US election: The price of a black president

rights and the social safety net.
But for those who had seen in president Obama’s election the culmination of four centuries of black hopes and aspirations and the realisation of the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s vision of a “beloved community,” the last four years must be reckoned a disappointment.
Whether it ends in 2013 or 2017, the Obama presidency has already marked the decline, rather than the pinnacle, of a political vision centred on challenging racial inequality.
The tragedy is that black elites — from intellectuals and civil rights leaders to politicians and clergy members — have acquiesced to this decline, seeing it as the necessary price for the pride and satisfaction of having a black family in the White House.
These are not easy words to write.
Obama’s expansion of health insurance coverage was the most significant social legislation since the Great Society, his stimulus package blunted much of the devastation of the Great Recession, and the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul added major new protections for consumers.
His politics would seem to vindicate the position of civil rights-era leaders like Bayard Rustin, who argued that blacks should form coalitions with other Democratic constituencies in support of universal, race-neutral policies — in opposition to activists like Malcolm X, who distrusted party politics and believed that blacks would be better positioned to advance their interests as an independent voting bloc, beholden to neither party.
But the triumph of “post-racial” Democratic politics has not been a triumph for African-Americans in the aggregate.
It has failed to arrest the growing chasm of income and wealth inequality; to improve prospects for social and economic mobility; to halt the re-segregation of public schools and narrow the black-white achievement gap; and to prevent the Supreme Court from eroding the last vestiges of affirmative action.
The once unimaginable successes of black diplomats like Colin L. Powell, Condoleezza Rice and Susan E. Rice and of black chief executives like Ursula M. Burns, Kenneth I. Chenault and Roger W. Ferguson Jr cannot distract us from facts like these: 28 percent of African-Americans, and 37 percent of black children, are poor (compared with 10 percent of whites and 13 percent of white children); 13 percent of blacks are unemployed (compared with 7 percent of whites); more than 900 000 black men are in prison; blacks experienced a sharper drop in income since 2007 than any other racial group; black household wealth, which had been disproportionately concentrated in housing, has hit its lowest level in decades; blacks accounted, in 2009, for 44 percent of new HIV infections.
Obama cannot, of course, be blamed for any of these facts.
It’s no secret that Republican obstruction has limited his options at every turn. But it’s disturbing that so few black elites have aggressively advocated those whom the legal scholar Derrick A. Bell called the “faces at the bottom of the well.”
The prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power, regardless of political winds or social pressures, has a long history.
Ida B. Wells risked her life to publicise the atrocity of lynching; W. E. B. Du Bois linked the struggle against racial injustice to anticolonial movements around the world; Cornel West continues to warn of the “giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism” that King identified a year before his death.
But that prophetic tradition is on the wane.
Changes in black religious practice have played a role.
Great preachers of social justice and liberation theology, like Gardner C. Taylor, Samuel DeWitt Proctor, John Hurst Adams, Wyatt Tee Walker and Joseph E. Lowery, have retired or passed away.
Taking their place are megachurch preachers of a “gospel of prosperity” — like Creflo A. Dollar Jr., T. D. Jakes, Eddie L. Long and Frederick K. C. Price — who emphasise individual enrichment rather than collective uplift.
“There’s more facing us than social justice,” Bishop Jakes has said. “There’s personal responsibility.”
Obama hasn’t embraced this new gospel, but as a candidate he did invoke the politics of respectability once associated with Booker T. Washington.
He urged blacks to exhibit the “discipline and fortitude” of their forebears.
He lamented that “too many fathers are M.I.A.”
He chided some parents for “feeding our children junk all day long, giving them no exercise.”
He distanced himself from his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose incendiary remarks about racism’s legacy caused a maelstrom.
But as president, Obama has had little to say on concerns specific to blacks.
His State of the Union address in 2011 was the first by any president since 1948 to not mention poverty or the poor.
The political scientist Daniel Q. Gillion found that Obama, in his first two years in office, talked about race less than any Democratic president had since 1961.
