I believe that many of those who “held their noses” and voted for Trump believe that he didn’t really mean all of the vile things he said and that he’s actually going to be a normal President.

Why would they think that? Because Trump is a white man, and our white male supremacist culture trains us to give white men every benefit of the doubt.

President Obama, who for his entire political career has consistently spoken words of decency and conciliation, has ceaselessly been called a liar and a secret terrorist supporter and worse. As a black man in our culture, he has been viewed with deep skepticism and distrust, distrust sown by Trump himself no less than anyone else.

The post Stop kidding yourself: Trump will not be a normal president appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Yesterday from 12:15 to about 2:15 in the afternoon, I marched with about a thousand other people from the spot where Mike Brown was killed up to West Florissant, then down to Chambers and concluding at Greater St. Marks, the former Catholic church St. Sebastian, which has become a gathering point for many of the peaceful protest efforts in Ferguson.

There were reporters there from as far away as Japan.

The crowd was about half white, half black. The mood was peaceful but passionate. People in cars driving by on West Florissant honked and gestured in support, as did people standing in their yards and watching. Numerous times I saw black men from our group of marchers go out of their way to shake the hands of County police officers who stood by alongside the march route. We chanted “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!” and “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” and sang “This Little Light of Mine.” My favorite sign held by a (white) marcher was “Mike Brown was our son.”

Though the news reports sometimes make Ferguson look and sound like a war-torn section of Baghdad or Gaza, and there had been some looting the previous night (curtailed by other protesters), many of the boarded-up businesses were still open, and West Florissant was fairly clean, thanks to the efforts of volunteers and protesters who’d come out to clean up. People with trash bags circulated during the march to pick up litter. Ferguson seemed like a place that was going on with life even in the midst of crisis. Leaving Ferguson on Saturday afternoon, one of my strongest feelings was that I wanted to come back, and to bring students with me to see for themselves this place that we’ve all been seeing on the news.

On Monday, as I do each year, I will talk to my African American Voices class about an essay called “Dragon Slayers,” by Jerald Walker, which will help us focus our study of the African American experience not primarily on white cruelty but on its flip side: black courage. I plan to ask my seniors where they see black courage in Ferguson. Some examples I can think of: Ron Johnson, Antonio French, Tef Poe, the protesters who held back looters and who got up early to clean up damage and board up broken windows, the Brown family itself in their calls for peace.

We’re watching history unfold before us. I really believe that what’s happening in Ferguson is about more than Mike Brown’s death, and I hope that it can be the beginning of a deep re-evaluation of where we are as a region and where we are as a nation, and a commitment to change. And I’d love it if my school, my friends, and my neighbors could be a part of that re-evaluation.

There’s a place for white courage in all of this, too—and I think it begins with simply listening, reading with an open mind about what’s happening, trying to understand, and then finding ways to help, including just being present for the peaceful protests in Ferguson, and understanding that this situation belongs to all of us.

The post Ferguson: How I’m going to discuss it in my classroom appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Back on August 8, 2012,  I published a piece on Occasional Planet in which I pondered the intense hatred that President Barack Obama inspires in some quarters. After considering several possible sources of that antipathy, like many others I concluded that racial prejudice must be the primary motivator.

Today at the New Yorker blog, Philip Gourevitch analyzes the supreme equanimity of Obama’s early-morning victory speech after this week’s election and offers another theory about why some people hate Obama:

 … watching him come to the podium and hold it, some of the reasons for that hatred were discernible. Obama is, above all, calm, cool—not needy in any way, and that absence of neediness, that pervasive cool, which reads to even his admirers at times like a slight, ironic detachment from his own eloquence, must seem to his detractors like an infuriating arrogance and remoteness. John Kennedy, who had the same gift of detachment, was often accused, quite fairly, of the same type of self-absorption and indifference to others. He carried no cash in his coat. Still—hate him? How, exactly? Why, precisely? (Republicans, who once saw the impotence and indignity of Democrats hating Reagan, their own detached man, should know better.) But it’s inevitable. Everybody admires the guy who never breaks a sweat—except the guys running alongside him in the race, who would at least like to see him making an effort.

The post Obama: Calm, cool, and hated for it appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The post Where’s the real Romney? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

During the administration of George W. Bush, I remember feeling a more or less chronic sense of despair and incredulity at the state my country was in. Lots of my friends felt the same way. And many others in this nation and in the world felt similarly. The distinguished historian Eric Foner wrote a Washington Post piece about W’s Presidency. It was called “He’s the Worst Ever.” Greg Brown, one of America’s greatest singer-songwriters, began performing a song in concert called “I Want My Country Back,” an anguished cry of despair about Bush’s America.

