THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA will be an event. But it has proven confusing for most on the \u201cLeft,\u201d who claim to want to overcome anti-black racism and achieve social justice<\/a>. Rejection of Obama on this basis has been as significant as the embrace of his candidacy. There is as much anxiety as hope stirred by Obama, especially regarding the significance of his blackness<\/a>.<\/p>\n For instance, the usually discerning and astute black political scientist and critical intellectual commentator Adolph L. Reed, Jr. \u2014 he is perhaps the single best thinker in American politics for a generation \u2014 has published several articles critical of the Obama phenomenon. Reed\u2019s journalistic criticisms during the Democratic Party primary election season hit some false notes, not least Reed going back on a pledge made years ago to \u201cnot vote for a Clinton for anything\u201d when he endorsed Hillary as a \u201clesser evil\u201d over Obama. Reed has been quick to point out the obvious, that the Obama phenomenon is no social movement, but only a marketing ploy of otherwise typically \u201ccentrist\u201d (i.e., not even \u201creformist\u201d) Democratic Party politics. Reed has been keen to disenchant Obama from early in his emergence in Chicago politics. Reed has pointed to the blindness of enthusiasm surrounding Obama, but Reed\u2019s attempts to scotch illusory hopes raised by Obama went too far in his endorsement of Clinton as some kind of backstop against the Obama effect \u2014 perhaps out of Reed\u2019s respect for the fact that Clinton did not pretend to be anything but what she is. Overall, Reed\u2019s criticisms have articulated something that others have been perhaps less open about saying, that the Obama candidacy might be a setback for the political and social interests of black Americans.<\/p>\n Reed\u2019s most recent article, \u201cWhere Obamaism seems to be going\u201d (in the Black Agenda Report, July 16, 2008, on-line at: www.blackagendareport.com) marks a deeper and less rhetorical engagement than his prior critique, which had been hampered by hyperbolic accusations, for instance of the \u201ccultish\u201d quality of the Obama campaign. In his recent article, Reed writes that,<\/p>\n An Obama presidency (maybe even just his candidacy) will likely sever the last threads of any connection between notions of racial disparity and structurally reproduced inequality rooted in political economy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is a serious matter to consider. However, what must be addressed first are the effects of the Obama candidacy on the existing \u201cLeft.\u201d<\/p>\n The diminished possibility of substantially linking struggles for racial justice to reforms of political economy needs to be grasped in light of ideology, specifically on the \u201cLeft,\u201d which Reed has raised as an issue surrounding Obama more generally. If Reed is correct about what Obama represents, we need to ask why this might be so, and how the \u201cLeft\u201d is responsible.<\/p>\n People on the \u201cLeft\u201d respond to Obama in ambivalent ways, through idolization or demonization. But neither is appropriate or realistic, and both are equally hysteric in character. The problem that Obama presents for the \u201cLeft\u201d is that they cannot decide whether they really want him, or rather fear what he might represent: the obsolescence of their politics. Even Reed evinces this effect.<\/p>\n Obama has not claimed to be anything but a typical Democrat. Despite burnishing credentials as a \u201ccommunity activist\u201d in Chicago when running for Illinois State Senate, Obama has not presented himself as a \u201cmovement\u201d candidate, despite what many may wish from him \u2014 to pin their mistaken hopes on this or else find him wanting. It seems that the idea of an entirely \u201cmainstream\u201d (i.e., conservative) black political candidate is beyond the imagination of most on the \u201cLeft.\u201d<\/p>\n So we are treated to some \u201cshocking expos\u00e9s\u201d of Obama as a supposed product of the \u201cChicago School\u201d of neo-liberal economic policy (of the former University of Chicago Professor of Economics Milton Friedman) \u2014 see for example Naomi Klein on \u201cObama\u2019s Chicago Boys,\u201d June 12, 2008, in The Nation, and various articles in Counterpunch \u2014 as if any president of the U.S. today would do anything but pursue post-Fordist\/neo-liberal policies!<\/p>\n The candidacy and election of Obama will continue to send the \u201cLeft\u201d into a tailspin, and in this sense will be \u201cbad\u201d for the Left \u2014 but this is Obama\u2019s greatest value.<\/p>\n Hitherto, the \u201cLeft\u201d has expected that black politicians should either \u201crepresent\u201d \u2014 or even \u201clead\u201d \u2014 a fictive black \u201ccommunity.\u201d Conversely, black Republicans have been demonized for being sell-outs or otherwise \u201crace traitors.\u201d It has been a fundamentally racist imagination that denies that black Americans can run the entire spectrum of policy positions and therefore social politics.