I doubt there is a liberal or a progressive -- black or white -- who voted for Obama, who does not have at least some level of disagreement with the President's policies and actions. There are probably very few progressives -- black or white -- who do not feel some sense of disappointment in the man based on campaign promises that were not kept. The range of expression of that disappointment, however, varies widely, with the most highly charged descriptive adjectives and epithets issuing from the lips and pens of white progressives. This diary examines the phenomenon in some historical context.
Let us, for a moment, step into the Wayback Machine and head for 1971...
As we exit, we find ourselves at the scene of a huge protest against the Vietnam war in Washington, DC. At the head of the miles-long column of protesters is a large contingent of marchers who proudly wear tattered combat fatigues and carry the banner of "Vietnam Veterans Against the War" (VVAW) They are among the most dedicated in the struggle to end the destructive and racist war in Vietnam, and they are the Americans who have lost the most in that war. They would risk losing everything they have left in order to end it. They are, in short, American heroes. And the vast majority of them are white.
There are, if we look, many men of color (and more than a few women) who are Vietnam veterans mixed in with the rest of the antiwar marchers. You'll see black veterans marching in the Panther contingent, wearing their black berets. A majority of the adult men under the American Indian Movement banner are veterans. And you'll see the same among La Raza. They all oppose the war, they've all put their bodies where their politics are, and they are all American heroes. But they are marching separately, divided into the ranks of the liberation struggles of their own communities.
Still visiting 1971, we pop over to the VVAW panel of 100 veterans (representing a hundred-thousand in their membership) who are testifying, in front of the media and the public, to having witnessed and participated in war crimes. A large majority of the organizers and participants are white, but VVAW has made a real effort to put together panels specifically addressing the problems faced by soldiers of color, and to talk about the racism of the war. We're here, though, to witness a short scene, because it sums up beautifully the divide between white and black antiwar veterans, two of whom are earnestly trying to talk to each other:
This is a passionate and painful clip, and the sympathy of the viewer is likely to be most attracted to the party with whom s/he identifies. (You really should see all of Winter Soldier, and support the efforts of distributor Millarium Zero to keep it available. It wasn't easy or cheap to get it re-released.) This may be the most important six minutes of film ever, in terms of capturing the same divide between the races, the same struggle on the part of black activists pointing out white privilege, and the same frustration in the hearts of well-meaning white progressives, that is going around and around again today.
What is most impressive and moving in this clip is that the white vets are listening. They are not shutting the black vet down, even though what he's saying is clearly painful for them to hear. They are opening space for the black veteran to tell them that, although they want the same thing -- an end to the war -- black vets have different reasons than white vets for being there. When the war is over, the black vet points out, he will still have to live with the problems & pain of being black in a racist America.
As Ward Churchill & Jim Van Der Wall document in their classic study Agents of Repression: The FBI's Secret War against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement, VVAW was not only supportive of black liberation struggles. VVAW was the only non-Indian organization invited to participate in several AIM actions, and VVAW members were at Wounded Knee during the occupation. Though white VVAW members always hoped they would gather more men of color to their organization, they did not let the absence of those members prevent them from supporting race-based liberation struggles. Nor did other white radical organizations. At the same march we visited in the first paragraph, you would have seen large, red SDS pins in evidence, proclaiming, "Stop the War & Racism!" (SDS, also, was predominantly white, but many in its ranks had come to political and racial consciousness via the civil rights movement.)
So, what does this have to do with the over-heated rhetoric about Obama? To make the connection, I need to show you another clip, this time from a seldom-seen film with an oft-repeated title: No Vietnamese Ever Called Me Nigger. (Again, you should watch the whole film, but it's out of print and you may have a hard time finding it. Some university libraries still have it. It would be a progressive triumph if we could get this back in circulation.)
The point made by Akmed Lorence, the vet speaking above, is that black soldiers were returning to a very different reality than white soldiers. The shock of betrayal by their government felt by white soldiers in Vietnam was traumatic and life-changing, whereas the anger of black soldiers at what they saw in Vietnam was part of a long history of racism, and of lies and promises that weren't kept. The former group saw Vietnam as an aberration, and the latter saw it as particularly bad business as usual. This meant that both groups were predestined to have different priorities when they went home. White veterans were fighting a war against war, black veterans were coming home to find white America was at war with their communities.
Though often involved in other movements, white antiwar vets put stopping the war at the #1 position of things they had to do. Non-white veterans, while also dedicated to stopping the war, often regarded other issues as more pressing. This is not a case of one group seeing the world more clearly than another group. It's a product of two different groups of people, with two different sets of experiences, looking at the world from very different perspectives, and, thus, formulating their priorities differently.