Why did we feel this way?

Thinking back, I can name several reasons I personally despised Bush as a president:

• the farces of the recount in Florida and the Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore

• war in Iraq

• surrender of environmental policy to industry

• torture

• tax breaks for the wealthy

• Bush’s blithe, dismissive personal manner, and his ineptitude with language

Today, three and a half years into the administration of Barack Obama, I think it’s obvious that some people feel the same level of disgust for him that I and others did for Bush. (Although I haven’t heard any distinguished historians call him the worst ever, nor any august singer-songwriters pouring out their despair in song.)

What I honestly want to think about here, though, is what specific reasons the Obama despisers could possibly have for despising Obama as a president.

* * *

Let’s think about the signature events in Obama’s time in the Oval Office:

• The Affordable Care Act? I can’t believe that anyone could hate Obama with a blazing passion over this one. For Pete’s sake, it started as an idea from a conservative think tank.

• The killing of Osama bin Laden? Only Noam Chomsky hates Obama for this one.

• The appointments of Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court? Too wonky to inspire much hate.

• The end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell? Nah. Polls indicated that almost 8 of 10 Americans favored ending this discriminatory policy.

• The economic stimulus? The bailout of the auto industry? Besides those who were actually helped by these, I don’t think most people even know what these measures really consisted of.

• The recession in general? I guess some people probably resent Obama for not catapulting the economy into high gear somehow and generating full employment, but I think people mostly realize that the President really doesn’t have the power to control something as massive and multifarious as the US economy.

• The growth of the deficit? This is certainly one that you hear from critics of Obama—that he has presided over an unprecedented expansion of government spending that is driving us into economic ruin. But, as this Washington Post graphic makes clear, the argument has serious problems. I doubt that much hatred of Obama is sincerely based on the deficit.

• His personal style and manner? Seems highly unlikely, given Obama’s winning personality, friendly smile, and facility with language.

* * *

I’ve given it my best shot, and I really cannot come up with any fact-based reasons to hate Obama.

You might have disagreements with him. You might be dissatisfied with some of the things that have happened on his watch. But it seems objectively true that nothing that has happened in Obama’s term of office could legitimately prompt the level of disgust and anger that numerous events during Bush’s presidency did.

It should be acknowledged that Obama does not inspire intense dislike as widespread as that inspired by Bush. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll indicated that 2 out 3 Americans say they like Obama.

I’m forced to conclude—as I have thought before and as many others have also concluded—that the high level of antipathy and derision that Obama inspires in a minority of Americans people is connected with his race: the facts that his father was African, his wife is African American, and he identifies himself as black.

Obama hatred is a thin stew—a few morsels of policy disagreement floating in a gravy of racial resentment, paranoiac birther fantasy, and simple prejudice. The good news is that, at this point in history, America’s appetite for such a stew seems relatively weak.

The post Hating Bush vs. Hating Obama appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Visiting Disney World with my family last week, I took in the show at the Hall of Presidents in the Magic Kingdom’s Liberty Square. After browsing through a small collection of Presidential memorabilia in the lobby of the theater (including a childhood autobiography Richard Nixon wrote in 1925 and a replica of the cowboy boots George W. Bush wore at one of his inaugurations), we entered the theater for the main event: a 20-minute presentation about the history of the Presidency, concluding with an animatronic display in which all 44 chief executives occupy the stage.

The map of the Magic Kingdom had made a big deal out of the fact that the Hall of Presidents show now features President Barack Obama. Indeed, during the show and afterwards, I found myself thinking about Obama. The presentation had been pretty simplistic (and how could it not be, covering over 200 years in around 20 minutes and having been designed for a mass, international audience?), arguing that the American presidency is unique because it is open to all citizens, no matter how humble their origins. “Only in America,” and all that. Who’s a better poster boy for that notion than Barack Obama?

Obama could have been portrayed as the consummation of the American promise. Even a kid of modest means from Hawaii, with a Kenyan father, born to a single mother, can grow up to be President. And Obama’s youthful, attractive family has the Camelot appeal of Kennedy’s. Obama could have been the feel-good conclusion to the whole show, a powerful piece of evidence that America is getting better and better, living up to its potential more fully with each passing year. Here is a President whose wife’s ancestors were slaves. Here is a President whose parents’ interracial relationship was illegal in sixteen states. Yet, to my mind at least, the show stopped short of explicitly making these connections.

