As Samuel Eliot Morrison had done when he delivered the first Harmsworth lecture eighty-seven years ago, I, too, must begin with a Prologue. “Through the Prologue,” Professor Morrison told his audience, “the author endeavoured to establish a personal relation between himself and his audience, and to arouse their curiosity and interest in the play that followed.”Footnote 1 I pray he is correct.
Anyone familiar with the history of this august chair will immediately notice that I differ from every previous Harmsworth Professor in one crucial way: I'm not white. While this is, indeed, a historic occasion, there is more to the story than my being what we call in the states “a Negro first” – some of it quite personal, some of it political, some of it symbolic; and much of it speaks to the place of African Americans and race in US political discourse and collective memory. The story I will share with you brought me to tonight's topic.
On 25 March of this year, the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin joined the ancestors. He was ninety-four years old. For those of you not familiar with Professor Franklin, he authored many seminal texts, notably From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans (first published in 1947) as well as Reconstruction after the Civil War, The Militant South, George Washington Williams: A Biography, and a collection of essays titled Race and History, to name but a few.Footnote 2 He has influenced virtually everyone laboring in the field of African American history, though he identified himself as an americanist specializing in southern history. He certainly was, but sadly his contribution as an American historian has been overlooked and undervalued. He was critical of consensus history and notions of American exceptionalism, and he consistently placed developments in the United States in a global, transnational framework.Footnote 3 His reluctance to treat US democracy as an immaculate success story derived not only from his keen scholarship, but from his experience. Besides enduring racism in virtually every archive and educational institution, Franklin's bouts with discrimination in the military during the Second World War shook his faith in American democracy.Footnote 4
The last time I saw Dr. Franklin was in August of 2008, while I was moving my daughter into her dorm room at Duke University. That same weekend, he participated in a public conversation with Indian historian Romila Thapar titled “The Historian in the World.” I was blown away by the man's mind, by his intellectual reach, his grace and eloquence, and by his searing critique of Western historiography. His talk left a deep impression on me for another reason: I thought about how his travels and visiting appointments abroad shaped his perspective as a historian. I returned to his memoir, Mirror to America, and read with interest about his tenure as the Pitt Professor of American History at Cambridge during the academic year 1962–3. It was a position in which he took particular pride.Footnote 5
Then it hit me: in 1962 Dr. Franklin was forty-seven years old and the first African American to hold the Pitt chair. I was born in 1962, and by some uncanny coincidence, I now hold the Harmsworth Professorship in my forty-seventh year, the year Dr. Franklin passed. Upon this discovery, it occurred to me that this huge crater in which I now stand is Dr. Franklin's footstep. Now the obvious question: why wasn't Dr. Franklin a Harmsworth Professor? According to Robin Winks, the University of Oxford planned to invite him in 1957, but the American Historical Association blocked the appointment!Footnote 6 By the time the AHA relented, Oxford's persistent invitations to Dr. Franklin fell on deaf ears – not surprising having been rebuffed by his own US colleagues.
Still, Dr. Franklin's Cambridge experience reveals something about the inescapable reality of race and politics. Unlike so many scholars before and after him, Dr. Franklin never had the luxury of resting on his laurels, teaching a few classes and hiding out in the University Library. Instead, he was an unofficial ambassador, a powerful and eloquent voice to translate the black freedom movement for European audiences, to explain the violence, the resistance, and the refusal to accept gradualism. Just months before he and his family took off for England, he put the finishing touches on his interpretation of the Emancipation Proclamation – a tiny but monumental book that put emancipation in a global frame and reminded readers that Presidents did not make history alone but that history made Presidents. Abraham Lincoln had to respond to slave revolts, the consequences of war and revolutions, economic pressures, cultural shifts of conscience, and politics. But Dr. Franklin also acknowledged and examined Lincoln the man, the decisions he made and the choices that lay before him. He explored the tightrope he had to walk between upholding the Constitution and challenging the law of the land on property rights since the birth of the nation.Footnote 7 (I sometimes wish Obama had read this book alongside Doris Kearns Goodwin's A Team of Rivals! But more on that later.)
