One African-American's Thoughts on Obama

Hathor, Luxor Museum, Egypt

(Image from Wikipedia)

My online friend Hathor, who maintains her own blog, Hathor-Sekhmet, wrote me an email a few days ago to give her thoughts on Barack Obama, about whom I've previously posted and whose book Dreams from My Father Hathor and I have both read.

I found the email very interesting because it clarifies a sense among the African-American community that Obama isn't 'black' enough, and Hathor has given me permission to post her email here at Gypsy Scholar.

Hathor begins with a reference to a recent incident that I've somehow missed, probably due to my living in Korea, which leaves me abstracted from a lot of American domestic news, but Hathor provides some links for international readers like me, and I've added some links of my own on other points (as well as some interjections):

I don't know if you have been following the news about the assault in Jena, Louisiana; here's a link an another link in case you haven't and commentary . Barrack Obama is being called to task by some in the black community for not being more involved with this issue. When you mentioned to me about Obama appearing to be an outsider, I thought about that now. Even though he understands how it is to be black and feels the rage, he doesn't have the history in his soul, not as a Kenyan or as an American black. I think he should have made a statement about Equal Justice. Personally, I would not have required that he go to Jena or associate with Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. Regardless of what type leaders Jackson or Sharpton are, they do understand the symbolism of nooses. They both understand how quickly that symbolism can bring violence and Jesse had certainly seen enough during the 60's working with the SCLC.

I don't think growing up as a child Obama had the constant reminders of what not to do, the unspoken words of what had happen to an uncle or some distant relative in the past, or the stories or news of violence to blacks from some offense of forgetting. There has not been sorrow or the struggle passed down. I am not blaming Obama, because you could not expect that from his mother or her parents. Unfortunately his father didn't feel the need for his son to be with him. I sort of understand how he feels when he goes to Kenya and his other family explains to him about his father. The feeling I had when my mother's sisters were telling me about how my mother was before she got sick, which meant nothing to me, because her impact on me was only from the person when she was sick.

Allow me to interject some remarks here.

For those unaware of Obama's personal history, you should know that his father was a black African from Kenya, and his mother was a white American living in Hawaii. Obama's father returned to Kenya when Obama was very young and had little direct influence on Obama's childhood, and Obama's time in Hawaii and Indonesia sheltered him from the strong black-white racial division of the time but also cut him off from the black community in America, a separation reinforced by the fact that he had no black relatives in the United States.

Hathor's observations here clarify what I referred to in my prefatory remarks above, namely, that a lot of African-Americans sense that Obama isn't 'black' enough. When she says that she doesn't "think growing up as a child Obama had the constant reminders of what not to do, the unspoken words of what had happen to an uncle or some distant relative in the past, or the stories or news of violence to blacks from some offense of forgetting," I finally understand the point. Part of being 'black' in America means having a familial link and a personal family memory to those who suffered under the South's Jim Crow laws, or who suffered comparable discrimination outside the South, including racist attacks and even lynchings.

One reason that I understand better is because I know how profound an adult's words to a child can be. My own great-grandmother told me when I was five years old to always remember that I was part Indian and not to forget how the Indians had suffered. She didn't relate any personal stories, and I don't know if her husband, who was half-Cherokee, suffered discrimination (though their daughter my grandmother hinted that he might have encountered some prejudice in Oklahoma), but even without personal stories, the memory of my great-grandmother's words remains with me.

But let's return to Hathor's remarks:

I wish he could express his earlier self, while running for president. He needs to express his vision with passion. Also he needs to get rid of some of his campaign advisers. I think the people can deal with more openness and honesty. I don't really worry about his experience in government. He has had to make decisions in life and in other positions, which I think prepares any one to govern. I thought one of the few new things this country was meant to abolish was a ruling class and dynasties. Quite a few people in their lifetime will have to act on a life and death decision, and 9/11 wasn't so extradinary that one would have to be groomed in order to make decisions. Sometimes, the event can bring out the brilliance and other times it brings out a response in fear. We never know.

I know what Hathor means. Who, for example, would have expected Mayor Giuliani to be a hero and a healer? Yet, there he was, on 9/11, an unexpected source of comfort and courage who said exactly the right things when so many others did not.

That quote in your post, in which Obama described his feelings as a youth, isn't resolved in this book. I think it is pushed back into the unconscious. His actions as a representative and his ideas about race are probably determined by his upbringing. In some ways his upbringing clashes with his own reality. Unfortunately he was not light enough to be perceived as something other than black. Being African was a problem because there were no African relatives he could spend time with, family outings, etc. Hawaii and Indonesia were not places where that was a lot of black-white conflict and not a lot of rhetoric pertaining to race, so his mother's views would be internalized more. This is just my opinion.