In the course of writing this post, though, I poked around on the Internet a bit and found Disney aficionado Kevin Yee’s analysis of the Hall of Presidents show, posted shortly after it was revamped to its current state in 2009. Yee argues that the implications of the show’s narrative are clear and unmistakable:

The bottom line is that the show now offers park visitors an actual, honest to goodness thesis: everything in American presidential history, it claims by virtue of a new storyline, has been inexorably leading up to this moment, and the election of Barack Obama is the culmination of a long “development” in us as a culture and a society.

Lee predicts that the show will alienate some audience members, and says that he has witnessed some people reacting unfavorably to it.

When Obama was introduced by the recorded narrator in the show, there was a pregnant pause during which I waited, dreading the heckling that I thought might erupt from some Tea Party type in the crowd. But nobody spoiled the moment with nastiness—maybe it was the Disney magic winning out. The show concludes with a roll call of the Presidents seated and standing on stage, culminating in the animatronic Barack Obama reciting the oath of office and speaking about America as a land of “limitless possibilities” where “‘We the People’ means ALL the people.” (See also this interesting video of Obama doing the recording for the show.)

It will probably take another fifteen or twenty years for the partisan fervor surrounding Obama’s presidency to die down enough to allow Disney to present Obama explicitly as quintessentially American—as the consummation of Disney’s historical narrative about America—without offending some segment of the show’s audience. Some Americans’ political or racial attitudes prevent them from viewing Obama in this way.

I suspect, however, that come this November, one powerful force in the election will be the pull that Obama still has on the American imagination. We like to think of America as a place where anyone can become President, where racism and prejudice gradually fade away thanks to the heroic efforts of those who struggle for freedom, where hard work and talent can compete with money and privilege.

We live in a Disney nation—a land where people believe in fairy tales, a land that promises that dreams can come true. Barack Obama’s story flatters the Disney narrative of America, completes the Disney version of the American presidency. For that reason, despite America’s economic woes, Republican obstructionism, the raging of the birthers and Tea Partiers, the persistence of racism, and Mitt Romney’s huge campaign war chest, I think Obama will win in November. I don’t think America will turn down four more years of the dream.

The post Disney, Obama and the American dream appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In Memphis, they’ve turned the hotel where Martin Luther King was murdered into a museum honoring the Civil Rights Movement. Across the South, “Civil Rights tourism” is on the rise. Though not without ambiguities and controversy, this development at its best may represent an attempt to acknowledge the sins of the past, the courage of those who resisted evil, and the pernicious effects of racism on everyone.

St. Louis, as I discussed in an Occasional Planet piece a few months ago, has a foggy memory of its role in slavery, Jim Crow, and other forms of systemic racism. But sometimes we do try.

The other day I came across this in my Facebook news feed.

“St. Louis Freedom Suits in the Era of Henry Shaw” with Dr. Kenneth Winn, Librarian of the Missouri Supreme Court. Part of the Friends of Tower Grove Park Lecture series. FREE Today, 4/1 at Stupp Center, 3P.

I knew I had to go.

Dr. Kenneth Winn, former archivist for the State of Missouri, got a grant to archive St. Louis circuit court records. Combing through jumbled documents, each tri-folded, tied with a red ribbon, and covered with a fine layer of black dust from the original coal-fired heating system in the Old Courthouse, Winn gradually realized that he and his team were finding something remarkable. Between 1824 and 1845, scores of enslaved people sued in the St. Louis court, arguing that they should be free. Winn’s archivists have found more than three hundred such lawsuits over the past eight years.

Though freedom suits were also frequent in other border states like Kentucky and Maryland, as well as in Louisiana, the St. Louis collection of freedom suits is now the largest in the United States. St. Louis, it seems, is ground zero for important court cases in the African American freedom struggle. Consider Shelley v. Kraemer and Jones v. Mayer, groundbreaking cases that addressed restrictive covenants and racial discrimination in private real estate deals; or United States v. The City of Black Jack, another important decision against housing practices that had a discriminatory effect. All three of these cases originated in the St. Louis area.