One of the results of that different positioning was that the rhetoric of white veterans on the topic of government betrayal was a lot more heated than that of black veterans, to whom betrayal was old news. (This is not to say that black rhetoric wasn't heated, because it certainly was. But betrayal was not a main theme.) Non-white veterans understood that the white focus on government betrayal and on ending the war above all else, was a product of white privilege, however noble VVAW's mission. But some white antiwar veterans simply weren't able to grok that what they considered non-white lack of focus on ending the war did not reflect an inability to "get" how bad the war was, but instead reflected an ability to see how bad a lot of other things in America were.
I would like to suggest a similar white blindness in some of our reactions to the black hostility a chorus of "traitor!" and "betrayer" criticisms levied at Obama engenders. The hostility is not due to an inability or a refusal to see what Obama "really is," or by any black tendency to march in racial lockstep to close ranks around besieged black politicians. Instead, it is expressed at the level of vituperation levied at the President. There is, in the responses of many black progressives to the heated anti-Obama rhetoric, a certain asperity: What was Obama supposed to do? Wave a wand to put his policies in effect? Make the Blue Dogs disappear? And don't the Republicans have something to do with obstructing Obama? While you can find plenty of black progressives who agree that, at various junctures, Obama should have been firmer, compromised less readily, or used his Executive powers to do more good, more quickly, the black community's discussions of these failings is far less heated, and far more nuanced, than the most vocal segment of white progressive discussion. And it's the amount of heat there that's the issue: white progressives seem upset that black progressives just aren't as mad as they are.
Many white progressives seem to want black Democrats to "admit" that their fiery critiques are valid and their concerns vitally important, and to adopt -- or at a minimum, tolerate -- the rhetoric that whites use to express their sharp sense of betrayal. But you just can't mandate how another community is "supposed" to feel -- if they're not outraged, they're not outraged, and that is that: deal with it.
I will posit this: black Americans tend not to feel "betrayed" by Obama's failures to live up to his campaign promises, because black Americans did not expect all that much from him in the first place. Lower expectations, lower likelihood of feeling betrayed. For the black community, Obama was never any kind of saviour. He was, however, the first black politician who made it to a level where he was a viable candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination -- the first black leader of the Party to which the majority of black Americans belong. Thus, his very candidacy was the emblem of the "HOPE" he stood for, completely aside from his policy stance. This fact, and this alone, would have been enough to make him a truly exciting candidate for black America, and moved them to get out there and beat the street, and vote in unprecedented numbers: it's about damned time. If white people can't understand that, and can't take that into account, then that's a blindness on our part, and not a failing on the part of African Americans.
And while African Americans do support truly liberal and progressive candidates -- like Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee -- when they have the opportunity, I doubt there is a black or white American in the country who believes that a black progressive of that stripe has a hot chance in hell of becoming a contender for the Democratic nomination. Black Americans, far more than white Americans, are aware of the complex racial politics and stereotyping that were in play during the Obama campaign and that are in play as his presidency progresses, and that will be in play if he's primaried. Black progressives who supported his candidacy also criticized his policies and actions among themselves, and in places where -- if a white progressive bothered to visit -- he or she could hear those critiques. (Go back and read issues of Black Commentator, if you don't believe this has been an ongoing theme in the black progressive community.)
Overall, the black community in America votes more "progressively" than the white community. I say this even in the face of evidence that there exist some corrupt black machine politicians who don't do as much for the black community as we might want them to do. And black politicians, in aggregate, vote more progressively than white politicians, by far. (I think the proof of this progressivism is that, if we were going to choose, every progressive in the country would prefer to have politicians who vote like the average member of the CBC, than to have politicians who vote like the average white Democratic member of Congress.) So something downright weird is going on when some white progressives are mounting arguments that the most progressive segment of the Democratic party is not comprised of "real" progressives.
The "If You Criticize Obama You're A Racist" meme I recently discussed is merely a distraction from the sense of entitlement and unconscious white privilege that is at the root (though usually not in the heart) of the most bitter expressions of anger and betrayal. Pulling the focus towards those who claim to be persecuted because they offer critical views of Obama is simply a way of disappearing the masses of progressives -- black and white -- who are not engaged in that level of hyperbolic critique. In short, the repetition of that meme, and of others, allows people not to hear what the black community is actually saying, in all its liberal and progressive diversity.
