 |
The cheering for Obama's victory has been exhilarating, and the portraits of emotional reactions, especially among African-Americans, inspirational. But the language used to celebrate the results of this historic presidential race has confirmed some nagging fears that I have held throughout this election: that Obama's victory would be used as evidence that structural racial barriers for black Americans have been removed. In short, that we have finally overcome. The media is already proclaiming victory over racism-the New York Times exclaimed "Obama Elected President as Racial Barriers Fall," and Ward Connerly, the anti-affirmative action activist, has announced that Obama's victory means that "we have overcome the scourge of race." All of this sort of enthusiasm is likely to be reactivated during the inauguration.
As a person raised in Harlem and the Bronx who studies African-American culture and social issues, this moment is significant for me. I am especially thrilled for my parents and parents-in-law whose generation of African-Americans were profoundly mistreated by this nation and who were refused access to a staggering array of rights, privileges and human dignity.
This moment is historic indeed, and it is true that this multi-racial, multi-class embrace of Obama shatters the mainstream currency that old brand of racial exclusion and hatred. At the same time, it's important to keep in mind two things: that hostile, categorical exclusion of blacks has been on the wane for quite some time; and that racial inequality remains, though in less blatant, overt.
The powerful impact of the civil rights mandate for social, political and cultural integration has rendered bizarre the kind of exclusions and raw hatred that was normal fewer than 35 years ago. Mainstream popular cultural depictions of black people as "normal middle class families" have likely helped neutralize this legacy as well. The success of shows like The Cosby Show, others featuring black presidents and films featuring black heroes speak to this shift. And in the "real" world, (although for many people, I'd suggest that mass media images are "real") important and visible black people-such as Condeleeza Rice, Clarence Thomas, and Colin Powell-have been appointed to critically important and highly visible positions in the governance of our nation. These visible and impressive leaders may have instilled confidence in the idea of black leadership among what researchers say is a large group of "ambivalent whites" (whites who do not consider themselves racist but who, when pressed, easily resort to negative racial generalizations and deny white racial privilege). I suspect their support of Obama was crucial in this election. Yet despite extensive changes, vast forms of structurally-reinforced racial inequality remain. African-American people of all classes continue to face profound discrimination in the workplace, in the granting of mortgages and regarding access to housing, significant income and astonishing wealth disparities. The working class and poor confront unconscionable educational inequities and criminal justice system practices that have racial effects and sometimes anti-black intent.
While Obama's victory is nothing short of extraordinary, his milestone does not wash away these sobering and systemic problems. I fear that for people already disposed to turn away from these realities and for others who consider black behavior the culprit for all of these inequities, Obama's victory will prove that these problems have been transcended-that African-Americans who claim they have experienced racism or who remain trapped in the underclass are there by volition or worse, by a cultural brand of natural selection. "How could," I can hear people already saying in my head, "this be about racism? We have a black President!"
This post-civil rights era has serious racial challenges that cannot be tackled with civil rights era definitions of racism. This new age is defined by the powerful gap between a deep form of racial inequality that flows underneath a proud and heartfelt rhetoric of color-blindness and a widely held belief in racial equality itself.
Popular culture, and hip hop in particular, provides an interesting lens for examining the racial projections we continue to celebrate. Alongside the Huxtables and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, we've embraced Jay-Z, 50 Cent, TI and 'Lil Wayne-highly profitable artists who have crafted rap music careers around ghetto-based autobiographical tales about drug dealing, violence, sexual excess and rogue capitalism from the margins of society.
Over the past decade, these stories have spun away from the realities of ghetto suffering. Today, the ghetto is understood as a cultural state of mind rather than a form of institutional oppression that has continued in one form or another since the Great Black Migration. Celebration of these packaged ghetto stories by mainstream listeners who remain oblivious to the ongoing forms of discrimination that maintain ghettos, captures the kind of ambivalent post-civil rights racism about which we must be alarmed. This is a powerful contradiction that our well-worn language of racism-as-racial-hatred is ill-equipped to handle.
If we think that the Obama victory means that we've reached the promised land, that institutional racism is gone and perhaps, impossible, because we have a black President, then we will have squandered the power of this extraordinary moment. We will have twisted a mandate for change into the service of the status quo. The kind of change so many Americans many already believe his victory represents is possible, but only in the wake of our honest and deep political will to confront this challenge.
Tricia Rose is Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University, and author of The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop and Why It Matters (Basic Civitas, December 2008)
Additional Commentary:
> "Monkey Business"
> Music, Social Justice and Market Manipulations
> Deadly Silences
> What It Means to Act Affirmatively
|
|