The point, of course, is that Dr. Franklin was a public intellectual whose quest for equal justice and equality for all informed and defined his work. His year at Cambridge and subsequent lectures throughout Europe might be seen as a transatlantic dimension of the black freedom movement, not merely another academic feather in his cap. In other words, he could not remain safely ensconced behind the ivy walls of Cambridge University; he had to speak to the BBC.Footnote 8
Dr. Franklin understood this awesome responsibility. Over the course of the next forty-seven years, he continued to produce rigorous scholarship while working publicly and behind the scenes to bring about change. In 1993, he railed against the idea that America was anywhere near a postracial apotheosis, offering the memorable comment that “the concept of a color-blind society is as specious as the concept of perpetual motion is stupendous.”Footnote 9 On 20 January 2005, he spent his ninetieth birthday delivering what he characterized as his “counter-inaugural” address, on the day George Bush was being sworn into office. He gave a brilliant accounting of the history of racial inequality and violence in the United States. It was classic Dr. Franklin – uncut, unplugged, unleashed. He possessed the courage to speak truth to power, yet never feared evidence that might contradict his assumptions.
So it should surprise no one that I shall dedicate my lecture and the entire year to the memory of John Hope Franklin.
A long Prologue, I confess, but a necessary one. Dr. Franklin, like so many of us, was moved to tears by President Barack Obama's election. As the dean of African American history, the media pressed him for a reaction. They got the soundbite they wanted – that he never thought he'd live to see a black man elected President – but they ignored his perspective as an American historian. Franklin never backed down from his pronouncement that the United States unequivocally had not achieved “color-blindness,” but that did not matter: the media, almost universally, proclaimed Obama's election to be the final death blow to racism.Footnote 10USA Today asked if we still need a Voting Rights Act “now that a black man has won the presidency,” and columnist Jim Wooten of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution argued that Obama's victory proved that “the political system that discriminated and the people who designed it are dead and gone.”Footnote 11 Some historians also repeated the sentiment. In Harold Holzer's view, “Barack Obama's victory serves to help complete the ‘unfinished work’ Abraham Lincoln spoke about in his Gettysburg Address: that America fulfill its dream of equal opportunity regardless of race.”Footnote 12
Poetic, but historically questionable. (Indeed, Barry Schwartz argues that the Gettysburg Address was originally about preserving the world's only democracy, and that it was later cast as a call for racial equality by the modern civil rights movement.Footnote 13) I question the idea that the “unfinished work” is complete.
Whatever the case, the proliferation of historical claims of these kinds in the wake of Obama's victory interests me, not because they are “wrong” or “bad,” but because they reveal deep ideological shifts and rifts being played out in the way the media, pundits, historians, even Obama and his handlers, have sought to interpret the historical significance and precedents for his election and presidency. I want to suggest a couple of things.
First, conservatives and many liberals have read Obama's election as marking the end of racism. This has had a chilling effect on public discussions or acknowledgement of contemporary racism, not to mention America's vexed racial history.
Second, partly as a consequence, Obama has been thoroughly decoupled from the social movements that laid the basis for his election. He has been turned into a kind of saviour who descended on to the world stage, transcendent of race and other fetters of identity, a transformational force upon whose shoulders the future of the nation and the free world rests. The great-man theory of history has come back with a vengeance, as Obama's rise has encouraged endless comparisons with past Presidents – notably Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and even Ronald Reagan. (For our purposes I am going to limit my discussion to the most common analogue – Lincoln.) The result has been the evisceration of social movements as a force for change. Many of my own students now believe that change comes only from intelligent, benign (almost divine) leadership, not from social movements.
