Georgetown University Professor Michael Eric Dyson wrote an essay for The Nation in which he explained why Barack Obama's presidential campaign is important for the United States. His reasoning, discussed after the jump, provides a powerful case for why Barack Obama's campaign is good for the American people, and bodes well for an administration devoted to social justice to follow the Bush administration's abuses of the citizenry.
Dyson is, along with Robin D.G. Kelley, one of the leading lights in African-American studies of his generation. Yet that does not mean he reflexively supports any African-American politician running for office, or would support Obama simply because he was President of the Harvard Law Review. Dyson is famous for criticizing affluent African-Americans (particularly Bill Cosby, whose comments sparked one of Dyson's books) -- or, to use Dyson's term, the Afristocracy -- for abusing and neglecting poor urban African-Americans.
Barack Obama, a man who enjoyed the privilege of fine education has gone on record criticizing African-Americans who (as the Washington Post characterized Obama's remarks last spring) "are 'disenfranchising' themselves because they don't vote," as well as "taking rappers to task for their language, and decrying 'anti-intellectualism' in the black community, including black children telling peers who get good grades that they are 'acting white.'"
Such a figure does not automatically get the approval of Professor Dyson. But because Obama says we all, everyone, including the government, have responsibilities to uplift society, to provide families the support they need to raise their children, and to give every child the opportunity to "receive the best education this country has to offer," and to change the economic inequalities that produce despair Obama is not an abuser of the community like Cosby. Obama is different because Obama offers more than critiques. Because Obama offers specific measures for justice. Obama is different because Obama wants to ensure that every citizen can keep from getting thrown off the ballot. Obama is different because, above all, Obama has done the work over the course of his life to put his education to use serving communities, Dyson sees him as an important leader for change whose experience over the past quarter century prepares him for this moment:
One need look no further than his training in the trenches of community organizing. As Ronald Reagan practiced what Vice President George Bush would call "voodoo economics"--supply-side theories wrapped in tax cuts for the wealthy--Obama exited the Ivy League corridors of Columbia University in 1983 and, after a brief and unsatisfying stint on Wall Street, headed straight for the 'hood. On the South Side of Chicago, he worked with a church-based group that sought to speak to poverty by understanding the language of its painful expression in crime and high unemployment. Obama rolled up his sleeves--something he was used to in satisfying his basketball jones on the courts of many a concrete jungle--and applied elbow grease and hard thinking to the persistent ills and unjust plight of the poor. Such practical training in relieving the burdens of the beleaguered will stand him in good stead as leader of the free world--as the poignant memory of the most afflicted replays in his mind.
Invoking the Reagan Era is no casual reference. Though Obama's supporters often call him "our Reagan" because Obama can get habitual Republican voters to listen to him much like Reagan caught the ears of many Democratic voters in 1980 and 1984, the actions of the Reagan administration were devastating to American cities, and to the African-American community. By describing Obama's deeds during the eighties, Dyson contracts the social responsibility of "our Reagan" with the callous disregard of Ronald Reagan. Dyson's history of the candidate advocates that though Obama did not grow up in the inner city, and had opportunities many African-Americans do not, there is no question of his devotion to the community.
Dyson goes on to argue that Obama needed to move from community organizing to political office to combat the Reaganite skepticism of government and use the law and politics to "positively change the lives of the vulnerable" in the United States. Dyson sees Obama's Senate work and words on disability pay for veterans, nonproliferation of WMD, Katrina, Darfur, and Iraq. For Dyson, Obama's multicultural identity provide an opportunity to heal the poisonous divisions in America (which, for Dyson, include not only racial divisions but class divisions throughout American society and also within the African-American community).
In conclusion, Dyson argues that Obama is a candidate of destiny, and his time is now. The calls for personal responsibility Obama makes of the American people are not, for Dyson, abuse of the poor and disenfranchised, but part of a package of rhetoric and action that promises to uplift all of us. He, no, we, with him as our president have a chance to make history and make this nation better.
Barack Obama has come closer than any figure in recent history to obeying a direct call of the people to the brutal and bloody fields of political mission. His visionary response to that call gives great hope that he can galvanize our nation with the payoff of his political rhetoric: a substantive embrace of true democracy fed by justice--one that balances liberty with responsibility. It is ultimately the hard political lessons he has learned, and the edifying wisdom he has earned--and is willing to share--that make Obama an authentic American. He is our best hope to tie together the fraying strands of our political will into a powerful and productive vision of national destiny.
Dyson's argument for supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama is not the only good reason to vote Obama in 2008. But as a scholar of the African-American experience -- and the American experience -- both past and present, Dyson is aware of the great opportunities Barack Obama presents here and now.
Michael Eric Dyson is fired up.