A Note to Progressives and Radicals: Some Thoughts as We Move Forward

A truly momentous thing happened last week when Americans found it in themselves to elect a Black man for President of the United States. I never thought I would see such an event in my lifetime, and, as I sat in front of my television set last Tuesday night, glued to the election coverage, I could hardly believe my eyes when I watched John McCain walk onto an Arizona stage, stand in front of the world, and concede this election. I wanted very badly for Barack Obama to win. I found myself imagining a McCain presidency as a scary world, and I felt that an Obama presidency would not be quite so scary. And when Obama actually won, when he made his victory speech before tearful audiences of diverse supporters, I really did feel moved. I thought, "We have entered a fresh era of politics, and we are going somewhere new and good."

Hold on… New and good? Did I just write that? As we celebrate, let’s also remember a few very important points. To begin, racism is not dead. Next, it behooves us to be as realistic as possible about the orientation of and limitations on the Obama administration. Obama has been branded as our great hope, and we have been told that supporting him is, in itself, sufficient "grassroots" participation. Given these issues, there is a huge amount of work ahead of us as we consider the role we will play in the coming years.

Racism Is Alive

As has been demonstrated by substantial scholarship on the subject, racism in the U.S. continues to thrive. I found it more than a little amusing to watch McCain imply, in his concession speech, that because a Black man has just been elected president racism is clearly a thing of the past. Referring to the racism of a century ago, McCain stated, "America today is a world away from the cruel and frightful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States." The irony of this statement was evident when the cameras panned across a crowd of White McCain supporters with scowls on their faces, many of whom may very well have been thinking some very, shall we say, disgruntled thoughts about Black people.

Yes, we have reached a tremendous point in our history now that we have a Black president-elect, an emotional moment for people of color and White people alike. And yes, this does mean something big. There is no doubt that the act of electing a Black man to the presidency carries with it much symbolism and is, in itself, a victory against racism. However, merely having a Black family in the White House does not erase all the systemic and institutional racism that circumscribes the lives of millions of people of color in this country. Racism is embedded in this culture in nefarious and varied ways, and it will take more than one president to address the structural constraints on people of color that exist as a result of the legacy of slavery and colonialism.

Moreover, Obama is more likely the exception to the rule than he is evidence that the rules themselves have changed. As the child of a White mother and an African father, as a man who grew up largely with his White grandparents, as an established politician with a conservative White running mate, Obama is more palatable to the White electorate than would be most Black people or other people of color in the U.S. Throughout his campaign, Obama was very careful to stay as race-neutral as possible, demonstrating his ties to White people and connecting himself to the notion of whiteness through carefully chosen words, actions, and public relations work, and all of this was, undeniably, necessary in order for him to have received as many White votes as he did. Even with this strategy, it was clear over the course of the campaign that Obama was being held to a higher moral standard than anyone in the McCain camp (such as Sarah Palin and her unwed pregnant daughter Bristol) by the media and political pundits. Obama, then, only represents to a certain degree what is possible for people of color. He is the exception to the rule, and his election is, by no means, proof that structural racism no longer exists.

A Realistic Look at President-Elect Obama

The state of racism aside, I believe it is a big mistake to overstate what Obama can and will accomplish in the White House and what his actions will mean for average people. As such, he will likely disappoint those of us in his progressive and radical constituencies. Throughout this campaign, though Obama has been speaking the rhetoric of change and touting slogans that position him and his supporters as agents of this supposedly collectivist change ("Yes We Can!"), he has never articulated any truly progressive or radical political stances. For instance, his positions on healthcare, taxes, the war in Iraq, the economic crisis, and education, among others, are decidedly neoliberal. That is, these positions are undergirded by his allegiance to the privatization of public services and the deregulation of local and global markets, to the great joy of large corporations but to the detriment of the rest of us. Clearly, in the wake of the financial crisis there will be some degree of regulation, but the question is whether or not this regulation will fundamentally alter the relationship between the private and public sectors and whether or not this regulation will actually reverse the immense deregulation that occurred under Clinton and Bush. A similar argument could be made against Obama’s healthcare plan, which seeks not to provide public healthcare to people but to extend private coverage.

Further, Obama’s easy willingness to buy into and employ the uberpatriotic, us-vs.-them rhetoric of the War on Terror is only a hint of what may be to come with regards to his approach to foreign policy (an issue that formed the cornerstone of his candidacy for a long time). During his campaign, amidst all of the racist epithets hurled at him by misguided McCain supporters who believed he was either Arab or Muslim or both, Obama consistently avoided the message that only Gen. Colin Powell was eventually brave enough to say: "The correct answer is, well, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is no, that’s not America." With regards to the Middle East and Central/South Asia alone, in recent months, Obama has unabashedly claimed his support for Israel (and his appointment of ardent Zionist Rahm Emmanuel as White House chief of staff is an excellent illustration of this), argued for a troop surge in Afghanistan, made a case for the bombing of Pakistan, and failed to address the issue of Iraqi sovereignty with any commentary on the status of forces agreement currently under negotiation.

Even if Obama’s platform were progressive, there is a limit to the President’s power to make real, fundamental change across the board. I do not mean to suggest that the office of President of the United States is not a powerful one—by all means, Obama will have considerable power once he is sworn in. However, Washington is under the heavy influence of lobbyists who represent the interests of large corporations that can afford to invest in their own political clout. They certainly get back excellent returns on their investments—in the form of lax regulations, laws that actually proffer special rights to corporate entities as opposed to individual citizens, and many cheeks that are willing to discreetly turn the other way at their infractions. Obama, in particular, received unprecedented corporate contributions during this election, and he is already in the process of setting the stage to pay those back by building a corporation-friendly administration similar to and even overlapping with Bill Clinton’s. Thus, neither Obama’s political stances nor his embeddedness in this system bode well for what many of us hope to see him accomplish in the next four years.