Finally, a few caveats: unlike so many lecturers before me, I am not summarizing my life's work. On the contrary, I have strayed quite far from my field of study. Tonight's topic grew out of my concern for how history was being used to explain the significance of Barack Obama's election and the shape of national politics. Thus my formulations are quite schematic, and even then time constraints forced me to scale back to about 10 per cent of my original outline. The aim of my lecture is to open discussion, not close it; I am not a presidential scholar, nor am I trying to become one. (Besides, you have one of the world's leading presidential historians, Nigel Bowles, a foremost authority on the Civil War in Jay Sexton, and a renowned Lincoln biographer, Richard Carwardine, here at Oxford.) Finally, I am less interested in debates among professional historians than in the way such interpretations of history play out in the general public, and their consequences for contemporary social movements and the future of the nation.
THE COLOR BIND
Obama ran a campaign that claimed to “transcend” race but in truth tried to erase it. He had no choice, not because white Americans are hopelessly racist but because our entire nation is woefully ignorant when it comes to race and racism. Thanks to a poll-crazed media, the issue of “race” has been reduced to what ordinary people think about race. And too often these polls continue to rely on an outdated black–white framework. To our peril, we ignore hard questions about why racial disparities persist and are widening, why hate crimes against Latinos have risen sharply, why one black man in nine aged twenty to thirty is behind bars, or how race has shaped immigration policy, the subprime lending crisis, or even the conduct of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. While scholars study these questions, they have not become part of the general campaign discussion because most Americans see race as a “black” problem rather than a national issue shaping virtually all aspects of public life and policy.
I suspect President Obama knows this, but he also knows that his race is a liability when it comes to addressing racial disparities.Footnote 14 It is sadly ironic that the President perhaps most sensitive to racial inequality would have to ignore race, lest he be accused of partisanship. Given these dynamics, President Obama believed he had no choice but to “transcend” race by invoking a politics of color-blindness, building unity not by recognizing that our whole nation has a race problem, but through forgetting and ignoring our past and present. To be fair, he rejects the “postracial” label. In The Audacity of Hope, he acknowledged the enormous gaps between whites and blacks and Latinos in income, housing, life expectancy, infant mortality, and wealth. “To suggest that our racial attitudes play no part in these disparities,” he wrote, “is to turn a blind eye to both our history and our experience – and to relieve ourselves of the responsibility to make things right.”Footnote 15
President Obama argues that the best way to remedy racial inequality is by lifting all boats economically. Everyone wins if we provide universal health care, create additional good-paying green-collar jobs, stop downsizing and outsourcing, and strengthen education. While the President certainly makes a compelling case, the idea that color-blind social and economic policies that ignore institutionalized racism will address persistent racial inequality by lifting all boats is untenable. For example, President Obama speaks eloquently about creating green-collar jobs and retooling a dying manufacturing sector to jump-start a clean-energy economy. But unless we eliminate persistent employment discrimination, reinvest in urban education, and relocate back to cities firms that fled to industrial suburbs, black and brown workers could be locked out of the new economy. He envisions affordable health care to all, but if we ignore the disappearance and deterioration of urban public hospitals, the black and Latino urban poor may have health insurance but no decent place to go for emergency care. Or consider how race shaped the subprime crisis. A recent study shows that African Americans and Latinos were disproportionately affected by predatory lending schemes and experienced a higher percentage of foreclosures.Footnote 16 Of course, given the overwhelming history of racial discrimination by lending institutions, the use of Federal Housing Administration ratings to devalue homes in black or mixed neighborhoods, and the use of redlining, blockbusting, and other forms of racial discrimination by real-estate agencies, the racial disparities in the subprime crisis should not surprise us – but you would never know this from the US media. The emphasis has been on white, middle-class suburbs, the iconic “ordinary American.”
Meanwhile, transcending race has rendered the problems of inner city neighborhoods invisible – with the possible exception of New Orleans. Just imagine if a centerpiece of federal housing policy was to rebuild and revitalize our inner cities, not based on gentrification and displacement, but on people of all backgrounds living together, expanding our civic culture in communities that care for one another? Or consider what a massive public-works/infrastructure project could do if a large portion of the investment went to building low-income housing for the homeless – the majority of whom are people of color? In the new postracial America, such projects are not politically viable.