From racial profiling to mass incarceration to affirmative action, his comments have been sparse and halting.
Early in his presidency, Obama weighed in after the prominent black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Mass.
The president said the police had “acted stupidly,” was criticised for rushing to judgment, and was mocked when he invited Dr Gates and the arresting officer to chat over beers at the White House.
It wasn’t until earlier this year that Obama spoke as forcefully on a civil rights matter — the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida — saying, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
Instead of urging Obama to be more outspoken                  on black issues, black elites parrot campaign talking points. They dutifully praise important but minor accomplishments — the settlement of a longstanding class-action lawsuit by black farmers; increased funds for black colleges; the reduction (but not elimination) of the disparities in sentences for possession of crack and powder cocaine — while setting aside their critical acumen.
For some, criticism of Obama is disloyal.
“Stick together, black people,” the radio host Tom Joyner has warned. (Another talk show host, Tavis Smiley, joined Dr West on a “poverty tour” last year, but has been less critical of the president than Dr West has.)
It wasn’t always so. Though Bill Clinton was wildly popular among blacks, black intellectuals fiercely debated affirmative action, mass incarceration, welfare reform and racial reconciliation during his presidency.
In 2001, the Harvard law professor Charles J. Ogletree called the surge in the inmate population “shocking and regrettable” and found it “shameful” that Mr Clinton “didn’t come out and take a more positive and symbolic approach to the issue of reparations for slavery.”
But Mr Ogletree, a mentor of Obama’s, now finds “puzzling the idea that a president who happens to be black has to focus on black issues.”
Melissa V. Harris-Perry, a political scientist at Tulane who hosts a talk show for MSNBC, warned in 2005 that African-Americans “who felt most warmly toward Clinton and most trusting of his party’s commitment to African-Americans” were in danger of underestimating “the continued economic inequality of African-Americans relative to whites.”
But she has become all but an apologist for Obama.
“No matter what policies he pursues, the president’s racialised embodiment stands as a symbol of triumphant black achievement,” she wrote in The Nation this month.
Black politicians, too, have held their fire.
“With 14 percent unemployment if we had a white president we’d be marching around the White House,” Representative Emanuel Cleaver II of Missouri, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, told The Root last month.
“The president knows we are going to act in deference to him in a way we wouldn’t to someone white.”
Some of the reticence stems from fear.
“If we go after the president too hard, you’re going after us,” Representative Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, told a largely black audience in Detroit last year.
But caution explains only so much.
Representative John Lewis of Georgia, one of King’s last living disciples, has not used his moral stature to criticise the president’s silence about the poor.
Neither have leaders of the biggest civil rights organisations, like Benjamin Todd Jealous of the N.A.A.C.P., Marc H. Morial of the National Urban League or Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, whether because of emotional allegiance or pragmatic accommodation.
The two black governors elected since Reconstruction — L. Douglas Wilder of Virginia and Deval L. Patrick of Massachusetts — have also de-emphasised race.
So, too, have the new cadre of black politicians who serve largely black constituencies, like Mayor Cory A. Booker of Newark, Mayor Michael A. Nutter of Philadelphia and Representative Terri Sewell of Alabama — all of whom, like Obama, have Ivy League degrees and rarely discuss the impact of racism on contemporary black life.
Some argue that de-emphasising race — and moving to a “colour-blind” politics — is an inevitable and beneficial by-product of societal change.
But this ideal is a myth, even if it’s nice to hear. As Frederick Douglass observed, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
The political scientist E. E. Schattschneider noted that conflict was essential to agenda-setting.
Other interest groups — Tea Party activists, environmentalists, advocates for gay and lesbian rights, supporters of Israel and, most of all, rich and large corporations — grasp this insight.
Have African-Americans forgotten it?
In making this case, I have avoided speculation about Obama’s psychology and background — his biracial heritage, his transnational childhood, his community organising, his aversion to being seen as “angry,” his canny ability to navigate multiple worlds, his talent at engaging with politics while appearing detached from it. — Pambazuka News.