NOT SO FAST MR. PRESIDENT...
By Erin Aubry Kaplan
It’s the end of inauguration week, and all the Obama hosannahs still linger in the air. It’s understandable. It’s barely comprehensible that Bush is actually gone and that a black man replaced him.
After eight years of pain and suffering Bush and his ilk inflicted on the electorate (to say nothing of the citizenry of the world), it’s absolutely essential that we get a chance to feel good. All that tension built up over all these years needs an outlet. We needed to give voice to it all, to dance, sing, weep, watch parades, go to balls, enthuse over Barack’s élan and Michelle’s outfits. It’s fine. Necessary, even.
But some of the joyousness bothers me, and it has for the duration of the presidential campaign. Here’s my problem: Far too many white people who had a certain smugness about Obama’s rise are now congratulating themselves openly for the historic moment, and far too many black people are letting them get away with it.
The result is that we’re all willingly falling asleep at the switch at the cause of racial justice, which is hardly over. But we’re all simply too vested in feeling good. Whites are triumphal that Obama is symbolically putting to rest the nasty racial battles of the past; blacks are misty-eyed that this is indeed the mountaintop, that we can go no higher and achieve nothing greater.
It was predictable that the conflation of Bush’s exit, King’s birthday, Obama’s inauguration and Lincoln’s bicentennial into one great, shining, badly-needed American denouement would be too much to resist. On Tuesday, CNN featured a crawl that excitedly announced that 70 percent of black people in a poll said that the Obama presidency meant that the dream of Martin Luther King has been fulfilled.
Okay, let’s start there. I hate to be a party pooper, but King’s dream had little to do with electing a black president. King was an activist who evolved into a social radical who believed that economic justice on the largest scale possible was the only way to achieve racial justice, and vice versa.
He would have been thrilled at the prospect of an Obama, of course, and likely would have supported his campaign. But King would have immediately recognized Obama as a product of a successful black middle class that in 2009 is still the exception to black reality, not the rule. He would have understood that Obama is not the expression of a collective movement, as he was, but a towering example of individualism that Americans have always admired more, especially in black folk.
But that admiration has left no room for a discussion of all the troubling facts that still define black life: poverty, imprisonment, poor education, poor employment, poor health outcomes, poor prospects overall, especially for black men.
A Pew Research poll last year found that black Americans are as pessimistic about their own future as they’ve ever been, with good reason. But the strange fact is, we’ve gotten a black president before we’ve gotten effective solutions to any of those problems.
And the mere presence of Obama convinces too many Americans that these problems simply don’t exist, or don’t matter terribly anymore. Even the most effusive black Obama supporters know this is a real danger.
I think Obama, middle-class icon that he is, knows better. But whether he can find a way to articulate concern and craft policy for his less fortunate brethren, the brethren who supported him unequivocally and who rightfully expect something in a first black president—yes, a black president for all people-- remains to be seen.
ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN is the first African American in history to be a weekly op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Her musings continue to appear in the Times, Essence magazine, and a host of other publications. Kaplan is currently working on her much anticipated book, to be released in 2009.