Cyrano's Journal

Color Blind: Reassuring the Master Race

Then there's the chapter (simply titled "Race") where Obama tries to cover his ass with white America by claiming that "what ails working- and middle-class blacks is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts." Equally soothing to the master race is Obama's argument that "white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America" as "even the most fair-minded of whites...tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country" (p. 247). Part of the reason for this "push back" - also known as denial - is, Obama claims, the bad culture and poor work-ethic of the inner-city black poor (pp. 245, 254-56).

Never mind that lower-, working-, and middle-class blacks continue to face numerous steep and interrelated white-supremacist barriers to equality. Or that multidimensional racial discrimination is still rife in "post-Civil Rights America," deeply woven into the fabric of the nation's social institutions and drawing heavily on the living and unresolved legacy of centuries of not-so "past" racism. Never mind that the long centuries of slavery and Jim Crow are still quite historically recent and would continue to exercise a crippling influence on black experience even if the dominant white claim that black "racial victimization" is a "thing of the past" was remotely accurate (see, for example, Joel Feagin, Racist America: Roots, Current Realities, and Future Reparations [New York, NY: Routledge, 2000] and Michael Brown et al., Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society [Berkeley, CA: University of California-Berkeley Press, 2003]).

White fears that Obama will reawaken the tragically unfinished revolutions of Reconstruction and Civil Rights are further soothed by his claim that most black Americans have been "pulled into the economic mainstream" (pp. 248-49). Never mind that blacks are afflicted with a shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their average net worth at one eleventh (!) that of whites and an income structure starkly and persistently tilted towards poverty.

Embracing the Assault on Public Assistance

I wonder if Scialabba read "progressive" Obama's claim that "conservatives and Bill Clinton were right about welfare." The abolished Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, Obama claims, "sapped" inner-city blacks of their "initiative" and detached them from the great material and spiritual gains that flow to those who attach themselves to the noble capitalist labor market, including "independence," "income," "order, structure, dignity and opportunity for growth in peoples' lives." He argues that encouraging black girls to finish high school and stop having babies out of wedlock is "the single biggest that we could do to reduce inner-city poverty" (p. 256).

Never mind the absence of social-scientific evidence for the "conservative" claim that AFDC destroyed inner-city work ethics or generated "intergenerational poverty." Forget the existence of numerous studies showing that the absence of decent, minimally well-paid, and dignified work has always been the single leading cause of black inner-city poverty and "welfare dependency." Disregard research showing that black teenage pregnancy reflects the absence of meaningful long-term life and economic opportunities in the nation's hyper-segregated inner-city and suburban ring ghettos. Forget that the single biggest thing that could be done to reduce inner-city poverty would be to make the simple and elementary moral decision to abolish it through the provision of a decent guaranteed income - something once advocated by Martin Luther King, Jr. and that other dangerous left "moral absolutist," Richard Nixon. And never mind the dominant place in the U.S of a structurally "perverted" (as King used to say) social order that grants hundreds of millions of dollars to parasitic hedge fund manipulators and murderous war masters while plaguing those who want to work for democracy, peace and social justice with constant economic insecurity.

‘The Worst Casualty of that War'

"The people of Iraq can be forgiven if they don't share Obama's sense that it was a good thing for the American armed forces to "recover" after Vietnam!"

Some of the worst parts of Obama's paean to the U.S. power structure concern foreign policy. On pages 287 and 288, Obama's power-worshipping praise of the imperial Cold War (the "successful outcome" of which marked "the Greatest Generation's greatest contribution to us after the victory over fascism") falls to a nauseating low when he holds forth as follows on the Vietnam War - a savage and racist U.S. assault that killed at least 2 million Indochinese (the proportional American equivalent would have run into the tens of millions):

"The disastrous consequences of that conflict - for our credibility and prestige abroad, for our armed forces (which would take a generation to recover), and most of all for those who fought - have been amply documented. But perhaps the biggest casualty of that war was the bond of trust between the American people and their government - and between American themselves. As a consequence of a more aggressive press corps and the images of body bags flooding into the living rooms, Americans began to realize that the best and the brightest in Washington didn't always know what they were doing - and didn't always tell the truth. Increasingly, many on the left voiced opposition not only to the Vietnam War but also to the broader aims of American foreign policy. In their view, President Johnson, General Westmoreland, the CIA, the ‘military industrial complex,' and international institutions like the World Bank were all manifestations of American arrogance, jingoism, racism, capitalism and imperialism. Those on the right responded in kind, laying responsibility for the loss of Vietnam but also for the decline America's standing in the world squarely on the ‘blame America' first crowd - the protestors, the hippies, Jane Fonda, the Ivy League intellectuals and liberal media."

It is left to hopelessly alienated carpers of the "moral absolutist" left to point out that Vietnam wasn't America's to "lose" in the first place and that the U.S assault on Indochina was consistent with the wider U.S. foreign policy aim of subordinating Third World development to the perceived needs of world capitalist order.

As for the supposed tragedy of the frayed "bond of trust between the American people and their government," it is left to the aforementioned "unrealistic" carpers and "cranks" to note that the so-called "Vietnam Syndrome" is a healthy thing. It's wonderful, many progressives know, that the American people subject "their" foreign policy establishment to skeptical scrutiny and turn against a racist, imperialist, and illegal war. It's fantastic that some of us understand the class basis of the imperialism that Obama sees as the mythological creation of left "caricature" (p. 288).

Obama cannot acknowledge that the previous supposed "bond of trust" (whose dissolution he mourns) between the American people and "their" government was based largely on Establishment lies calculated to "scare the Hell out of the" citizenry with exaggerated Soviet and international "Communist" threats. The deceptions were meant to induce the U.S. populace to cower under the permanent umbrella of the National Security State.

