The Daily Voice Debate on Obama (Part II)

ALVIN TILLERY: I have to agree with you, Professor Warren, about Obama also sending signals to the black community. There is no doubt that after 30 years of imbibing the message that we are the worst people in the nation--welfare queens, criminals, kids who can't crack the SAT--from politicians and the media that a lot of us now believe it. There is also no doubt that the quickest way for a black man to win the status of a "leader" in the community is to stand up in front of a microphone and chastize us for our supposed failings. That is why it is so important for scholars and others in the public eye to get the real story out--that black people in America are really one of the most successful communities in world history. I mean look at how quickly we closed the gap in high school degree attainment after the civil rights movement. Moreover, the fact that 55 percent of us are now middle class--despite the fact that affirmative action has been a miserable failure in terms of achieving its goals--is absolutely amazing. I think once this story gets out it will be harder for black "leaders," politicians and pundits to use this very negative communication style in the community.

DORIAN WARREN: Let's switch gears and talk in-depth about the "More Perfect Union" speech Obama gave in Philadelphia last week on race. Based on how he "uninvited" Rev. Jeremiah Wright from giving the invocation at the announcement of his candidacy, I honestly expected Obama to throw the Rev. overboard without blinking, and before the speech, I thought his candidacy was done. He did exactly what you wanted him to do in that speech, right? Did it change your opinion of Obama at all?

ALVIN TILLERY: I have to admit that I saw more in Obama than I ever hoped to in that speech. I never expected him to defend either his personal or spiritual relationship with Reverend Wright. On the contrary, after watching him on the talk shows on Friday night, I thought that he was going to continue to abrogate the relationship. A cynic might say that he had to maintain the ties to shore up his base--black voters. That might be part of it, but I think that he really did show some resolve by not throwing Reverend Wright completely under the bus.

DORIAN WARREN: Right. He didn't throw him under the bus (but he did tell him to move to the back of the bus). What about the substance? He basically started the speech by discussing the "original sin" of American democracy: slavery. That was unexpected for a candidate who claims there is only "the United States of America" (and no "Black," "Latino," "white" or "Asian" America). And he made an argument about the historical legacy of racial inequality: from slavery, through Jim Crow, up to the present, and the fact that the issues remaining from this racial legacy have not been worked through. So there you go! Senator Obama is explicitly talking about race and racial inequality. Isn't this exactly what you wanted?

ALVIN TILLERY: As you know, Professor Warren, I, like many of our colleagues, still have some real problems with the substance of Obama's speech. To me, Michael Dawson really hit the nail on the head in his post over at the Root.com, when he pointed out that Obama's speech placed white resentment of the policies designed to combat racial inequality on the same moral plane with black anger over racism. I mean it is just befuddling that Obama could say that the "anger [that] exists in the white community" grows out of "legitimate concerns" about fairness and not racism.

If it is true, as Obama conceded in his speech, that we still have not "fixed" segregated schools, then how do we do that without busing? If colleges and industries barred blacks because of their race until the 1960s and 1970s--the period when Reagan came in to attack these great "excesses" that Obama worried about--then how do we correct that without affirmative action? How do we correct the advantages that today's white college students receive from having parents and grandparents who went to these schools when the racial bar was in place without affirmative action?

The fact of the matter is that the civil rights coalition put busing and affirmative action in place to cure the evils of Jim Crow. Obama himself acknowledges that these remedies have not yet fixed the problems but at the same time says that the people who got all the good stuff under the color bar and their descendants--white folks--face similar hardships as those who continue to suffer from the initial crime. I think that this is both a ludicrous proposition and an inauspicious start to his efforts in trying to broker a peace in the "racial stalemate."

DORIAN WARREN: Okay, I'll concede that point Professor Tillery. But didn't he need to acknowledge white anxieties and frustrations with their growing insecurity (even if caused, say, by globalization or the political shift to the right instead of attempts at racial equality) to achieve his primary goal of recovering from the Jeremiah Wright controversy? You did not expect him to be honest about the nature of white privilege? His appeal to whites is precisely based on a kind of "black exceptionalism," where he is perceived as not the same kind of black politician as Rev. Jesse Jackson or Rev. Al Sharpton (which is how the Clinton camp, and the former "black" president himself, has tried to "paint" him). Afterall, he has to try to win some of the working-class white voters in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

ALVIN TILLERY: Well, I guess I hoped that he would just distance himself from his pastor and issue a call for sustained dialogue on race relations. From my perspective, however, in his effort to right the ship of his presidential campaign he pushed black America overboard--down the plank even--with this rhetoric about white America's "legitimate concerns." In other words, Obama's speech completely distorted the realities of how these social policies affect whites.