<\/p>\n As witnessed with Obama, the racist illusion that seems to die the hardest is the notion that black people are especially insightful let alone \u201cprogressive\u201d in their outlook on American society. It is an old canard on the \u201cLeft\u201d \u2014 somewhere between wishful thinking and demagogic propaganda \u2014 that the most oppressed are somehow the most critically conscious of social realities. Behind this spectacular illusion the \u201cLeft\u201d has spun, however, has been the more prosaic realities of the Democratic Party and the role of \u201cblack\u201d politics in it.<\/p>\n Because American politics has been about the struggle for inclusion in the power structure by successive waves of various immigrant and other marginalized groups, it has been perhaps the most destructive illusion that the Democratic Party, which has played the inclusion game of its constituency politics better (especially in urban machine politics) than their Republican rivals, is somehow to the Left socially or politically. \u2014 As Gore Vidal once put it, American politics is really a one-party affair, the \u201cparty of property,\u201d with \u201ctwo Right wings.\u201d The Democratic Party is simply the party that tends to include the interests of parvenu bourgeois elements from non-WASP groups, along with perhaps some of the more enlightened WASPs. \u201cBlack politics\u201d has been part of this game, especially since the reorientation of American party politics as a result of the Civil Rights movement and the defection of the Southern \u201cDixiecrats\u201d to the Republicans in the 1960s. Whereas previously the Democratic Party represented the unholy populist lash-up of Southern rednecks with Northern ethnic constituencies and organized labor, and the even earlier phenomenon of blacks voting for the Republican Party of Lincoln and Grant as a matter of course, today it is taken for granted that black Americans naturally find their political interests expressed in the Democratic Party. But this has worked to ill effect, especially as the \u201cLeft\u201d has contributed to the charade.<\/p>\n The election of Barack Obama represents something very difficult for those on the ostensible \u201cLeft\u201d to understand, that since the 1960s the Right (in both its Democratic and Republican Party forms) has been very successful in depoliticizing \u2014 effectively defusing \u2014 the issues of poverty and other forms of social degradation faced by most black Americans. The Left has played into this very well, doing their own work of replacing style for substance and, as Adolph Reed has put it, \u201cposing\u201d for politics. Thus, the \u201cLeft\u201d since the 1960s has actually become a part of the new Right, a key factor in the depoliticization and hence conservatizing of American politics and society, for more than a generation now.<\/p>\n Of course Obama is just as much a product of this conservatization and depoliticization. This should shock no one. \u2014 Yet it does, and so this symptom is extremely important to note and understand.<\/p>\n The election of Barack Obama will be an event. It should be a moment for reevaluating American society and politics. It should be an opportunity for throwing overboard illusions the \u201cLeft\u201d has sown for at least 40 years about the realities and possibilities for American society and politics. The incredulity with which the Obama election is met, either in hopeful expectation or denial based in fear, is less about his election itself than it is about the confused, mistaken and utterly reactionary consciousness on the American \u201cLeft:\u201d it is a measure of the racism of the \u201cLeft,\u201d how this \u201cLeft\u201d is a key bulwark of racism in American life.<\/p>\n Note how the Obama candidacy has been met with hostility from all the usual suspects, the sexagenarian post-Civil Rights leadership of Jesse Jackson, Sr. (who said he wanted to cut Obama\u2019s balls off!), to the unblushing racist politics of Democratic Party stalwarts like the Clintons (who were \u201cjust saying what the Republicans will, anyway\u201d), and those like Rev. Jeremiah Wright who cannot countenance any challenge to the wounded narcissism they\u2019ve made their profession. \u2014 Obama was entirely correct about Wright et al. being stuck in the 1950s. The vested interests of black politics are rightfully wary of Obama. Their game is up. The time for reckoning has come.<\/p>\n So what can be made of this campaign by Obama that completely eschews the business-as-usual of the business of racism in the U.S., and one that does not run politically on the basis of \u201copposing\u201d the racist demagogy of the Democrats (like the black Republicans do, making of their \u201ccriticism\u201d of black Democratic hucksterism a business of their own, in their own way: see for instance Shelby Steele on Obama), but rather seeks to bypass such politics?