So my suggestion -- and I have taken this suggestion to heart, myself, and am dedicated to acting on it -- is to moderate my critiques of Obama. My emotions -- like the emotions of a whole lot of white progressives -- are pitched very high now. I feel upset. I feel betrayed. I feel righteously angry. But I'm trying to be sensible enough to remember that my feelings are not what the progressive movement is all about, and that if my feelings matter at all, then the feelings of every other progressive matter too. So when I critique Obama -- which I often do -- I make sure I stick to his policy, and I make sure the words I use to critique that policy are in proportion to the charges I'm making.
For example, I understand Kos's urge to use the word "groveling" to describe Obama's session with the "Captains of Industry." That meeting really pissed me off, too. I wanted to punch a wall. But even Kos would have to admit that "groveling" is a hyperbolic metaphor -- there was no literal "groveling" going on. More accurately -- and what made all us progressives, of all colors, angry -- Obama offered a whole lot of conciliatory words and concessions to the representatives of the minority of rich assholes who are stealing our resources and impoverishing our future. "Groveling" makes a better headline, of course, and it's great if you want to rabble-rouse, but we progressives aren't supposed to be assembling crowds with pitchforks after ratcheting people up with purple prose... tempting as it is. Especially not if we want to maintain we're "reality based."
Kos' racial politics are, as far as I have seen, excellent, which is why I'm picking this example. And I would put money down on a bet that evoking racial imagery was the furthest thing from his mind. But the problem with hyperbole is that it has resonances that the author can't always anticipate and control. There are very few African Americans over 50 (and far too many under that age) in this country who don't have a visceral and gut-wrenching memory of being expected to grovel themselves, or of watching a family member be forced to grovel to a white authority, often for very petty and mean reasons, and often with a physical threat for not groveling lurking in the background. And if their memory is of refusing to grovel in the face of pressure, well, you can count on that not being too pleasant an occasion either. The days when black folks were told to go around to the back door are not all that long gone. The image of black adults being forced to beg white authorities for favors which should have been rights -- going "hat in hand" -- has not faded either. And there are still a lot of places in America where a young black man better look down at the ground and answer "Yassuh" to a white cop if he's going to get out of a situation with a whole skin. So, yeah, a white progressive can use the hyperbolic "grovel" without thinking too hard about it, and without intending to evoke any racial imagery. But many black readers will see in their minds a caricature of President Obama, looking downcast, with his top hat in his hand, standing in front of a bunch of big, powerful, cigar-chomping white bosses. It's an ugly image, and it was utterly unnecessary for Kos to evoke it (even unintentionally) to make his point.
Now, I can hear the white folks complaining: "We have to watch everything we say! Anything we say can be called racist!" And I'd like those of you who are having this initial reaction to step back for a second and breathe, and listen for just a few minutes more. Note that I am absolutely not calling Kos racist. I picked his example primarily because he has very good racial politics. What I am saying is that hyperbole is based on using inflammatory words -- words that evoke powerful images. And the minute you start using that kind of language, you will find you're invoking images that are outside and beyond your intent and control. So I am suggesting a tone of moderation in our writing about the President, with the recognition that, whether we intend it or not, and whether we like it or not, we are dancing in a minefield. We cannot take that Wayback Machine back in time and change African American history, and so we must, if we are to remain close to our staunchest allies and America's most progressive community, be cognizant that this history is still in play.
The safest way to be sure you're not invoking stereotypes with your hyperbole is simply not to use hyperbole in your arguments. It's a demagogic, rather than a rationalist technique, anyway, so it shouldn't be that hard for a reality-based community like us to give it up. Leave the hyperbole about the President to the Tea Party and the wingnuts -- it's their natural language because they're all about rhetoric over reality. And if you get angry -- if you just have to vent your anger using the most extreme Big Bad Words you can imagine -- do it in a closed circle of friends where it's not going to ricochet out in public and hurt anyone unwittingly. Everyone should have a group within which they're safe to snarl and stomp and rage and show their ass.
In public, however, I think moderated language when discussing the President our black brothers and sisters in struggle overwhelmingly support, is a wise idea. It helps prevent people from mistaking our meaning, and it doesn't promote the racial divisiveness that has plagued the progressive movement in America since its inception. I don't want black Americans to feel they have to make a choice between "Obama" and "progressivism." It's a false dichotomy (as the black voting record clearly shows), and it's an incredibly foolish, self-destructive stance for us to take. What we need to do is take a cue from the black progressives who are already out there critiquing Obama, and seek a tone and a strategy that meshes with theirs -- in the end, it'll make us all stronger.
UPDATE: It's 2am in my part of the world, so I am calling it a night. Thank you for a really excellent discussion, and a lot of things to think about. Happy holidays, for those who celebrate, and to all a good night!