It's my own view, too, as I've noted above. But Obama had his own 'black' experiences, as the quote from Obama that Hathor refers to makes clear:

I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man's court, ... by the white man's rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, ... wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn't. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. In fact, you couldn't even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self -- the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass -- had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger. (Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, page 85)

Such was Obama's reaction as a young black man to some experiences of racial difference even in multiracial Hawaii of the 1970s.

At any rate, Hathor concludes with an explanation of her previous, lengthy silence about Obama:

I had intended to post about him, but I've been really too lazy to follow his campaign. Since Pennsylvania is one of the last primaries, the candidates who lose early hardly stay in the race till they get here. I think Obama has enough money to stay in. This is not to say I would vote for him, but it is too early for me to get engaged or hopeful about a candidate.

I also don't know enough about Obama's position on issues to know if I'd vote for him or not, but based on his extraordinary book, I rather like him personally.

Oh, one last remark from Hathor:

You are really disciplined, to be able to post everyday.

Thanks, Hathor, for the kind words, but I suspect that I post daily not from discipline but from an insane obsession to raise my voice in the wilderness, as if it could be heard among the some 200 million other bloggers out there in the same, tame, overcrowded wilderness.

Anyway, there it is, Hathor's email providing her interesting thoughts on Obama.

Thank-you, Hathor.

Obama: "a stake in this order..."

Searching for the lost moral oder?

L'atmosphère: météorologie populaire

Camille Flammarion, 1888

(Image from Wikipedia)

Readers will recall this entry from several days ago:

I had begun to see a new map of the world, one that was frightening in its simplicity, suffocating in its implications. We were always playing on the white man's court, ... by the white man's rules. If the principal, or the coach, or a teacher, ... wanted to spit in your face, he could, because he had power and you didn't. If he decided not to, if he treated you like a man or came to your defense, it was because he knew that the words you spoke, the clothes you wore, the books you read, your ambitions and desires, were already his. Whatever he decided to do, it was his decision to make, not yours, and because of that fundamental power he held over you, because it preceded and would outlast his individual motives and inclinations, any distinction between good and bad whites held negligible meaning. In fact, you couldn't even be sure that everything you had assumed to be an expression of your black, unfettered self -- the humor, the song, the behind-the-back pass -- had been freely chosen by you. At best, these things were a refuge; at worst, a trap. Following this maddening logic, the only thing you could choose as your own was withdrawal into a smaller and smaller coil of rage, until being black meant only the knowledge of your own powerlessness, of your own defeat. And the final irony: Should you refuse this defeat and lash out at your captors, they would have a name for that, too, a name that could cage you just as good. Paranoid. Militant. Violent. Nigger. (Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, page 85)

In a comment, Hathor asked: "Why do you think he moved from that logic?"

Well, Obama eventually gives a hint, along with other details about how things can go wrong. In the following passage, he first describes how things began to get worse for young inner-city African-Americans:

[S]omething different was going on with the children of the South Side that spring of 1987 ... an invisible line had been crossed, a blind and ugly corner turned.

There was nothing definite I could point to, no hard statistics. The drive-by shootings, the ambulance sirens, the night sounds of neighborhoods abandoned to drugs and gang war and phantom automobiles, wherre police or press rarely ventured until after the body was found on the pavement, blood spreading in a glistening, uneven pool -- none of this was new. In places like Altgeld, prison records had been passed down from father to son for more than a generation; during my very first days in Chicago I had seen the knots of young men, fifteen or sixteen, hanging out on the corners of Michigan or Halsted, their hoods up, their sneakers unlaced, stomping the ground in a desultory rhythm during the colder months, stripped down to T-shirts in the summer, answering their beepers on the corner pay phones: a knot that unraveled, soon to reform, whenever the police cars passed by in their barracuda silence.

No, it was more a change of atmosphere, like the electricity of an approaching storm. I felt it when, driving home one evening, I saw four tall boys walking down a tree-lined block idly snapping a row of young saplings that an older couple had just finished planting in front of their house. I felt it whenever I looked into the eyes of the young men in wheelchairrs that had started appearing on the streets that spring, boys crippled before their prime, their eyes without a trace of self-pity, eyes so composed, already so hardened, that they served to frighten rather than to inspire.