In these nineteenth-century freedom suits, however, the issues were even more stark and personal: individuals bringing suit against slave masters, asserting that they were unfairly enslaved. Their arguments typically took one of three approaches:

1) A claim of maternal Indian descent: Native Americans at this time were not legally subject to enslavement (though in practice many were), and one’s legal status depended the legal status of one’s mother.

2) A claim of established residence in a free state or territory: This was the claim made by Dred and Harriet Scott, who had lived in free states for extended periods of time with their master, a military surgeon.

3) A claim that one (or one’s parent) had been a victim of kidnapping: Stealing people was a lucrative source of illicit income at this time. Such was the case with St. Louisan Lucy Delaney, whose 1891 narrative From the Darkness Cometh the Light is still read today as a remarkably detailed and accurate account of the author’s journey from slavery to freedom.

 Why St. Louis? 

At Tower Grove Park that Sunday afternoon, Winn explained that St. Louis attracted a lot of slave freedom suits because as a city that bordered a free state, it offered both a supportive community of free blacks as well as the chance of gaining the support of sympathetic whites.

Also, in 1824, shortly after Missouri’s controversial entry into the Union as a slave state, the state legislature amended its slave codes to allow slaves to sue for their freedom. In a remarkable move, the new codes also provided for taxpayer-funded legal counsel for slaves who brought these suits. Merely providing the right to sue was fairly meaningless, after all, since few slaves had the resources to mount successful legal cases.

Despite this remarkably liberal policy, slavery was entrenched in St. Louis. The city was founded in 1764 by Pierre Laclede and his stepson Auguste Chouteau, along with their slaves. When Auguste died, he owned some fifty slaves, ranging from elderly men to newborn babies. Auguste and his brother Pierre were ruthless slave masters who tried to disrupt the transfer of the Louisiana Territory to U.S. control because they feared that Thomas Jefferson would forbid slavery in the newly-acquired lands. Later, Pierre Chouteau, Jr., known as “Cadet,” would help to make sure that Missouri’s constitution permitted slavery—and later still he would help to fund the Sanford family’s legal work in Dred Scott v. Sanford. Though today the Chouteaus’ name carries the ring of St. Louis royalty, they were actually something like the Koch brothers: wealthy power brokers who worked behind the scenes to extend oppressive laws and promote inequality.

Dr. Winn presented a fascinating account of the way freedom suits worked on the ground. More women than men filed these suits; men were more apt to take to their feet to escape slavery, while women often had children to think about. If a slave sued for freedom, the master was forbidden to sell the slave away or beat him or her in retaliation. If the slave feared that such retribution was going to occur regardless of the law, he or she would be removed to the city jail and possibly hired out to someone else. The wages paid would be held until after the case was settled. If the slave won freedom, the money was given to the newly emancipated winner. If not, the money went to the slave master, who would often then sell the slave away as revenge.

Some of the lawyers who represented slaves were scorned in the same way that some lawyers today are considered “ambulance chasers”—seen as sucking public funds to defend a despised class of people. On the other hand, some very prominent attorneys took on these freedom suits, not because they believed slavery was wrong, but because they believed it was right—but only if done legally. Edward Bates, for instance, a slave-owner who later became Lincoln’s attorney general, was Lucy Delaney’s attorney and made an impassioned argument on her behalf.

In 1845, the “Golden Age of Freedom Suits” in St. Louis came to an end when the flow of public funding for them was abruptly shut off. Dred and Harriet Scott’s case, filed shortly before the cessation of this funding, was seemingly a routine case, for they clearly had established residence in a free state.

The Scotts lost on a technicality in the St. Louis circuit court, but as their case was appealed to the Missouri Supreme Court, according to Dr. Winn, a lot of white people decided to throw a lot of money into making it a test case to bring down the “once free, always free” rule. Indeed, the state court explicitly broke with precedent, declaring that revolutionary times demanded a new approach. “Once free, always free” was no more: it didn’t matter where the Scotts had resided.

With powerful people like the Chouteaus arrayed against Dred and Harriet Scott, the case made its way to the Supreme Court, and in 1857 Chief Justice Roger Taney authored the devastating majority opinion that African Americans had no rights a white man was bound to respect and that, in fact, the Missouri Compromise of 1820 was unconstitutional. Congress, attempting to legislate a compromise to the issue of slavery, had exceeded its powers, the Court decided. (This decision sounds eerily familiar today as the Supreme Court considers the fate of the Affordable Care Act.)

The last freedom suit in St. Louis was filed in 1860, and in five years’ time such suits would be moot.