THE NEW LINCOLN?
Virtually every major media outlet across the country compared Obama to Abraham Lincoln.Footnote 17 It was inevitable, given that Obama's inauguration coincided with the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth. And the new President himself has not only embraced the analogy but aggressively employed it for his own political theater:
• When he announced his candidacy on the steps of the Illinois state capitol, in Springfield, in 2007, he compared himself to Lincoln.
• He was the first President to use the Lincoln Bible for his inauguration;
• His inaugural theme, “A New Birth of Freedom,” was inspired by Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. And if you still didn't get it, Penguin books put out a special edition of Obama's Inaugural Address, packaged with the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln's First and Second inaugural addresses, and Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay “Self-Reliance.”Footnote 18
• As president-elect, Obama chose to travel on a whistlestop-like train from Philadelphia to Washington – following the final leg of the train route taken by Lincoln.Footnote 19
• And perhaps most famously, Obama told CBS News that he was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin's 2005 book A Team of Rivals, which focusses on Lincoln's cabinet. He also met with Goodwin.
Not surprisingly, Lincoln-mania and Obama's election became a cottage industry for certain well-placed Lincoln scholars and pundits to draw parallels between these two tall, gangly, big-eared, Illinois lawyers-turned-politicians. Goodwin's interpretation, more than any other, set the stage by focussing on Obama's selection of rival Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State (much like Lincoln's choice of William Seward for the same post). Virtually every journalist and pundit embraced the Goodwin thesis, though they were also fascinated by the physical, geographical, and biographical similarities. That Obama and Lincoln were “self-made men” and Washington outsiders captured the imaginations of journalists like Evan Thomas and Richard Wolffe of Newsweek.Footnote 20 On the other hand, their fellow liberal Newsweek colleague, Howard Finemann, thought the analogy insulting. “To be blunt,” wrote Finemann in October 2008, “his trials are a lot less Malcolm X than Obama's autobiography has made it seem.” He characterized Obama as just another privileged prep-school kid who knew how to work the system. His “community-organizing work was not very controversial (or effective)”, he didn't think Obama's antiwar speech was so heroic, given the time and place, and he called his Senate victory against Alan Keyes “a cakewalk.” In other words (and the list goes on) Obama, unlike Abe, had no real adversity.Footnote 21
The historians tended to be more judicious, if not more charitable. Harold Holzer, co-chairman of the US Lincoln Bicentennial Commission, and author of Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860–1861 (2008) has been a pervasive voice on television and print, speaking on Obama's Lincolnesque composure, his commitment to national unity, his decision to remain quiet during the president-elect phase, and the symbolic nature of his election as a fulfillment of Lincoln's vision of racial equality.Footnote 22 James McPherson commented on how both Presidents possessed cool intellect, were voracious readers, and had to oversee wars without previous military experience.Footnote 23 And he, too, plugged his books on Lincoln. Goodwin was everywhere on every show, but had surprisingly little to say beyond restating her thesis in A Team of Rivals – though she did hammer home the point that the only real difference between Obama and Lincoln is the scrutiny the former faces with the twenty-four-hour news cycle. In other words, today any internal dissension within the administration is bound to become a distraction and shape public opinion.Footnote 24
Indeed, I was struck by the emphasis both historians and journalists placed on public opinion and opinon polls. In Goodwin's piece in the UK Guardian earlier this year, she only mentions the Emancipation Proclamation as an example of Lincoln's uncanny ability to gauge public opinion – a point Richard Carwardine has made (though Goodwin devotes little over a dozen pages in her nine-hundred-page tome to that important document).Footnote 25 Likewise, Matthew Dallek's substantial piece in U.S. News and World Report compares Lincoln's anti-slavery policies with Obama's massive reform agenda – health care, energy independence, economic recovery – only to make the point that these two Presidents were ahead of public opinion, and their political genius rests on their ability to gauge that opinion and forge ahead at the proper pace. It's a limited argument because it not only ignores social movements and contending forces that are pushing for or against such changes, but it renders the President the primary historical agent who must persuade the public first and then push through his agenda. There is no dialectic, no transformation, no development, either in the President or his constituency—not to mention all other branches of government, capital, labor, etc.Footnote 26
