Cornel West is up in arms because Obama is afraid of "free black men." West's colleague at Princeton, Melissa Harris-Perry, says that West's critique of the President stems from personal matters, including unanswered phone calls, rather than true political analysis.
While I don't know what the nature of the relationship is between West & Obama (he's the president of the free world, he's a busy guy), I don't think you need limit the personal nature of his verbal attack to simple interpersonal relationship issues. West "called the black president out for what he sees as his complicity with the agenda of white, moneyed elites. He called Obama a "black mascot" for Wall Street, and at one point accused him of not acting like a "free black man." West is taking it personally that Obama does not act like West believes a "black man" should behave.
In an Op-ed for the LA Times, conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg expresses a view I have long held (see, the political divide can be breached.) Obama is a politician. It is bound to happen. He is not betraying any one race or ethnicity with his behavior. He is, like all politicians, betraying, to some degree or to the nth degree, all his constituents. As Erin Audrey Kaplan points out, "the president owes blacks as much as he owes Jews or any other constituency that voted for him in significant numbers." Indeed, as the President, he owes it to everyone living in America (legally or otherwise.)
This is a nice spread of responsibility that I like to see. Citing racism as the motivating factor for opposing Obama's agenda is simplistic and basically not true. Wanting to hold Obama responsible for his campaign promises, which I've never felt were realistic, is not a product of my hatred of this so-called black president or of blacks or African-Americans, or Kenyans, for that matter (har har.) Understanding that Obama, before his being a black man or a white man or a biracial man or a man, is necessarily a politician makes his actions understandable, if not always laudable.
It's easy to pretend only whites can be racist, and it's easy to pretend the South is full of bedsheet wearing white guys. (Of all the places where I've spent time in these US of A, the North has been the most racist and racially uncomfortable place I've experienced. Not the South.) The problem with all this pretending is that it means the political dialogue is firmly oriented around ad hominem attacks, polarizing figure, and ridiculous rhetoric from both sides (see Bill O'Reilly and Rachel Maddow.) And the problem with this is that people forget how to debate and forget that issues are complicated and hydra-headed.
This simplified political atmosphere is why West can basically imply that Obama isn't black enough-- in a very particular understanding of being black, as defined by Cornel West. If my experience as a biracial individual is a common one, if you're pink and purple, the purples will always call you pink and the pinks will think of you as purple. I don't know why Obama is an exception to this suddenly in the dialogue. I was very disappointed when Obama chose to fill out the census as a black man, especially considering his background. Science tends to recognize nature and nurture as vital to development, and it's too bad claiming traditional labels can't take that in. It is, in general, a failure of understanding the particularities of racial makeup and socialization in America that has resulted in Obama's being considered a black president. He had the opportunity to show that that "certain rootlessness", in the words of Cornel West, can benefit a multiracial individual who, owning this rootlessness as the qualifying feature of multiracialism, can move past skin-associated expectations and start getting work done. This has happened with whites, where it is somewhat unimpressive when somebody is half-Irish, half-French, despite the fact that the Irish were considered ethnic minorities, hired to do work that was considered too dangerous to waste costly slaves on. (And it was hardly a Southern phenomenon. Italian and eastern European immigrants, in addition to the Irish, met the same resistance in Northern cities.)
West is threatened by the idea that something could challenge his racial false-binary (something that for him is very black and white HAHA but for real), and so for him, it is personal: he says that when an independent white man and an independent black man meet, "they got to be mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them." I hope he recognizes that both men must be mature, and that both men must be mature to understand that multiracialism is a new can of worms that should not be shoehorned into one or the other. West seems threatened by the introduction of a new way of thinking, where quadroons are not just black people. They are people who had a significantly different personal experience from a full-black (or white) person, and it is ignorant and sadly dismissive to think otherwise. (West mentions the challenge of one's culture being in opposition to one's skintone, but it is still without a real understanding of the possibility that a biracial person might want to claim that as their American experience. Unfortunately, Obama chose to reject this idea, too, with the census.)
What is most unfortunate is that West links the sadly natural tendency of any president, Republican or Democrat, to answer to the moneyed elites to Obama's inability to fulfill his destiny as the black man in office. Kaplan wonders if "Obama will turn out to be yet another disappointing black politician, one who readily articulates the needs of those at the bottom but doesn't ultimately address them." This is problem every politician needs to fix, and the sooner we stop thinking about it in racialized terms-- especially in nation where the poor white has become an "ethnic" group-- the sooner we can get shit started. But I'm pretty sure that won't happen.
People want to say we live in a post-racial world now, which is a truly ridiculous term. On the other hand, we will never live in a practically color-blind world if a biracial man is not recognized as such because those around him are too quick to claim him as their own (or as in opposition to them) in order to make political action "easier" and the country's political dialogue more sensational.
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