Despite the fact that disgruntled whites continue to sue every university under the sun when they do not get exactly their first choice of college, there is so much evidence that affirmative action does not harm them. How could it when, as Derek Bok and William Bowen found with their landmark 1998 study of affirmative action, The Shape of the River, almost 90 percent of black college students go to colleges and universities where affirmative action is not used at all? That means that of the 2.5 million African-Americans who are alive and held BA degrees in 2003, 2.25 million got there without affirmative action. Moreover, of the 250,000 blacks that attended colleges where affirmative action matters, only 125,000 received the benefits of the program. I know that far more than 125,000 of the 50 million whites who hold college degrees believe that they did not get into an Ivy League school because they lost out to an African-American. Their claims are not accurate but Obama says they are "legitimate."

I already see white (and a few conservative black) pundits and reporters on mainstream television invoking Obama's speech as evidence that racism is no longer a problem in America. I expect that this type of backlash from the speech will only make it harder for black America to preserve these crucial policies of redress. While I did not expect Obama to tell the truth about how overblown claims of "reverse racism" are in our society, I guess I hoped that he would remember the first rule of medicine and racial politics--do no harm!

DORIAN WARREN: Ouch! But why should he have had to distance himself from Rev. Wright in the first place? I mean, it's not like there is anything that Rev. Wright has said in any of his sermons that most readers of the Daily Voice (or most black Americans more broadly) would disagree with. I appreciate you bringing in data and facts and all that, but I bet Senator Obama would agree with you. One way to interpret the part of his speech where he talks about "white resentment" is to attempt to refocus whites on their class interests (he argues that those resentments "distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze"). Now yes, he could have just made that argument without legitimizing "white backlash" and putting it on the same level as "black anger". But what do you think the speech tells us about what black people can expect from Obama if he wins?

ALVIN TILLERY: Well, I think that his entire campaign tells us that we cannot expect very much from him in terms of advancing our core common interest in racial equality.

Again, I don't think that Obama is hostile to black interests. On the contrary, I think that he--like so many people--believes that his identity has given him special vision with regard to fixing racial inequality. I also think that the adoration that our community has for him has compounded this dimension of the problem. I mean, we have not asked him for anything in return for our votes. Indeed, I think the whole community has been hoping that Obama is like Dan Freeman, the lead character in The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Sam Greenlee's 1971 novel about a black CIA who quietly bides his way up the ranks and then uses all of his knowledge and skills to help the black community spark revolutionary change.

Obama's reckless comments about racial inequality lead me to believe that even if he fashions himself as a Freeman-like figure, he will not understand what it will take to kick the door open. Think back to his Ebenezer speech where he chastised black Americans for a nativism that recent studies demonstrate does not exist in the community. Now, fast forward a few weeks from there to the debate in California where he flatly dismissed the reality that illegal immigration is squeezing black workers out of the labor markets for low and semi-skilled labor in some parts of the country. Even Hillary Clinton, who had a lot more to lose by alienating Latino voters at that point in the race, acknowledged that she had been to black neighborhoods where she had seen this reality.

Let's take another, more subtle example. In describing his "white" grandparent's impact on his life, Senator Obama talked about how his grandfather had "survived the Depression to fight in Patton's Army during WWII" while his "white grandmother worked a bomber assembly line at Ft. Leavenworth." Obama references the narratives of his grandparents as a way of pointing out that his white family were just ordinary folks who served the country on their way to achieving the American dream. The problem with his formulation is that it ignores the benefits that his family received as a result their service. In other words, I bet that his grandfather cashed in on the GI Bill when he returned to Kansas after the war.

Unfortunately, the fact that the military had a racial quota during World War II means that about 85 percent of the eligible black men who would have wanted to serve in the military along side the senator's grandfather could not do so. This also means that these same black men missed the extraordinary benefits--educational opportunities, home loans, etc.--that fueled the expansion of the white middle class after the war. Perhaps things would have been okay for black men if they could get into the factories to replace white workers who went off to fight; unfortunately for these men, corporations chose to bring white women like the senator's grandmother into the shop over black men. As you know, Professor Warren, by virtue of your colleague Ira Katznelson's book When Affirmative Action was White, there is a lot of evidence that the gaps we see between white and black America are a function of these benefits.

I raise these two examples to demonstrate that Obama is sometimes in such a hurry to "unite" the country--around the same old myth that we have all suffered equally--that he fails to ask crucial questions about the realities facing black communities. This leads me to believe that if Obama wins he will probably pursue the same "race neutral" policies that have thus far failed to address the legacies of Jim Crow.