That's what it was: the arrival of a new equilibrium between hope and fear; the sense, shared by adults and youth alike, that some, if not most, of our boys were slipping beyond rescue. Even lifelong South Siders like Johnnie noticed the change. "I ain't never seen it like this, Barack," he would tell me one day as we sat in his apartment sipping beer. "I mean, things were tough when I was coming up, but there were limits. We'd get high, get into fights. But out in public, at home, if an adult saw you getting loud or wild, they would say something. And most of us would listen, you know what I'm saying?

Now, with the drugs, the guns -- all that's disappeared. Don't take a whole lot of kids carrying a gun. Just one or two. Somebody says something to one of 'em, and -- pow! -- kid just wastes him. Folks hear stories like that, they just stop trying to talk to these young cats out here. We start generalizing about 'em just like the white folks do. We see 'em hanging out, we head the other way. After a while, even the good kid starts realizing ain't nobody out here gonna look out for him. So he figures he's gonna have to look after himself. Bottom line, you got twelve-year-olds making their own damn rules."

Johnnie took a sip of his beer, the foam collecting on his mustache. "I don't know, Barack. Sometimes, I'm afraid of 'em. You got to be afraid of somebody who just doesn't care. Don't matter how young they are." (pages 252-253)

Hathor had a post back on January 13, 2007 in which she talks about Lost Boys, or one in particular, a boyfriend from junior high who got lost growing up:

Beginning high school was such an adventure, that I soon forgot him. Several years later I ran into a mutual friend, I ask about him. I was told he was in prison for fatally shooting his best friend. I never knew why, although I did see him later, I never asked. That last time I had seen him he was high and his appearance disheveled. We just made small talk. I walked away thinking what had happened to that good looking black boy. He never really became a man, because murder and drugs had usurped that. What is sad, is that there are so many stories like this one. That was almost fifty years ago.

That would have been nearly 30 years before what Obama saw in 1987. Hathor saw the isolated case way back during the early 60s, but in Obama's time, entire generations of young men -- even young boys -- were being lost to the streets.

In the late 80s, I was living in Berkeley but just on the border to Oakland, along Alcatraz Avenue, and I used to lie awake at night and listen to the crack wars being fought over the control of turf. I've already blogged on one violent experience from the fall of 1987, but there were more than one. Like Obama, I used to see crippled young African-American men, or even boys, hobbling along and using canes to support themselves -- casualties of the crack wars, I guess, or of the crack itself.

Like Johnnie, I found the scene frightening.

Even Obama begins to worry one night when he get out of bed to ask some teenage boys in a car to move on:

"Listen, people are trying to sleep around here. Why don't y'all take it someplace else."

The four boys inside say nothing, don't even move. The wind whips away my drowsiness, and I feel suddenly exposed, standing in a pair of shorts on the sidewalk in the middle of the night.... (page 269)

Obama remembers being a young boy like them ... but not quite like them:

I'm thinking that while these boys may be weaker or stronger than I was at their age, the only difference that matters is this: The world in which I spent those difficult times was far more forgiving. These boys have no margin for error; if they carry guns, those guns will offer them no protection from that truth. And it is that truth, a truth that they surely sense but can't admit and, in fact, must refuse if they are to wake up tomorrow, that has forced them, or others like them, eventually to shut off access to any empathy they may once have felt. Their unruly maleness will not be contained, as mine finally was, by a sense of sadness at an older man's injured pride. Their anger won't be checked by the intimation of danger that would come upon me whenever I split another boy's lip or raced down a highway with gin clouding my head. As I stand there, I find myself thinking that somewhere down the line both guilt and empathy speak to our own buried sense that an order of some sort is required, not the social order that exists, necessarily, but something more fundamental and more demanding; a sense, further, that one has a stake in this order, a wish that, no matter how fluid this order sometimes appears, it willl not drain out of the universe. I suspect that these boys will have to search long and hard for that order -- indeed any order that includes them as more than objects of fear or derision. (page 270)

Here, I think that Obama hints at what helped him exit from the "maddening logic" of his youth -- logic telling him that since everything was already governed "by the white man's rules," the only alternatives were withdrawing totally into oneself or violently lashing out against everybody. Or even choosing both alternatives simultaneously, as the youth of 1987 seemed to be doing. The way out of this logic opened up for Obama when he came to see that he had a stake in a rule-governed order that transcended race even if the specific, existing system didn't treat every group alike.

But I'm speculating a bit, for I see from this last passage that Obama has left out some details of his teenage years and given us a mere shading, allusions to things that might have passed...