The Last Lap

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Yet for all of his vaunted charisma and no matter how much the political press adores him, Obama could not have won over so many non-black voters unless the nation itself had already changed. In some ways, Jackson says, Obama’s new electoral coalition represents the fulfillment of “my whole idea about the Rainbow Coalition.” But now America is ready for that idea—largely, it seems, because of continuing social transformations during what some scholars have mislabeled the post-civil rights era. All along, since 1965, changes were occurring that were greater, Dick Gregory claims, than even the old movement heavies had imagined. “All of them old-time civil rights leaders that knew that it ain’t [time] yet, they hadn’t been in tune with this new piece out here.”

Young whites are a major part of the change. “Most white baby boomers have taught their children that you cannot live in that past that our parents kept us in,” Bob Johnson says. “You’ve got to be open, you’ve got to accept.” Jesse Jackson, returning to his favorite metaphor, agrees: “Once the walls came down, we could see each other and become roommates and work with each other and play ball with each other.” Sports, music, fashion, entertainers—all have done the work of acculturation that, above and beyond obtaining simple justice, was always the goal of racial integration. (Gregory, the entertainer, demurs on this, saying that while comics and satirists helped “change the whole mind set” by saying “’Hold on, the avalanche is coming,’” the movement, and later voters and public officials of good will, did what really counted.)

The country is also far less narrow-minded and knee-jerk today than it was regarding dissent. “When Dr. King said he was against the Vietnam War, he was accused of treason,” Jackson remembers. “Barack says he’s against the Iraq war and people say, ‘You make sense.’” And of course, there is the historical reckoning on race. Bob Johnson senses that many white Americans want somehow, at long last, to exorcise the legacies of slavery and Jim Crow—an atonement, Johnson says, “proving to themselves, intellectually and emotionally: ‘I am not a racist.’” Although Johnson insists that Obama has not run as “the redeeming black candidate,” it is obvious to anyone who has paid attention that his campaign has turned that sense of racial guilt and symbolic redemption to its enormous benefit.

Early in the campaign, some critics doubted whether Obama’s background made him “black” enough to carry the burden of the nation’s racial past. There are also some ironies, both despite and because of his bi-racial heritage, about how Obama has battened on the tempered optimism of integrationist civil rights. Obama’s search for personal identity has had its twists and turns; and he has not described all of them in his two books. In one of those turns, in 1995, he took a time out from his first campaign for the Illinois state legislature in order to attend Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March in Washington, D.C.—an event Stanley Crouch has written about as “the nadir of black nationalism.” Neither curiosity nor the machinations of South Side Chicago politics can fully explain why Obama was there, any more than they can explain his decades’ long attachment to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Still, even if Obama, like the rest of us, is a work in progress, the civil rights veterans seem to see his impending victory as a refutation of the persistent anti-integrationist pessimism about America, whether advocated by the Nation of Islam, the Aryan Nation, or sanctimonious white liberals who have assumed that ordinary white Americans would never truly embrace a black candidate. (As matters stand, Obama is poised to win a greater percentage of the white vote than either John Kerry, Al Gore, or Bill Clinton.)

The veterans caution that hard work still awaits, to insure and then consolidate the breakthrough. After the Emancipation Proclamation, Jackson recalls, “it took us three years to get to the Thirteenth Amendment” which abolished slavery; “then it took us three years to get to Reconstruction—and then that got cancelled.” Revolutions in American life can always go backwards. And Obama, whose political skills far outstrip his experience, still has a long way to go to prove himself as a Chief Executive capable of confronting two wars and a world financial order that is in collapse.

Bob Johnson says he lies awake at night worrying that the “huge euphoria of expectations” will crash and burn if Obama does not prove successful from the get-go. In an odd way, Obama’s being perceived as black will, Johnson says, buy him some time, as any hasty criticism can easily be deflected as racially motivated. But Obama’s supporters can go only so far in ascribing bad faith and hidden bigotry to his adversaries, as they did during the primaries, lest American politics become racialized in the nastiest possible way.

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November 3, 2008 | 1:09pm

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lolagib1

I think that a lot of these black leaders are finally coming around and acknowledging the significance of Barack Obama's nomination and possible presidency. I am an African American woman, as well as an Obama supporter and I can honestly say that whether Obama wins or loses there has been a huge shift in racial beliefs and ideas, and practices here in America.

In regards to a lot of these older activists and leaders of the civil rights movement and social issues....I feel that that they too are grappling with these events and are starting to accept that things really have changed in America. I do not believe that just becasue you are black that you have to be an Obama supporter; and it is fair to constructively criticize him. But some of the criticism that Obama caught from Bob Johnson, Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson and plenty others was uncalled for. I personally felt that many of them did not want to let go of the torches that they carried. They did not want to pass on that banner and let young, educated, post Jim Crow black leaders pick up the cause. Bob Johnson made horrible remarks that were uncalled for, and considering that debacle he calls a television channel (BET), he really needs to check himself. BET is his legacy whether he still owns it or not. Jesse Jackson made off the cuff remarks that were really scathing, there were other leaders that questioned Obama'a "blackness"....it was a sad case of reversal, blacks tearing down other black people which is unfortunate.

I think they too need to look at themselves when it the context of "the dog chasing the car". If Barack Obama does win the presidency, it will be, in a sense, that everything those leaders have been waiting for finally happens....and now they will have to figure out what there place is in terms of American politics. I am in no way saying that if Obama wins, racism will not exist and that all problems that inner city black youth face will dissapper....NO WAY! These will still be issues. What I am saying is that the conversation of black life, youth, politics, social issues will have to be more progressive. And it will be time for these older black leaders to start inviting more young leaders to the table to confront these issues.

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The Last Lap

The Last Lap