black president (the WHAT DOES OBAMA MEAN thread)

[gypsy]

i was gonna call this "ok crackers lissen up," but i thought that might get us off on the wrong foot. so instead let's start with the theme song.

ok, benediction out of the way, the question here is what does obama mean? what does a black man being nominated for president mean? what does the possibility of a black president mean? or as snm put it...

please answer the questions and tell me what i am thinking about the possibility of a black person being elected to the white house. what exactly does it mean to me? how specifically does it affect me? what change will be wrought in my personal situation if a black person becomes president? how will my life be transfomed after this historic event? and especially what -- precisely -- is it that i am not talking about that i would be talking about about obama's race if only, oh, if only, if only, if only i weren't a defensive and in denial racist?

these are good questions. i don't necessarily expect this thread to turn out a whole lot better than the one that quote comes from -- i.e. lots of white people explaining why it just doesn't matter and just isn't that big a deal, hey man, we're all cool here, that might matter to you, but dude, it's just not something i think about a lot....

but who knows? something interesting could come of it. and anyway the blab being the blab, we'll be posting condi rice slash fiction by page 4. nevertheless. we'll see where it goes.

[gypsy]

some of what i think is this:

-- being black is not barack obama's only quality, obviously. he's smart, he's ambitious, he's a politician. he's an egomaniac. (president is definitely an only-egomaniacs-need-apply job.) he's a liberal. he's a millionaire. (a relatively new millionaire, but a millionaire is a millionaire.) still. he's black. it is the salient fact of his public and political life. his entire career as a politician is built around his awareness of his race, and his awareness of other people's awareness of his race. so his position as a presidential nominee cannot be approached on any substantive basis without coming to terms with the role race has played in his public life and will continue to play. he has made a relatively big gamble that he understands its dynamics well enough to navigate it more to his advantage than disadvantage. the democratic party has, with some reluctance and a fair amount of anxiety, made an even bigger gamble on the same thing: that this is the year we can elect a black president.

-- but "being black" is a pretty complicated thing, particularly in obama's case. on the other thread, cafkia made the sensible observation that blackness is as much a cultural fact as a biological one (just ask an octoroon), and so if obama identifies as black (which he does) then he's black. still, the degree to which obama's blackness is elective is interesting and unusual. having grown up with a white mother, an indonesian stepfather and white grandparents, in the only state in america where whites are not a majority, his self-identification as "black" took a while. i haven't read his book, but i gather that's partly what it's about, how he over time took on that identity and then had to learn what it meant to be black in america. so his construction of his racial identity was self-conscious, to a really unusual degree.

-- and that's where some of the initial questions came in, early on the campaign: was he "black enough"? could other black americans identify with him, with his background, or would they think he was an impostor? the answer came after iowa, and as usual the question was all wrong. it turned out that a lot of the black uncertainty about obama that had been showing up in polls was not about his blackness, but about whether white people would ever really vote for a black guy. the question was wrong because, like cafkia said, if you look black and you call yourself black, in america you're black. cops pulling you over or cabbies refusing to pick you up do not stop in their decision-making process to wonder if you're maybe a mixed-race guy with an indonesian stepfather. that's not how it works. self-constructed or not, obama's a black man.

[gypsy]

-- which, all of that, what does it mean to his political career? i think what he realized early on was the ways race could work to his advantage. it made him stand out. being a smart guy at columbia is good, being a smart black guy at columbia is better. becoming editor of the harvard law review is a nice resume-builder, becoming the first black editor of the harvard law review gets you national media attention. he obviously realized there was leverage to be had in his racial identity, and he learned how to use it. in articles about his time in the illinois legislature, i think it's interesting that there are all these accounts of how he kind of deliberately separated himself from the chicago contingent and started fraternizing with the downstate (white) legislators. that's an obvious prelude to a statewide run, but it also takes a fair amount of self-confidence for a youngish black guy from the city to be courting the white country boys. my guess is that he understood that the white country boys, at least some of them, might be flattered by the attention. it's the my-black-friend syndrome (which stephen colbert also does well -- i think the colbert/daily show people are generally really sharp on race). and which the clinton people also understood -- the hillary adviser who sneered that people wanted obama to be their "imaginary hip black friend" -- but they got mean and churlish about it and ended up making themselves look bad.

-- and the reason that hillary-adviser line sounded bad was because obama's racial appeal is a little bit different than "i'll be your cool black friend." it's that, hey, look, we're all cool enough people that it's not even a big deal to you that i'm black. even though of course we both know that i'm black and everything that entails. but, you know, we're cool with it. it's a very flattering line, in a low-key way. low-keyness is really pretty central to obama's persona. and there's a reason for that too ...

there's a whole lot more, but i can only write so much about this shit per day. even i have my limits.

[HailBop]

gypsy is roaming in broader territory and may have crafted an assumption in how snm (or the generic prototypical voter) must approach his thinking on some level, even if subconsciously...

but the larger point on the subject in my view is that those among the electorate who are just breezing the race issue should just passively congratulate themse\ves.

I;d start with separating the larger ongoing issues of race in our society from the specific question of whether voters are factoring race with this candidate (positively or negatively.) It's still a "so what?" for me, I'll celebrate the historical later and hope we reap progress with the issue no matter who wins.

Some some voters will have a sense of this historic importance in their decision, but I think when pundits talk of Obama transcending race, you might understand where snm is coming from. Among many voters who see themselves as post-racial (at least in their political worlds,) I can see where race doesn't register as a significant aspect of where they are thinking in any calculus of their decision. It's like insisting that the surge "worked." There's so many influences and initiatives playing out in the maelstrom that the true essence of any individual's position on a subject is potentially infinite within the Etch-a-Sketch.