<\/p>\n One catch-phrase that has flown in the wake of the success of the Obama candidacy is \u201cpost-racial,\u201d raising the question of the degree to which America has overcome racism. But perhaps the matter is not one of our historical moment being post-\u201dracial\u201d but rather post-racist. Perhaps racism has changed. For the historical racism that plagued the U.S., from the failure of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era through Jim Crow until the overcoming of legal racial segregation with the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s\u201360s, is over. But this has not meant the meaningful improvement of conditions of life for the vast majority of black people in America, but rather has accompanied worsening conditions, as part of the broader greater stratification and brutalization of American society in the general downturn since the late 1960s \u2013 early \u201870s.<\/p>\n In the meantime, the political issues of racism, as they stood in 1950s\u201360s, have been rendered obsolete. On the one hand, American society and culture is less \u201cracist\u201d than it has ever been; on the other hand, real suffering is rendered, if not invisible then politically insoluble. There has been \u201cprogress\u201d on the issue of \u201cracism\u201d while there has been regress in terms of addressing any problems of greater substance for black people. The hollowed-out politics of \u201canti-racism\u201d meanwhile has come to serve, at best, the racket politics of black and other Democrats, and at worst a paranoiac narcissistic trap for anyone who might be willing to think radically about political and social change in the U.S.. \u2014 The more sensible people have done what the rest of America has, come to avoid the madness \u2014 or the simple cretinism \u2014 of such politics as much as possible.<\/p>\n The degree to which it has at all, American politics and culture has tried to address the social concerns of black people according to a peculiar and confounding mixture of the older Civil Rights and subsequent Black Power political models \u2014 think of the successful conflation of the diametrically opposed politics of MLK, Jr. and Malcolm X by Spike Lee, for instance \u2014 for an entire generation, without at all improving the lot of the greater portion of black Americans.<\/p>\n This presents a paradox, and the Obama election is a very good emblem for it. For it is truly the case that Obama does not stand at the head of a groundswell of a social movement but rather only a successful marketing tweak of Democratic Party electioneering. The inability to critique Obama without recourse to de-authenticating his \u201cblackness,\u201d which everyone feels to be a hollow move, exposes the utter contemptuousness of what stands for \u201cpolitics\u201d today. \u2014 In the end, the election really will hinge on whether Obama as an image makes people feel better than John McCain does. This is an outrage, but not especially outrageous given the state of American politics today. But at least now political symbolism has developed so that the image of a \u201cblack man\u201d can be one of jejune \u201chope\u201d (and not only for black Americans), and no longer just a jigaboo bugaboo, as the Republicans (and many Democrats) have made it their cynical trade to ply disingenuously and opportunistically for the past generation, finding it an increasingly less successful ploy to pull off today.<\/p>\n Perhaps young (black) people have embraced Obama precisely because they have become so \u201csick and tired of being sick and tired\u201d with the politics of their parents and grandparents. Perhaps it is enough that Obama means turning the page, even if the basic story remains the same. Change is its own value \u2014 if only because it represents an opportunity. \u2014 In this case it is the opportunity presented by the failure of \u201cblack politics.\u201d<\/p>\n The election of Barack Obama will not solve the problems faced by the greater lot of black Americans, but it might at least deliver the coup de gr\u00e2ce for a politics that was not working for social improvement anyway. And this should be welcomed \u2014 at least by anyone who is honestly concerned with the politics of substantial reform and emancipatory transformation of life in the U.S.<\/p>\n Those on the \u201cLeft\u201d who thought it would take a revolution \u2014 of whatever kind \u2014 to have a black leader have had a profoundly mistaken social imagination. It turns out that racism was not the kind of problem they thought it was. The problems facing black Americans were both less and more intractable than they thought. They have mistaken the political significance of anti-black racism \u2014 and black Americans have paid the price for this depoliticization of their social grievances.<\/p>\n The election of Obama will be an event. It is a signal that we need not be held back any longer by the invidious illusions the prior \u201cLeft\u201d bequeathed us \u2014 amidst the botched world they have made. We have been stifled too long under the weight of their obfuscations and rationalizations, while society has gone to hell \u2014 or has gone, if you prefer, to \u201cNixonland\u201d (the title of a recent book by Rick Perlstein): The \u201cLeft\u201d has been complicit in the degradation of politics by mirroring the \u201cculture wars\u201d unleashed by the Right, becoming caught up in symbolic imagery, as in the late-\u201960s Black Power turn, at the expense of real political progress.