large number of younger black males I have repeatedly heard denounce Obama as "bourgeois" and "a white man's Negro."

As I noted in a ZNet commentary that appeared two days after Obama's Philadelphia speech, "the oppression that angers Wright and other black Americans is more than an overhang from the bad old past.

"The humiliation and hopelessness felt by millions of those Americans are being reinforced, generated, and expanded anew on a daily basis right now... in the 21st century.

"Black ‘anger and bitterness' is being generated within the U.S. by racist policies and practices in these years (today) as well as in ‘those' (past) years. New ‘memories' of racial tyranny are being created right now beneath the national self congratulation over the defeat of level-one racism"

As Bill Fletcher noted, Obama "attributed much of the anger of Rev. Wright to the past, as if Rev. Wright is stuck in a time warp, rather than the fact that Rev. Wright's anger about the domestic and foreign policies of the USA are well rooted - and documented - in the current reality of the USA [emphasis added]."

Change for the Worse

Another deep flaw in Obama's almost universally heralded Philadelphia oration was that it failed to understand that "change" had also occurred for the worse, not just the better, in U.S. race relations and black American experience.

It mentioned none of the ways in which black status and life had actually worsened over recent decades.

It acknowledged none of the downsides of the limited and partial Civil Rights victories or the related problem of increased class inequality within the black community.

It naturally did not acknowledge the problematic side of Obama's popularity and candidacy - the way it is understood by many Americans to falsely conclude that racism no longer plays a significant role in American life.

This blinds people to the persistence of structural, institutional, and "state-of-being" racism beneath and beyond the success of selected privileged blacks like Obama.

What's so great about running for President?

As for double standards and running for president, yes, it would seem absurd at one level to say that Obama or any other black candidate shouldn't run for the White House when deep racial oppression continues.

But hold on. What's so goddamned great or special about running for the White House, from a social justice perspective? Maybe the struggle against racism and other political and societal evils isn't about running people (of any color) for the presidency - the top position in the executive committee of the American ruling class - or any other high elective office.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. turned down efforts to get him to run for the White House and died for his determination to authentically resist American capitalist, racist (deeply understood), and imperial power structures - what he called "the triple evils that are interrelated."

By the end of his life, King had concluded - correctly in my view - that only revolutionary change could save the U.S. from an ever-deepening descent into repressive authoritarianism.

As King noted in the spring of 1967, liberals have for too long "labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change here, a little change there."

What is really required, King knew, was "a reconstruction of the entire society...a radical redistribution of political and economic power."

And King voiced concern that symbolic victories over public bigotry and legislative triumphs over legal segregation and discrimination would give white America a terrible green light to conclude falsely that all the nation's racial problems had been solved.

Revolutionary change is exactly what Obama is NOT about. "Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama," Ryan Lizza recently observed, "is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary.

Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them."

Call me crazy, but I would include racism (deeply understood) in the complex of "existing institutions" to which Obama is "eager" to "accommodate himself."

It's a very good move for him from an "in it to win it" perspective since the white electoral majority is in deep denial about the persistent existence anymore of meaningful racism (institutional or otherwise) as a significant factor in American life.

As far as most good white Americans are concerned, the concentrated, hyper-segregated misery of many of our inner cities' black residents is self-imposed and self-chosen - a product of personal irresponsibility and an inadequate culture.

Obama has no choice but to go along with such sentiments on the whole if he wants to make into the ultimate Masters' House - the White House. And so I repeat: maybe it's not about running for President.

Given that much of white America may well still be too racist to vote for a black candidate, finally, Obama's passion for the Empire's top job may be subject to a different and related criticism.

Namely that it will help enable another four years of hard-right rule and elect a white nationalist administration likely to escalate the assault on racial (and every other form of social) justice at home and abroad.