[gypsy]

well, you know, i'm sure there were people who said "so what" about jackie robinson too. or rolled their eyes at the "i have a dream" speech. you know, whatever man, who cares? understandable racial defenses. but saying "so what" or rolling eyes didn't diminish the significance of those things, any more than they diminish the significance of a potential black president. one individual thinking -- or strenuously, laboriously insisting -- that something is no big deal does not ipso facto make it so. history is what it is.

but really the whole debate about "is it important or not" is ridiculous to me. it's obviously important. what's interesting to me is how and in what ways.

[HailBop]

well, you know, i'm sure there were people who said "so what" about jackie robinson too. or rolled their eyes at the "i have a dream" speech. you know, whatever man, who cares? understandable racial defenses. but saying "so what" or rolling eyes didn't diminish the significance of those things, any more than they diminish the significance of a potential black president. one individual thinking -- or strenuously, laboriously insisting -- that something is no big deal does not ipso facto make it so. history is what it is.

but really the whole debate about "is it important or not" is ridiculous to me. it's obviously important. what's interesting to me is how and in what ways.

speaking for myself, the larger issues of race are more important to me than who wins this election. And peoples' problems with race are within their souls or lack of... ain't going to put that to referendum.

And what presidential contender gave this "I have a dream speech" you speak of??

I just don't see the office of president being the place to effect changes with the problems. I see so many other issues needing attention and fitting the job of running a government.

the guy wows me beyond the side issue of his race or the potential relevance of good things that accrue to his happening to be black.

[gypsy]

I just don't see the office of president being the place to effect changes with the problems. What presidential candidate gave this "I have a dream speech" you speak of??

right but isn't what you're saying about obama -- that your admiration of him goes "beyond race" -- sort of the idealized realization of that speech? the office of the president has enormous symbolic power. we build monuments to these guys. we put them on our coins. we carve them into mountains! the president is as close as a democratic state allows itself to get to a king/pope/warrior chief. the symbolism of who occupies that office is likewise enormous. and it hasn't been any accident of history that we have an unbroken 220-year string of white men occupying it.

there are two things here: the president's legislative role and the president's symbolic role. they're often intertwined, especially in crisis. but they're also separate. you can accomplish different things on those two planes. in the case of the first black president, the symbolism is going to overwhelm almost anything he does legislatively, in terms of historic resonance. that doesn't mean that while he's in office people are going to wake up every morning and say, "oh, we have a black president!" familiarity breeds contempt, and within 6 months we'd all have plenty to bitch about. but closeness also clouds perspective, and seen through the lens of american (and world) history, the symbolic fact of the first black president would pretty much trump all other aspects of the presidency. or if not trump them, at least define them -- provide the context in which they were seen.

which is maybe part of what i mean, really -- race is the context for obama. i've been saying subtext, and it's that too, but it's more encompassing than subtext.

[tardisrider]

I'm not going to dissect everything that's been written or even pretend to have read most of it. I think it's a big deal if only because of the fact that by even seriously entertaining the possibility of a black president, it shows that We The People have grown in leaps and bounds in a short time.

I remember hearing older kids in school talk about the idea that the States might someday have a black president, but that was usually in hushed tones of some far-off, apocalyptic nightmare of a future. Of course, some people still think that way, but I've personally witnessed people whom I thought would never support a black candidate now doing so. That is a positive change in those individuals, and I'm happy to see it.

I'd like to see a Jewish president. I wouldn't vote for someone just because he or she was a Jew, but the possibility seems much less unrealistic (can I say even less shocking?) now than it used to.

I'm going to sit the rest of this one out and wait for the Condi slash on page 4.

[HailBop]

I just gotta take a last parting shot at this:

well, you know, i'm sure there were people who said "so what" about jackie robinson too. or rolled their eyes at the "i have a dream" speech. you know, whatever man, who cares?

you're citing two examples of historic milestones that WERE all about race.

you want to elevate the significance of Obama on these terms? i don't know.

right but isn't what you're saying about obama -- that your admiration of him goes "beyond race" -- sort of the idealized realization of that speech? the office of the president has enormous symbolic power. we build monuments to these guys. we put them on our coins. we carve them into mountains! the president is as close as a democratic state allows itself to get to a king/pope/warrior chief.

yeah, so what's with all the symbolic worship? HELL, THINGS IS BROKEN! we'aint going to be c'graven granite images for a long time.

[gypsy]

I'd like to see a Jewish president. I wouldn't vote for someone just because he or she was a Jew, but the possibility seems much less unrealistic (can I say even less shocking?) now than it used to.

yeah, and see here's where ... gah, i can't go into it right now, i need to go to bed. but the possibility of a black president is not only or even exactly mostly about the issues specific to black-white history in america. (although it's about those too, and i wouldn't want to minimize them.) it's more broadly about the symbolism of the "other" -- any "other" -- ascending to that position. it's not just about what obama is, but about what he isn't. if those doors are opened to one person who is not all of the things that have, to date, always been requirements for the position, then it creates possibilities for other people who also aren't those things. (even if their differences are different from obama's differences.)

I'm going to sit the rest of this one out and wait for the Condi slash on page 4.

"mr. prime minister," she purred, smiling wickedly, "we expect a full troop withdrawal by monday morning."
"you minx," he said, curling his upper lip in a slavic leer. "we won't leave until we got what we came for!"
"oh?" she asked, stepping close to him.
"and what ..." running her fingers lightly around his collar
" ... did you ..." loosening his tie
"...come for?" this last whispered forcefully into his right ear.
he trembled..."