Barack Obama and African American Empowerment
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Barack Obama and African American Empowerment pal-mara3-00fm.indd i 9/21/09 2:29 PM The Critical Black Studies Series INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH IN AFRICAN AMERICAN STUDIES COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Edited by Manning Marable The Critical Black Studies Series features readers and anthologies examining challenging topics within the contemporary black experience—in the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, and across the African Diaspora. All readers include scholarly articles originally published in the acclaimed quarterly interdisciplinary journal Souls, published by the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. Under the general editorial supervision of Manning Marable, the readers in the series are designed both for college and university course adoption, as well as for general readers and researchers. The Critical Black Studies Series seeks to provoke intellectual debate and exchange over the most critical issues confronting the politi- cal, socioeconomic, and cultural reality of black life in the United States and beyond. Titles in this series published by Palgrave Macmillan: Racializing Justice, Disenfranchising Lives: The Racism, Criminal Justice, and Law Reader Edited by Manning Marable, Keesha Middlemass, and Ian Steinberg Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race, and Public Policy Reader Edited by Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line Edited by Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones Black Routes to Islam Edited by Manning Marable and Hishaam D. Aidi Barack Obama and African American Empowerment: The Rise of Black America’s New Leadership Edited by Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke New Social Movements in the African Diaspora: Challenging Global Apartheid Edited by Leith Mullings The New Black History: The African American Experience since 1945 Reader Edited by Manning Marable and Peniel E. Joseph Beyond Race: New Social Movements in the African Diaspora Edited by Manning Marable The Black Women, Gender, and Sexuality Reader Edited by Manning Marable Black Intellectuals: The Race, Ideology, and Power Reader Edited by Manning Marable pal-mara3-00fm.indd ii 9/21/09 2:29 PM Barack Obama and African American Empowerment The Rise of Black America’s New Leadership Edited by Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke pal-mara3-00fm.indd iii 9/21/09 2:29 PM barack obama and african american empowerment Copyright © Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe, and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-62050-6 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-0-230-62052-0 (paperback) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data. Barack Obama and African-American empowerment : the rise of Black America’s new leadership / Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke, Editors. p. cm.—(The critical black studies series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-230-62050-6—ISBN 978-0-230-62052-0 1. African Americans— Politics and government 2. African American leadership. 3. Obama, Barack. 4. Presidents—United States—Election—2008. 5. United States—Race relations— Political aspects. I. Marable, Manning, 1950– II. Clarke, Kristen. E185.615.B2855 2009 973.932092—dc22 2009010423 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: December 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America. pal-mara3-00fm.indd iv 9/21/09 2:29 PM Contents Introduction: Racializing Obama: The Enigma of Postblack Politics and Leadership 1 Manning Marable I Background to the New Black Politics 13 1 System Values and African American Leadership 15 Robert C. Smith 2 The Limits of Black Pragmatism: The Rise and Fall of David Dinkins, 1989–93 25 Ryan Reft 3 City Politics and Black Protest: The Economic Transformation of Harlem and Bronzeville 43 Derek S. Hyra 4 Toward a Pragmatic Black Politics 65 Fredrick Harris 5 On Black Leadership, Black Politics, and the U.S. Immigration Debate 73 Mark Sawyer 6 The Political Orientations of Young African Americans 81 David A. Bositis 7 The Case for a Neo-Rainbow Electoral Strategy 91 Danny Glover and Bill Fletcher, Jr. 8 The Ethics of Colin Powell 105 Grant Farred II The Meaning of Barack Obama 121 9 First Lady in Black: Michelle Obama and the Crisis of Race and Gender 123 Gerald Horne and Malaika Horne-Wells 10 The Race Problematic, the Narrative of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Election of Barack Obama 133 Rickey Hill pal-mara3-00fm.indd v 9/21/09 2:29 PM vi Contents 11 From Idol to Obama: What TV Elections Teach Us about Race, Youth, and Voting 149 Sherrilyn Ifill III The 2008 Presidential Campaign and Beyond 161 12 Race, Postblack Politics, and the Democratic Presidential Candidacy of Barack Obama 163 Carly Fraser 13 Sovereign Kinship and the President-Elect 183 Joy James 14 You May Not Get There with Me: Obama and the Black Political Establishment 195 Kareem Crayton 15 Barack Obama and the Black Electorate in Georgia: Identifying the Disenfranchised 209 Keesha M. Middlemass 16 Barack Obama’s Candidacy and the Collateral Consequences of the “Politics of Fear” 225 Gregory S. Parks and Jeffrey J. Rachlinski 17 The Struggle Continues: Combating Voting Discrimination in the Obama Era 241 Kristen Clarke About the Editors and Contributors 263 Index 267 pal-mara3-00fm.indd vi 9/21/09 2:29 PM I NTRODUCTION Racializing Obama The Enigma of Postblack Politics and Leadership Manning Marable The historical significance of the election of Illinois Senator Barack Obama as president of the United States was recognized literally by the entire world. For a nation that had, only a half century earlier, refused to enforce the voting rights and constitutional liberties of people of African descent to elevate a black American to its chief executive was a stunning reversal of history. On the night of his electoral victory, spontaneous crowds of joyful celebrants rushed into streets, parks, and public estab- lishments in thousands of venues across the country. In Harlem, over ten thousand people surrounded the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building, cheering and crying in disbelief. To many, the impressive margin of Obama’s popular-vote victory suggested the possibility that the United States had entered at long last an age of postracial politics, in which leadership and major public policy debates would not be distorted by factors of race and ethnicity. Obama’s election almost overnight changed the widely held negative perceptions about America’s routine abuses of power, especially those perceptions held across the Third World. One vivid example of the recognition of this new reality was represented by a petulant statement by Ayman al-Zawahri, the deputy leader of the al-Qaeda ter- rorist network. Al-Zawahri contemptuously dismissed Obama as the “new face of America,” which only “masked a heart full of hate.” Al-Qaeda also released a video in which former Bush secretaries of state Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, both Afri- can Americans, as well as Obama, were denigrated “[in] the words of Malcolm X (may Allah have mercy on him) [as] ‘house Negroes.’” Malcolm X was favorably quoted for condemning the docile “house Negro who always looked out for his master.” To al-Qaeda, Obama was nothing short of a “hypocrite and traitor to his race.” America “continues to be the same as ever. .”1 Despite Obama’s concerted efforts to present himself as a presidential candidate “who happened to be black,” both proponents and pal-mara3-00intro.indd 1 8/25/09 3:59 PM 2 Manning Marable enemies like al-Qaeda were quick to freeze his identity to the reality of his blackness, for both positive and negative reasons. To understand the main factors that contributed to Obama’s spectacular but in many ways unlikely victory, it is necessary to return to the defining “racializing moment” in recent U.S. history—the tragic debacle of the Hurricane Katrina crisis of 2005, under the regime of President George W. Bush. It was not simply the deaths of over one thousand Americans and the forced relocations of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes in New Orleans and across the Gulf of Mexico states region who were disproportionately black and poor. The inevitable consequences of a natural disaster in New Orleans, a city below sea level, were not unexpected. Rather, it was the callous and contemptuous actions of the federal government—especially the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)—plagued by cronyism and corruption, that directly contributed to blacks’ deaths. The world witnessed on tele- vision for days the stunning spectra of thousands of mostly black and poor people stranded in New Orleans’ downtown Morial Convention Center. FEMA claimed its vehicles could not reach the center to send in medical supplies, food, and fresh water; meanwhile, media representatives and entertainers easily were able to drive to the center. States like Florida, which proposed to send in five hundred