Now don't get me wrong; I'm not dismissing the role of public opinion. Often it matters in terms of a regime's ability to mobilize support for war (though it did not stop the Bush–Cheney regime). And the pollster Stanley Greenberg also weighed in on the Lincoln–Roosevelt–Obama comparison by arguing that the first two men gauged popular opinion constantly and acted accordingly. But he also argued that the point is not to wait for the populace to come around but use the power of oratory, the bully pulpit, the media to change minds, to persuade the people to support the President's position.Footnote 27
But missing from Greenberg's, Dallek's, and Goodwin's formulations are social movements – movements that propelled the President's agenda and movements that pushed back. Opinion polls alone don't reveal the dynamic relationship between ideas, visions, aspirations, and movements. One of the few exceptions among the oft-quoted talking heads was Eric Foner, Columbia University professor and author of many books on Reconstruction, nineteenth-century labor and politics, and US history broadly speaking. As he cautioned National Public Radio's Michelle Kellerman,
If Obama is going to learn one thing from Lincoln, I think it ought to be how to respond to the pressure and the needs of broad social movements, not just the inside-the-beltway politics. We remember Lincoln … because of how he changed and grew during the Civil War, how he moved toward emancipation of the slaves, and then toward the very end of his life really began thinking seriously … about the place of African Americans as freed people in a post-slavery society.Footnote 28
Foner was also one of the few “experts” to put the question of race, slavery, and emancipation front and center. Perhaps this was a function of National Public Radio? I suspect other historians brought it up, but mainstream producers/writers did not feel that it played well to the public, or that it was beside the point in our new color-blind society? Whatever the reasons, I found the absence of a sustained discussion of race and slavery surprising and unfortunate – and not simply because our new President is black. As many other scholars have argued, Lincoln's “transformational” presidency pivoted on the question of slavery. Though always principled in his opposition to slavery, his path to emancipation was shaped immeasurably by the inexorable movement of African Americans toward freedom. Even the casual reader comparing his First and Second inaugural addresses cannot help but notice a shift from upholding the Fugitive Slave Law and slavery where legal to a recognition, four years later, that the “slaves” were historical actors whom he called “a peculiar and powerful interest” and hence “the cause of the war.” This was hardly Lincoln's first salvo against the evils of slavery, but it emphatically recognized black humanity and the price the nation had to pay to secure liberty for all. We cannot know this trajectory by limiting our sights to the Oval Office, Lincoln's “team of rivals,” or the halls of Congress. Social movements matter, from the most important one of the era – emancipation – to the draft riots, to abolitionism, to labor struggles on both sides of the Atlantic.
Certainly scholars continue to discuss, debate, and mull over these issues. In fact, buried in that avalanche of new Lincoln studies have been some useful interventions focussed on slavery and race. (One would think that with the election of the first black President these texts would have risen to the top like cream.) George Frederickson's brief Big Enough to be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race, takes its title from Du Bois's controversial reflections on Lincoln in Crisis magazine published in 1922.Footnote 29 Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s edited volume Lincoln on Race and Slavery is an excellent collection of primary documents with a strong introduction for general readers.Footnote 30 But even Gates's famous name was not enough for wide circulation or a trade press. Both books were essentially ignored in the national media, and not because they sully Lincoln's grand reputation – they don't. On the contrary, they challenge accusations of racism as well as the hagiographers who proclaim him the Great Emancipator, emphasizing, as Du Bois did, Lincoln's inconsistencies and contradictions.