How should a city reckon with its past?

Surely Dr. Winn’s talk—and the research it was based on—represents one way of doing so. The story he told was complex, as was the picture of St. Louis that emerged. Here was a place whose very founder and his descendents were major forces in the perpetuation of chattel slavery. Yet it was also a place that offered a relatively hospitable climate for enslaved people who risked everything to seek justice and freedom through the law. It was a place where a slave-owning lawyer could make an impassioned speech in order to free a brave African American girl who had been illegally enslaved.

In order to reckon with our complex past, we St. Louisans need to hear these types of stories and to share them with each other. In our classrooms, Black History Month needs to be a time of searching for new understandings. We may know about the March on Washington or the bridge at Selma, but how much do we know about all the important struggles that took place in our own city? If we don’t understand the complex history of race in St. Louis, do we have any hope of understanding the complex present?

The post When slaves sued for freedom: A city reckons with its past appeared first on Occasional Planet.

The other day I took a bike ride along the Riverfront Trail in St. Louis.  The trail runs north from Laclede’s Landing, following the Mississippi until it crosses over the river at the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. Winding through flood walls, junkyards, at least one homeless encampment, and other industrial sites, the trail offers a cross section of a part of the city that the average pedestrian or motorist never sees.

Near the Merchant’s Bridge, I was surprised to discover an historical site called the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing. Across from a corrugated metal building, a mural on a white concrete wall depicts several dark figures—escaping slaves—boarding a canoe on the moonlit Mississippi. In the other corner of the painting, menacing figures train rifles on them.

I teach a high school course on African American history and literature, so I took note of the mural (and snapped a picture of it as well), planning on mentioning it to my students that Monday. I biked to within eyesight of the bridge then turned around to head back to the trailhead. On my return, I noticed a plaque near the memorial. Although I almost sped by it in my rush to get home (I was late), I turned back and took the time to read it.

The marker explained that on the morning of May 21, 1855, a group of runaway slaves, guided by a free black woman named Mary Meachum, crossed the Mississippi River at that spot near the Merchant’s Bridge.  On the Illinois side, they encountered a policeman and other authorities. Shots were fired. Some escaped. One member of the group was killed. Mary Meachum, the widow of prominent black clergyman John Barry Meachum, was arrested and jailed, and identified in the press as a participant in the Underground Railroad.

All of this was fascinating, but what struck me with particular force was a detail in the middle of the text on the marker. Some of the slaves involved in the incident belonged to “the prominent St. Louisan Henry Shaw.”

In this day and age in America, no doubt as a result of the labors of activists and historians of the African American experience, most reasonably enlightened people have considered the paradoxes of our national ideals and heroes: that Thomas Jefferson, for example, who wrote that line in the Declaration of Independence about all men being created equal, owned slaves (and fathered children by them). One of George Washington’s slaves actually fled from Washington’s estate during Washington’s time as our first President.

Nevertheless, the revelation that Henry Shaw owned slaves struck me with surprising force. It hit close to home. I live on the periphery of Shaw’s garden (which opened four years after the incident commemorated at the Freedom Crossing). I coach my daughters’ soccer practices in Tower Grove Park, which Shaw bequeathed to the city of St. Louis in 1868. On a couple of occasions I’ve toured Shaw’s house. I’ve held my daughters up to the windows of the mausoleum where Shaw is buried. For a while, my oldest daughter even used Shaw as a kind of yard stick for how old people and things are. “Was Henry Shaw alive then?” she would ask. In my mind, Shaw had always been a kindly, philanthropic environmentalist—not a slavemaster.

When I got home from my bike ride, I poked around on the Internet and read more about the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing site in a fine St. Louis Magazine article by Jeannette Cooperman. Cooperman’s account added an even more disturbing twist to the story, one that further tainted my sense of the man who is the namesake for a street, a neighborhood, and even a coffee shop near my house. As punishment for the escape, Shaw authorized a slave trader to sell one of the escapees, Esther, down the river to hard labor. He did not sell her two children, however.

As Angela Da Silva points out in Cooperman’s article, St. Louisans tend not to think of Missouri as part of the South. We’re the Midwest, we say. A Border State. We conveniently forget about the fact that the Border States were slave states, specifically exempted from the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War so as not to jeopardize their tenuous allegiance to the Union.

