Tuesday, September 9, 2008

OBAMA CAMPAIGN IS ABOUT MANIPULATING WHITE GUILT

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September 9, 2008
By Alphayo Otieno
The Standard

Geraldine Ferraro may have had sinister motives when she said that Barack Obama would not be "in his position" as a frontrunner but for his race.

Possibly she was acting as Hillary Clinton’s surrogate. Or maybe she was simply befuddled by this new reality — in which blackness could constitute a political advantage.

But whatever her motives, the first woman to be nominated by a major political party for vice-president was right: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position."

Obama is, of course, a talented politician with a first-rate political organisation at his back. But it does not detract from his merit to say that his race is also a large part of his prominence. And it is undeniable that something powerful in the body politic, a force quite apart from the man himself, has pulled him forward. This force is about race and nothing else.

The novelty of Obama is more his cross-racial appeal than his talent. Jesse Jackson displayed considerable political talent in his presidential runs back in the 1980s. But there was a distinct limit to his white support.

Obama’s broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Obama’s genius to understand this.

Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, he also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed — an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman.

How to turn one’s blackness to advantage? The answer is that one "bargains". Bargaining is a mask blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multi-racial society.

Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America’s history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer’s race against him. And whites love this bargain — and feel affection for the bargainer — because it gives them racial innocence in a society where they live under constant threat of being stigmatised as racist.

This is how Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Obama’s extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence.

Boilerplate

His actual policy positions are little more than Democratic Party boilerplate and hardly a tick different from Hillary’s positions. He espouses no galvanising political idea. By the evidence of his slight political record (130 "present" votes in the Illinois state legislature, little achievement in the US Senate) Obama stacks up as something of a mediocrity. None of this matters much.

Race helps Obama in another way — it lifts his political campaign to the level of allegory, making it the stuff of a far higher drama than budget deficits and education reform. His dark skin, with its powerful evocations of America’s tortured racial past, frames the political contest as a morality play. Will his victory mean America’s redemption from its racist past? Will his defeat show an America morally unevolved? Is his campaign a story of black overcoming, an echo of the civil rights movement? Or is it a passing-of-the-torch story, of one generation displacing another?

Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans — black and white — Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority.

And yet, in the end, Obama’s candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton’s or Jesse Jackson’s. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Obama’s run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance.

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