But I return to Du Bois, the later Du Bois who seventy-four years ago gave us his magisterial Black Reconstruction, for a slightly different take on Lincoln – one that restores the dynamics of social movements to the realm of presidential policy. And in so doing, I want to suggest that we might locate Obama's political legacy not in the wit and wisdom of Abe Lincoln but in the political dynamics of the movement for freedom. When Du Bois revisited Lincoln and the question of emancipation, consistency was no longer the point; it was about agency. “Meantime,” wrote Du Bois,
with perplexed and laggard steps, the United States Government followed the footsteps of the black slave. It made no difference how much Abraham Lincoln might protest that this was not a war against slavery … The slave, despite every effort, was becoming the center of the war. Lincoln, with his uncanny insight, began to see it.Footnote 31
Here Du Bois documents Lincoln's initial reluctance, his instructions to return fugitive slaves to Confederate lines, to avoid freeing black folk held by the rebels. But it was these tattered, weary, yet hopeful Africans whose acts of self-emancipation compelled Congress to pass the first Confiscation Act in August 1861, effectively “freeing” slaves used in war by the enemy. As Du Bois and John Hope Franklin and many others have been arguing for decades, whereas Lincoln walked a thin line between his moral opposition to slavery, the issue of political expediency, and his defense of the Constitution, it was the kidnapped Africans who forced the issue – with additional wind provided by the Charles Sumners, Thaddeus Stevenses, Horace Greeleys and others – Lincoln's left flank, advocates of abolition–democracy.
Enslaved Africans not only weakened the Confederacy by disrupting production, running off to Union lines, engaging in what Du Bois called “a general strike,” but as freed people black folk paved the way for a more democratic nation. Black soldiers saw themselves as liberators and believed that they earned their right to the land and to participate as citizens. Their sense of politics, collective identity, and civic vision was forged in slavery. Freed families wanted to build a society substantially different from that of their former masters and northern capitalists. They wanted a state that could provide economic support for those in need, irrespective of color, that would protect its citizens from violence and exploitation and grant them the right to armed self-defense, that would provide public education and public services, that worked to actively achieve and defend equality, and that would seize land from the former rebels (whom they believed were guilty of treason) and distribute it to freed people as reparations for unpaid wages.
President Obama, I would argue, may claim the mantle of Abe Lincoln, but he is also a political descendant of that first generation of black lawmakers elected during Reconstruction, when ex-slaves won the right to vote, held offices in the state houses and assemblies and Congress, and helped draft the most democratic state constitutions in the history of the country – providing free universal public education, funds for roads and infrastructure, services for the poor and physically disabled; ending imprisonment for debt and abolishing public whipping. These men, many of whom bore the marks of the slaver's lash, preferred expanding democracy to punishing whites, and some even supported woman suffrage. A quarter-century later, of course, African Americans were effectively disfranchised through force and intimidation.
In all the Lincoln–Obama comparisons, in all the efforts to assess the historical significance of America's journey to the first black President, where was this story on CNN or MSNBC? The truth is, in the United States today, the Civil War is considered an American story; the history of slavery and emancipation is relegated to “black history.” And in our new era of color-blindness, to even bring up slavery will only bring us down. I can't tell you how many times I've been accused of “playing the race card” – on the radio, in little comments to Web articles, etc. – for insisting that slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights are not minority histories of special pleading but central to the American experience. But, again, Du Bois said it much better than I can when he observed that
emancipation came not simply to black folk in 1863; to white Americans came slowly a new vision and a new uplift, a sudden freeing of hateful mental shadows. At last demoracy was to be justified of its own children. The nation was to be purged of continual sin not indeed all of its own doing – due partly to its inheritance; and yet a sin, a negation that gave the world the right to sneer at the pretensions of this republic. At last there could really be a free commonwealth of freemen.Footnote 32
Obama's original campaign vision of uniting the nation around creating a caring, compassionate culture from the “bottom up” has its roots in a distinctive political heritage – and the black freedom movement is but one branch. Obama's support for women's rights, gay rights, a green economy, even prison reform (however limited) is a product not just of Enlightenment ideas but also of struggles for social justice – feminism, GLBTQ movements, environmental and ecological justice movements, and groups like Prison Moratorium and Critical Resistance. While he does not embrace all of the ideas and principles embodied in these movements, many elements of his platform can be traced to their activism.
