The Obama Message: Empowering?

The Obama message: Empowering?

by Ron Walters
May 10, 2007

A recent headline blared out an interesting take on a set of speeches by Barack Obama, 'Obama criticizes black America' and I said to myself, 'hmmmmm, seems like I have heard that song before.'

I had. I was sitting in a Conference of the National Rainbow Coalition in January of 1992 when candidate Bill Clinton showed up, after executing a near mentally retarded Black man in Arkansas the previous day, and proceeded to chew out popular Black Rap singer, Sister Souljah in his speech. Sister Souljah had said the week before in an interview that since police were killing Blacks, perhaps there needed to be a week where Blacks killed the police. Clinton was non-plused that black leaders hadn't called her on the carpet for that admittedly outrageous remark.

Well, it was later discovered that this was a dedicated strategy that was not meant for the audience before him. Instead, Clinton's campaign advisers had him speaking to White moderates, Reagan Democrats and others to prove that he was tough enough to handle Jesse Jackson and be tough on Blacks in the process.

Barack Obama is running for president of the United States, not the moral arbiter of the black community.

And rather than giving Blacks an empowering message, he seems to be talking through Blacks to someone else. This is no time for the elevation of an intra-cultural message into national politics; rather this is a setting for Obama and others to tell us what they mean to do to promote public policy that has a direct effect on elevating the Black community. He and his handlers should leave the preaching to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama's minister, who does a much better job. Otherwise they could create the impression that this is a disingenuous dialogue that does not, in the end, empower the Black community by linking their aspirations to the person who will control the White House.

Of course we asked for it to some extent, because Black people are unique in America in that they conduct a public dialogue about their problems and invite everyone to give their view on an equal footing with their own. On the other hand, you seldom hear Whites commiserate about the people in jail, or the poor, or who has responsibility for these issues as culturally their own. The debilitating conditions of the White community, even though they are the majority, are very often discussed publicly using Blacks as a foil. So when issues of poverty, incarceration, female-headed households or others are discussed, even though there are more Whites saddled with these problems than Blacks, we are often the subject used to discuss them. Perhaps this is characteristic of a people without effective power to change their situation, but even though this is the discussion we have on a regular basis in Black barbershops, we should not legitimize this deflection as the way politicians come into our communities and join in a community discussion rather than to explain what they do if they had the power to make a difference.

As an example, Obama said that Blacks are disenfranchising themselves because they don't vote. This is not true. In the 2000 election cycle, the proportionate difference in the Black and White vote was virtually the same. That is to say, the difference in the proportion of the Black community and White community that registered was little more than 2 percent. And the difference in voting was little more than 3 percent. The difference rose somewhat in 2004. In fact, 1.3 million more Blacks voted between 2000 and 2004, achieving 56 percent of the group and providing further evidence that Blacks do, indeed, vote. Let the Obama campaign take that message into the South Carolina primary where Blacks, in 2004, constituted nearly 50 percent of the Democratic vote. An empowering message would be first to recognize the potency of the Black vote, then to build in their substantial performance with reasons why they should turnout out in even higher numbers in 2008.

I would say the same thing about his view of community economic development, where he reportedly told a group of Black state legislators in South Carolina that a good economic plan would for Blacks would be for them to stop throwing garbage out of their cars. Well, again, as president, I want to know what he will be doing with the Community Development Bloc Grant budget that is meant to help enrich poor communities and that has been cut to the bone to at less than $5 billion for the whole country. If the revenue flows in poor communities matched that of their rich counterparts, then perhaps people would think twice about throwing garbage. I don't want to excuse garbage throwing, but for many, what you see is what you get.

The point is that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and others didn't use their platform in presidential politics to preach to us our about moral failings, they used it to lift us up and we should demand that from other candidates as well.

Ron Walters is the Distinguished Leadership Scholar, Director, African American Leadership Institute and Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. His latest books are: White Nationalism, Black Interests (Wayne State U. Press): and Freedom Is Not Enough (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers.

The Chicago Defender

(The Chicago Defender is an African-American newspaper serving the Chicagoland area)