<\/p>\n As Adolph Reed has pointed out, Obama might indeed represent the \u201csevering\u201d of the \u201clast threads\u201d potentially linking anti-racist and anti-capitalist politics. But the specific ways these have been \u201clinked\u201d in the social imagination and politics \u2014 the ideology \u2014 of the \u201cLeft,\u201d for more than a generation, have not helped but actually worked to the detriment of either addressing the social problems faced by most black Americans or addressing the problems of capitalism in the U.S.<\/p>\n Perhaps the very attempt to address these two sets of issues in identical terms, as if struggling against racism and capitalism were not only indissolubly linked but were somehow the same thing, fudging the issue of how to articulate them, was the mistake, especially as the struggle against racism and for \u201cblack empowerment\u201d came, since the late \u201860s, to take the place of the struggle for working class empowerment and against capitalism.<\/p>\n Capitalist politics since the 1960s has succeeded in effectively separating, neutralizing and eliminating both agendas, empowering working class people and ameliorating social conditions for black people, and both in the name of \u201cblack politics,\u201d which today does not require reform but abolition. \u201cBlack politics\u201d has done nothing to empower black working-class people, but only to chain them, in a more or less roundabout way, to the Democratic Party and its capitalist politics. So we do not need \u201cbetter\u201d black politics, but rather to overcome such politics entirely. We have stood sorely in need of a specifically working class politics that can effectively speak to (black) workers comprehensively, to all aspects of their social reality and political empowerment.<\/p>\n This need can be found reflected in the fact that Obama leads in the current electoral polls of all lower-income people, including more than 10 points among \u201cwhite\u201d workers. \u2014 So much for the specter of the supposedly so intractable racism of the \u201cwhite working class\u201d that the post-\u201960s \u201cLeft\u201d has peddled so hard and for so long! Instead of this, pursuing the chimera of some kind of purportedly \u201cprogressive\u201d black nationalism or other distinctly \u201cblack\u201d politics has sent the \u201cLeft\u201d so far around the bend that it has become unable the recognize the true nature and character \u2014 and range of varieties \u2014 of black conservatism (including among working class people), of the inherently conservative nature of \u201cblack politics\u201d itself. \u2014 Hence, Obama.<\/p>\n With Obama we might be able to wake from the nightmarish \u201cdream\u201d of \u201cblack politics:\u201d in the \u201cmainstream,\u201d in both the miserable Democratic Party ethnic racket variety and the cynical and phony \u201csobriety\u201d of black Republicanism; and, among \u201cradicals,\u201d the \u201crevolutionary suicide\u201d of which the Black Panther Huey P. Newton spoke, as well as what Frantz Fanon and the late Malcolm X called the \u201csickness and madness\u201d of black nationalism \u2014 only to perhaps be able to face our grim social realities more squarely. If Obama represents the \u201cend\u201d of \u201cblack politics,\u201d this should be welcomed, not least as a salutary \u2014 if painful \u2014 shock to the bad \u201cLeft.\u201d<\/p>\n The surprising \u201cblack face\u201d of conservatism Obama reveals ought to send reeling \u2014 and finally into the \u201cdustbin of history\u201d \u2014 the complex of assumptions involved in \u201cblack politics,\u201d so that we can interrogate what it was that it was supposed to accomplish, for it clearly has not, and perhaps never could.<\/p>\n The Obama election will be an event \u2014 in that it will not be one. Nothing will change. But this might help the \u201cLeft\u201d to change \u2014 certainly some for the worse, clinging to ever more demented and ineffectual \u201cblack politics,\u201d but perhaps also some others for the better, who might finally extricate themselves from the trap such politics has presented for more than a generation. | \u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n Originally published in <\/em>The Platypus Review<\/strong> #6 (September 2008).\u00a0<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The end of “black politics” Chris Cutrone THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA will be an event. But it has proven confusing for most on the \u201cLeft,\u201d who claim to want to overcome anti-black racism and achieve social justice. Rejection of Obama on this basis has been as significant as the embrace of his candidacy. There […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12,24,23,15,6],"class_list":["post-331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-12","tag-anti-black-racism","tag-neoliberalism","tag-obama-era","tag-the-platypus-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=331"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2379,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/331\/revisions\/2379"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}