President Obama descends from a long line of “community organizers,” from Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Bob Moses to Grace Lee Boggs, Johnnie Tillmon, and Dolores Huerta. Some of these names are familiar, some are not, which is exactly the point. Unlike any other US president, Obama was formed by a political tradition that believes in the power of ordinary people to make decisions, to participate fully in the democratic process, and to formulate policies and agendas that grow immediately out of their daily struggles. He presumably learned something from the residents he had organized in Chicago's Altgeld Gardens housing project in the mid-1980s, those beautiful older black women who taught our fourty-fourth President about the capacity of poor people to make demands and fight back. And he has to have known then that the policies leading to disproportionately high unemployment rates, deteriorating housing stock, crumbling urban hospitals, and rising crime rates were anything but color-blind.
In the end, race matters, but so does our culture of self-interest and our national refusal to come to terms with our racial past. The Obama strategy has been to win over the majority of Americans by appealing to their self-interests and by ignoring historical and contemporary oppression. As he explained, “when you start focusing so much on the plight of the historically oppressed … you lose sight of what we have in common.”Footnote 33 As pragmatic as this statement might appear, it is also incredibly short-sighted. When you focus on the plight of the historically oppressed, we see even better what we have in common: our histories are bound up together, not just as a nation but as a world. As James Baldwin once warned white Americans, “If you don't know my name, you don't know your own.” Besides the obvious fact that the privileges enjoyed by the powerful are made possible by the exploitation of the “historically oppressed,” there is no reason why the whole of “the American people” should not care about the plight of all oppressed people. In lieu of a politics of self-interest, imagine a politics of collective interests, a commitment to an international community working to end all forms of oppression and exploitation, to make restitution, to see our own complicity and do something about it, to build a caring culture, one rooted in empathy and critical analysis. Racial justice and thoughtful, race- and gender-conscious policies that try to remedy persistent discrimination can benefit all Americans by raising wages, improving work and living conditions, maintaining economic stability, expanding the body politic, and building a society based on a beloved community rather than hatred, fear, and containment. This was the essence of Martin Luther King's dream – not a color-blind society that ignores discrimination or wishes it away by refusing to acknowledge it, but one in which color is not a badge of inferiority or criminality; where color does not determine the value of one's home, or who is more likely to see jail time versus probation, or who is the likely target to be purged from voting rolls. This, I would venture to say, is the vision that shaped some of the key movements that made Obama's election possible.
Of course, anyone who pays attention to American politics knows that many of the social justice movements that put him in office have felt betrayed by his actions, often in pursuit of an illusory bipartisanship. The Nobel Peace Prize-winner is preparing to send more troops to Afghanistan, is reluctant to reverse Bush policies of extraordinary rendition or refuse terror suspects trial; he backed a watered-down health care reform bill; and the list goes on. Of course, he also faces the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and intractable House and Senate Republicans, and he's but ten months into his first term.
My point, of course, is that where President Obama moves will depend on how he's pushed. Were Lincoln able to preserve the Union and contain slavery without war, he would have done so. Had the enslaved worked loyally for the Confederacy, defending their masters rather than running toward Union lines, there may not have been a Confiscation Act, an Emancipation Proclamation, a northern victory. What would Lincoln have done without abolitionists – white and black?
And so, as critic Cornel West said of the new President: “I hope he is a progressive Lincoln, I aspire to be the Frederick Douglass to put pressure on him.”Footnote 34
