I’m still washing in the waves of Obama’s great speech last Thursday night. The most fascinating thing to me is that he did not speak of his blackness, at least as I recall the speech. He began by saying, "They said this day would never happen–" But it wasn’t just about a black guy winning Iowa. He wasn’t offering himself as a racial hero. He meant the insiders, the Hillaryites, the old school, the experienced. He did talk about his own background, but again as I recall, it was in strictly personal, highly-individuated terms: he was the product of a father from Kenya and a mother from Kansas.
Obama is the melting pot. Gone are the days of identity politics. Have you noticed that the young people who are supporting him don’t speak of him as black. We want a black man in the White House. Of course everyone knows this, but I believe his supporters actually are being color-blind, and Obama’s mixed-raceness makes this sort of new American faith possible.
The melting pot was out of favor in American life for the last generation. Nathan Glazer and D.P. Moynihan got rid of it in their book, and my people and the blacks helped to push it out too, by asserting our right to feel proud of who we are. I’m black and I’m proud. Or, I’m not going to hide my Jewishness.
We are all sick of identity politics. Identity politics is Sunnis v Shi’ites and Muslims v Christians. It is hatefulness. Have you noticed the American Express ad where the father and son go back to the old country, Norway, to rediscover their roots, and have all these Norwegian adventures, on their Amex card? It is a sweet ad. Then at the end of the ad they discover that they are actually Swedish, and so they must fly to Stockholm. Ha ha. The ad is based on an absurd premise, that people with Swedish roots think that their grandfather was from Norway. I’ve lived in Minnesota; people out there don’t make that mistake. What the ad is about is what Obama is about: This roots talk is in the end trivial, it’s time to get past it. Boy is America exciting right now!
Related posts:
- Clinton (Bill) trivialized I/P conflict by reducing it to ‘identity politics’
- ‘Birthright’ Should Welcome Non-Jews (and Other Reflections on the Obama Effect on Identity)
- Blacks Reassess Their Identity in Light of Obama Victory. Ergo…
- Neocons’ Identity Politics Have Helped to Fuel Explosive Sectarianism in the Middle East
- Obama Never Played the Gender Card (Or Any Other Identity Card)
{ 11 comments }
Weiss – Better tell Obama's church that racial identity is dead.
http://tucc.org/about.htm
We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian… Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain "true to our native land," the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.
The Pastor as well as the membership of Trinity United Church of Christ is committed to a 10-point Vision:
A congregation committed to ADORATION.
A congregation preaching SALVATION.
A congregation actively seeking RECONCILIATION.
A congregation with a non-negotiable COMMITMENT TO AFRICA.
A congregation committed to BIBLICAL EDUCATION.
A congregation committed to CULTURAL EDUCATION.
A congregation committed to the HISTORICAL EDUCATION OF AFRICAN PEOPLE IN DIASPORA.
A congregation committed to LIBERATION.
A congregation committed to RESTORATION.
A congregation working towards ECONOMIC PARITY.
Phil is as imprecise in his tv watching as he is in his study of Middle East politics. In the AMEX ad they realize while in Norway (after looking at genealogical records in some sort of archive) that their people actually came over from Sweden (they take a ferry then, not a plane) If Phil knew a fucking thing about Scandinavia, he'd know that many "Norwegians" actually originated in Sweden. Anyone from Minnesota knows that.
But go Obama. He's a lying racist drug dealing empty suit. But he's not white! At least not completely!
You couldn't be serious…he's the ultimate white guilt candidate.
And so, I read on the internet: "We are apt to have a president that is there by propitiation and not for any sane reason-just as Oprah rules by that loathsome fiat."
Your comments sound very much like those offered by Bill Bennett on CNN.
While your own rejection of identity politics is admirable, I think you are applying the model to a very different case here. And it doesn't work. Lets hear from the Guardian's excellent columnist Gary Younge:
For there are a number of commentators – particularly, but not exclusively, conservatives – who seek to portray Obama not just as a generation removed from Jackson, but the antithesis of everything Jackson stood for. To them his success signals both the failure of “black” politics and the removal of “black” issues from the political arena. As such, his victory does not reshape our analysis of how race is understood in America; it marks a repudiation of the existence of American racism itself…In truth, [Bill Bennet, George Will's] comments really show that one of the few things that has not changed in the past 20 years is their backward and self-serving analysis of racial politics.
http://fanonite.org/2008/01/07/an-obama-victory-would-symbolise-a-great-deal-and-change-very-little/
http://fanonite.org/2008/01/07/2007-the-year-of-black-%e2%80%98media-leaders-especially-obamaby/
I've been reading you with some interest for the last month. I thought you were refreshingly different from the rest of the deceivers but I was wrong.
"I'm still washing in the waves of Obama's great speech."
You talk like Obama is your long awaited Messiah, although you didn't lay on the bullshit as thick as your genetic twin:
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=01&year=2008&base_name=obamas_gift#103509
The American Prospect's Ezra Klein:
"Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence."
Neither Abraham nor Moses decribed their actual encounters with God in anywhere near the fashion as you do in regard to your encounter with the words of the Magic Negro.
Do you and Ezra think the goy-animals will fall for this infantile manipulation by the god-men of Zion?
Me and Emerson hate them coon and heebs, yes indeedee.
Hmmm? Could you guys please enlighten me to the origins of Obama-the-racist talk.
I seem to remember I read something somewhere, apart from Pipes mad rants,that already are repeated ad nauseam, but I forget what it was.
Links please.
Sorry, next time I check punctuation.
But I guess, we have seen nothing yet:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/01/05/obama/index.html
Why are mirrors so much on my mind lately?
What makes this even more interesting is the fact that Reynolds' sister-in-law is African.
I dread the day Obama wins the presidency, but not because I don't think he'd do a good job, but rather because the main stream media will run 10,000 stories about the first black president. Obama is half black and half white. To call him the first black president makes no more sense than to call him yet another "white president." Why is the media so fixated on race?
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