It's left to unreconstructed radicals like this reviewer to note that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (whom the technically black Obama loves to quote and cite with the radical content deleted) was among those "on the left" who saw the Vietnam War as an expression of America's imperialism and racism and its related captivity to what that radical leftist Dwight Eisenhower reasonably identified as the "military industrial complex." King came to those conclusions and went beyond them by tying it all to race and class rule within the imperial homeland.

It is left for "unreasonable" "zealots" of the radical fringe to note that "biggest casualty" of the war on Vietnam was suffered by THE PEOPLE OF VIETNAM. The terrible U.S. GI body count (58,000 during the war and more through suicide since) pales before the astonishing damage done to Indochinese villages, cities, infrastructure, ecology, agriculture - not to mention the millions killed in more direct fashion. The number of South Vietnamese civilians murdered just by the CIA's Operation Phoenix (assassination) program was equivalent to 45 percent of the U.S. body count in Vietnam.

With perhaps as many 700,000 Iraqis killed so far by "Operation Iraqi Freedom" (O.I.F.), the people of Iraq can be forgiven if they don't share Obama's sense that it was a good thing for the American armed forces to "recover" after Vietnam!

A Dumb War But Not a Criminal One

Given his terrible take on Vietnam, it should hardly be surprising that Obama's Audacity of Hope is incapable of accurately identifying the Bush administration's illegal, racist and brazenly imperialist invasion of Iraq as a monumental war crime committed in order to deepen U.S. control of super-strategic Middle Eastern energy resources. In Obama's myopic eyes, O.I.F. is a great strategic blunder - a "dumb" and "botched" (p.308)war but not a criminal one - carried out with "the best of [democratic] intentions" (pp. 290-309). O.I.F. is a mistaken effort "to impose democracy with the barrel of a gun" (p.317), Obama says.

"Obama's Audacity of Hope is incapable of accurately identifying the Bush administration's illegal, racist and brazenly imperialist invasion of Iraq as a monumental war crime."

The over-obvious petro-imperialist ambitions behind the occupation go completely unnoticed in The Audacity of Hope. So does the opposition of most American and Iraqi people to the illegal invasion.

Obama does, however, cite opinion data meant to illustrate what he considers to be the real danger in the wake of the ongoing Iraq crime: that Americans are leaning dangerously towards "isolationism" and thus turning their backs on the benevolent superpower's "responsibilities" to carry out its noble global mission (pp. 303-304).

Against Independent Development

Any doubt the imperialist foreign policy establishment might have about whether Obama shares their opposition to independent development outside American supervision comes on page 315. I wonder what Scialabba thinks of the passage where Obama criticizes "left-leaning populists" like "Venezuela's Hugo Chavez" for daring to think that developing nations "should resist America's efforts to expand its hegemony" and for trying to "follow their own path to development." Such dysfunctional "reject[ion] [of] the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy" will only worsen the situation of the global poor, Obama claims (p. 315).

Obama ignores a preponderance of evidence of showing that the imposition of the "free market" corporate-neoliberal "Washington Consensus" has deepened poverty across the world in recent decades. Millions are left to live in ever-more extreme poverty as Obama lamely instructs "developing nations" that "the system of free markets and liberal democracy" is "constantly subject to change and improvement."

Those who have the time and energy to examine the American "homeland" might want to note the ever-escalating inequality of U.S. society and the related, ever-deepening insecurity experienced by American working people. Such is the ugly reality of life, even in the U.S. - home to what Obama obsequiously calls "a prosperity that's unmatched in history" (pp. 149-150) - under the rule of the neoliberal doctrine that Obama upholds.

Advance Promise of Democratic Betrayal

Scialabba's unfortunate reflections aside, Obama's volume would be more accurately titled "Audacious Deference to Power." Whatever its dust-jacket might say about Obama's desire for "a government that truly represents [ordinary] Americans," The Audacity of Hope is carefully designed to reassure the corporate-imperial plutocracy, the foreign policy establishment and the white majority that an Obama presidency would show proper [Alexander] "Hamiltonian" deference to dominant social, racial, and global structures and ideologies of inequality. Beneath false humility, populist pretensions and consultant-crafted claims of "freshness," "outsider" status and non-ideological "pragmatism," The Audacity of Hope is the work of an authoritarian corporate-imperial insider. It is dedicated to recycling timeworn and heavily ideological ruling-class doctrine. It is the product of a relentless ideological triangulator, a clever racial accommodator and political opportunist.

"The Audacity of Hope is the work of an authoritarian corporate-imperial insider."

Following in the Third Way footsteps of the similarly slimy pseudo-progressives Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, Obama's Audacity of Hope reflects and builds on his broader record (see Street, "The Obama Illusion") to suggest strongly that we could count on an Obama presidency "to," in Edward S. Herman's words, "make populist and peace-stressing promises and gestures that are betrayed instantly on the assumption of power" (Edward S. Herman, "Democratic Betrayal," Z Magazine, January 2007, p. 23). It suggests that the world will still have plenty to fear from an Obamanation. One can only hope that its author's often tiresome and long-winded prose will limit the damage the book and its author can inflict on America and world history.

Paul Street ( ) is a veteran radical historian, journalist, and activist and anti-centrist political commentator in Iowa City, Iowa. Street is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004), Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the Post-Civil Rights Era (New York, NY: Routledge, 2005), and Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, and Policy in Chicago (Chicago, 2005). Street's next book is Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York, 2007).

Our thanks to the editors of BLACK AGENDA REPORT, a fraternal site, for recommending this fine article.