But hearing this shocking story about Henry Shaw is an unforgettable reminder that Missouri is actually the Upper South. The streets we walk were walked by slaves and slaveowners. I live on grounds that were once tended by slaves. One of our city’s most famous benefactors owned slaves and cruelly enforced their subjection.

“I wonder where the slaves lived?” my wife wondered when I told her the story. I thought of Henry Shaw’s house and the basement windows into which my daughters and I have curiously peered. Those basement rooms were for the “servants,” I think I remember hearing during a tour. Was servant just a euphemism for slave?

The story of Mary Meachum, of Henry Shaw and his slaves, offers a rather chilling lesson in historical memory. It speaks of the ways we deceive ourselves about our past, allowing ugly realities and episodes to fade and be replaced by comforting misconceptions.

In the Missouri Botanical Garden today, less than a mile from Henry Shaw’s country home, is a garden dedicated to the life and work of George Washington Carver. This stately memorial pays tribute to the botanical contributions of a famous African American scientist. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, yet the Carver Garden also seems a distinctly contemporary example of political correctness that avoids the discomfiting questions raised by a memorial like the Mary Meachum Freedom Crossing.

The Freedom Crossing site, in the end, testifies not only to the moral failings of the venerable Henry Shaw, but also to the courage and commitment of black St. Louisans. It’s a shame that it’s virtually hidden from public view.

That hiddenness itself carries a message.

The post Evil and the garden appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Daedalus, the journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, published in 1965 two issues on “The Negro American.” Some 56 years later, in 2011, the journal has published a kind of follow-up, a two-volume issue on race in the age of Obama. The first issue, edited by Washington University’s own Gerald Early, takes a humanities-centered approach. The second, edited by Lawrence D. Bobo of Harvard, features the work of social scientists. Both issues make for fascinating reading—perhaps the most varied and learned discussions of present-day racial issues in America available in one place anywhere. (You can buy the Daedalus  journals for $13 apiece.)

I recently read with particular interest an article called “Barack Obama & American Racial Politics,” by a trio of eminent political scientists, Rogers M. Smith, Desmond S. King, and Philip A. Klinkner. This article framed the history of racial politics and political alliances with great clarity, and its analysis of the current moment struck me as being absolutely correct. Although the authors’ description of President Obama’s political acumen gives me great hope, their larger points about the realities of race in America  serve as disquieting reminders of the challenges we face.

The article describes three eras of racial politics in American history, each divided by a transitional period: 1) the era of slavery (1790 to 1865); 2) the era of Jim Crow (mid-1890s to mid-1960s); and 3) the era of race-conscious controversies (1979 to the present).

Most distinctive about our current era, the era of race-conscious controversies, according to the authors, is how neatly racial alliances match up with partisan alliances. Unlike previous eras, in which a variety of positions toward slavery and segregation could be found in either of the two major parties, in our current era, “Republicans regularly endorse color-blind policies, while Democrats support race-conscious ones.” This partisan division means that even though the racial issues currently at stake may be less dramatic and stark than the issues of slavery and segregation, they seem even more intractable because they are tied to the political fortunes of one party or the other.

As Lyndon Johnson brought an official end to the Jim Crow era of de jure segregation, he remarked that he had lost the south for the Democratic Party for a generation. The authors note that “he was more right than he knew,” pointing out that no Democratic presidential candidate has won a majority of the white vote since LBJ himself was elected in 1964.  Nevertheless, Johnson’s Great Society legislation—e.g, the Voting Rights Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Higher Education Act—also led to changes in the electorate overall that eventually made possible the presidency of Obama.

One of the most interesting observations in the article is that “With the emergence of each new structure of rival racial alliances, members of both alliances have professed allegiance to the resolution of the previous era’s disputes.” Republicans accuse Democrats of betraying Martin Luther King’s dream that his children would be judged by the content of their character and without regard to the color of their skin. Democrats, in turn, accuse Republicans of willfully ignoring the enduring inequalities that have been left unchanged by civil rights gains.

The authors note that most white people oppose race-conscious measures to alleviate inequality—and even white Democrats favor them somewhat half-heartedly. So Barack Obama as a candidate had to tread very cautiously in discussing these matters, expressing support instead for policies that would appear race-neutral but actually have a disproportionately beneficial effect for African Americans and Latinos. (Health care reform falls into this camp, as does, interestingly, Michelle Obama’s campaign against obesity.) Meanwhile, John McCain had to be careful about overt race-baiting during the campaign since his party professed an ideology of color-blindness. Yet, as we all remember, issues of race simmered just under the surface throughout the run-up to the election.