I do want to emphasize that I am not arguing against having elected Obama. If an Obama presidency will turn out to be right-centrist, a McCain presidency would have been much more disastrous. Rather, this essay is meant to be a call to all of us to recognize the limitations of our elected officials and not to place false hope in their inherent willingness to serve our interests. Instead, I would push us to consider what our role will be during the Obama years and think about how we might use collective action to pressure this administration to serve our needs. I worry, of course, that this collective response is unlikely given so many people’s belief that Obama is a savior of sorts. Now that he is slated to take up the presidency will we all relax and celebrate? How did we become so complacent? And what now?

Branding Us into Complacency

The Obama campaign’s brilliant branding efforts created for us a product—Obama himself—available for mass consumption, capitalizing on an American consumerist tradition in which we respond to brands and logos over ideas and values. And oh, did we consume him. Supporters bought a wonderful array of direct-from-the-campaign and bootleg-off-the-street Obama gear (similar to the Nike or Adidas gear worn by millions), idolized him using a range of media (if you don’t believe me, do a search on YouTube or check out the blogosphere), and dedicated hours, days, months, and even years to getting him elected. In constructing Obama as a product for consumption, his election became the end goal, for electing him meant that we could continue to "consume" him for at least the next 4 years. However, such a campaign leaves no role for Obama supporters other than as consumers. Rather than locating us in dialogue or in contention with Obama, his campaign attempts to locate us as the followers of a man who can do no wrong (or, if he can do wrong, we are expected to implicitly agree to forgive him his sins and allow him to lead us anyway because the other option would have been much worse). Such a construct does not leave any room for understanding Obama as part of a political machine that we need to continue to reform.

Even more detrimental, the campaign was called "grassroots" by Obama himself, a cry that was consistently taken up by supporters and media alike. In this case, such a label is somewhat misleading, since the term grassroots is usually used to describe bottom-up social movements that arise naturally or spontaneously. The Obama campaign was neither bottom-up nor spontaneous. Though the campaign did capitalize on Americans’ large-scale dissatisfaction with the Bush regime, it was a political campaign that emerged from and was sanctioned by the Democratic Party itself. Obama was a U.S. Senator and Democratic Party member when he put his name in the ring, not an average, disgruntled citizen whose community pushed for him to be elected. The campaign often cited the fact that it received so much money in small donations as evidence of its grassroots status. However, Obama also received massive donations from, in Ralph Nader’s words, "Wall Street interests, corporate interests and… corporate lawyers." As I mentioned above, these donors will soon expect Obama to give them a return on their investments.

Moreover, as the campaign progressed, Obama’s stances got more, not less, conservative, yet another indication that he was acting as any presidential candidate would act by marketing himself to a wider range of voters rather than responding to the mandate of his supposedly "grassroots" constituency. Such tactics are fine for a presidential campaign, but they are not grassroots.

It is true that the Obama campaign used techniques borrowed from grassroots organizing to inspire people to "Barack the Vote", however, the campaign itself was run in a top-down fashion. This was another example (though probably the most successful example) of the Democratic Party running their man, just as this party has done countless times in the past. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with that, since it is only reflective of the U.S. political tradition, but let’s call it like we see it.

It was through this excellent marketing of Obama as the Product of the Century and the Obama campaign’s brilliant positioning of supporters as "grassroots activists" that people began to ascribe their own political hopes to the candidate, whether or not anything he had done or said aligned with these projections. Mostly, people hoped for change. There is no doubt that most of us are sick of living in the kind of world we have had to inhabit for the last 8 years, so the slogan "Change we can believe in" is not hard to embrace. But the rhetoric of change is unspecific and unpromising until the gaps in these vague promises are filled in with the hopes and dreams of the millions of people in this country and around the world who have been inspired by Obama’s rise. Supporters everywhere have ascribed to Obama’s presidency their own images of what kind of change we need. I have heard a range of people express wildly different conceptions of what Obama stands for on issues of foreign policy, health care, education, fiscal policy, gay marriage, religion, and the criminal justice system, among others.

Again, I do not fault anyone for holding this view. People are feeling desperate these days, and we are willing to hold onto the smallest threads of hope for a better world. On Election Day, I heard a short radio interview with a man coming to vote for Obama. He said that times were hard, that he is unemployed and losing his house, that things are worse now than they have ever been for him. He said he was voting for Obama because he wants "something good" for himself and his community. He said he was ready to do something to make that happen. I was sad for him, not only because of the hardship that he has been forced to endure, but because nobody was there to remind him that he could become instrumental in advocating for the good of his community by joining in the real power of collective action to promote social change. Voting is not the only, nor even the most, crucial path toward substantive, large-scale change. It is organizing that pushes elected officials to stay accountable to our needs.

It would be a big mistake to stop our work here. Yes, Obama is different than McCain and having him as President of the United States may open doors that have been closed to us for a long time. We collectively made the right decision to put this man in office, now let’s hold him accountable and make him responsive the needs of the many. President-elect Obama may not be inherently progressive, and he may be embedded in a system that was designed to serve the interests of a relatively few elites, but for this reason it is even more incumbent upon us to identify our collective and individual roles as he takes office. Like anyone holding such a high office, he will not embody our hopes unless we put political pressure on him to do so, and this pressure must come from large social movements. This is a moment for celebration, a celebration that should manifest in our renewed commitment to true grassroots activism. As Martin Luther King, Jr. once stated, "Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."

If this vision for social change isn’t optimistic celebration, I don’t know what is.

*Special thanks go to Alicia Woodley and Samer Abboud for helping me with this piece.