Despite Obama’s adroit navigation of the treacherous currents of race in America during the 2008 campaign and his impressive record of achievements as president, the 2010 midterm elections serve as only one reminder of the challenges that Obama faces in bringing progressive change—and, indeed, in leading America out of the era of race-conscious controversies and into a new and, one hopes, happier era.

The authors note that Obama has used his personal story as an emblem of the American motto of e pluribus unum, as a call to Americans to set aside divisions and instead work together to find common ground and compromises that can help us move forward as a country. As the earlier part of the article makes clear, however, these divisions are not so easily set aside. Moreover, the approach of using universal or race-neutral programs to effect changes to racial inequality often falls short of producing substantial change.

President Obama is both admired and mocked for his seeming unflappability, his coolness. That coolness was probably an essential characteristic for his ascendancy to the White House. On the level of image, it no doubt assured some white voters that he was not a threatening “angry black man”; on a more practical level, his equanimity probably allowed him to make wise strategic decisions that helped him win the election and achieve the political victories that he has won while in office. At the same time, the president’s critics have sometimes found him to be overly aloof, too distant from the fray, too calculatingly aware of the long-range strategy to get involved in the heat of political battle.

In my own limited experience with race-conscious controversies, I have also found coolness to be a useful virtue. Assuming the best of those who might criticize me, being slow to take offense, being willing to compromise even with opponents who may seem irrational or malicious—I have found these to be strategies that effectively avoid inflamed and destructive conflict. And so I tend to trust President Obama.

But was the election of the first African American president the momentous event that has ended the third period of racial politics in American and propelled us into a period of transition? Will his re-election in 2012 be the final turning point in ending this third era? And what would a new era look like?

A new era would seem to require both a diminishment in awareness of race as well as a diminishment in the inequities that correlate to race in America. As we move toward an America in which there is no longer a single racial majority, and in which economic inequality reaches ever greater proportions, it seems unlikely that either of those two requirements will be attained. Even the two-term presidency of Barack Obama, whom I believe to be an uncommonly brilliant man, will thus probably not spell the end of our current era of racial politics.

Obama’s coolness may indeed be a great presidential virtue. Yet the two previous eras of racial politics in America—slavery and Jim Crow—ended only after periods of intense heat: the massive upheavals of the Civil War and the Civil Rights revolution. As I look into the future, I feel a bit of trepidation as I consider the suffering and strife that may accompany the end of our current era and the transition to the next.

The post Racial politics and Obama: A new era? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Watching the coverage of President Obama’s speech about the killing of Osama bin Laden, I find myself in agreement with various friends (on Facebook and elsewhere) who have expressed uneasiness with the crowing over this development.  I’m uneasy with the celebration of an assassination, leery of reprisals, and put off by the tackiness of citizens singing “We Are the Champions” in response to a bloody shootout.

I thought Obama’s speech framed the killing with great care and sobriety. I think what we saw in Obama’s speech was the President taking personal responsibility—and, yes, credit—for bin Laden’s death. It was the statement of a President who understood what he had done and why.

Some have pointed out that yesterday was the anniversary of George W. Bush’s infamous speech on the aircraft carrier in front of the unfortunately premature “Mission Accomplished” banner.

I think an even more interesting contrast, however, is with this clip of Bush talking about bin Laden just six months after 9/11:

Bush’s casual swagger and smirking seem so painfully inadequate, so utterly different from Obama’s gravitas and moral understanding.

Bush mocks the idea of “focusing on one person” and proudly notes that he doesn’t spend that much time thinking about bin Laden. He asserts that those who worry about bin Laden don’t understand the “scope of the mission”—and that terror is so much bigger than one person.

From this vantage point, this clip seems to crystallize the tragedy of the Bush years: the President’s blithe expansion of “the mission” beyond al-Qaeda and bin Laden; the loss of focus that led us into two wars in which we are still enmeshed.

And though I’m uncomfortable with the triumphalist “flash mobs” chanting U-S-A and waving flags in celebration of America’s killing someone, I’m made hopeful by the intelligence and subtlety of Obama’s announcement and by the fact that he not only understood from the beginning of his Presidency how important it really was (to the American public, if nothing else) to bring down Osama bin Laden, but also was focused enough to make it happen.

The post Obama’s moral understanding vs. Bush’s swagger appeared first on Occasional Planet.