President Obama and the New American Racial Contract
Let’s face it, just a few months ago, if you would have asked any number of African Americans if they really believed that they just might actually live to see a Black American President, you could be certain that almost if not all to a one they would have responded with a resounding —“No!” Today, most of the country still seems to remain somewhat mystified by this latest example of the nation’s lingering racial divide. Nevertheless, whether real or simply imagined, this wide-spread sentiment has existed as a consequence of the heretofore ubiquitous nature of racism within most Black people’s lives. Whether one cares to acknowledge its presence or not, this statistic alone is proof enough that it has played a powerful role nonetheless. However, one should not expect for this antiquated yet still rather vigorous social disease to be instantly cured simply as a result of a Black man’s election to the Presidency of the United States. The true psychopathology of American racism is like a virus that has been taken for granted for quite sometime. Still till this day, racism remains a somewhat shrouded aspect of the culture, like some deformed child that we all have kept somewhere hidden in the basement. We all know that it is there, but we really not supposed to talk about it.
The psychological distance between the two however, between Black skepticism, and White befuddlement is the veil that shrouds Black life from the world outside of this inimitable community. Nonetheless, the election of a Black man to the highest office in the land has totally demolished the central pillar of the once perceptibly indomitable racist principle. All of a sudden, gone forever is the ritual illusion of Black racial inferiority and what is left in its stead is the New American Racial Contract.
The time has now arrived when decades of even the most subtle ‘apart-hate’ traditions have suddenly been tossed deep into the sharp relief of an emerging new social order. Out of the blue, in the face of the Globalism of the 21st Century, gone from public view is the media contrived notion that all expertise must naturally be displayed in white-face. Although this development actually began to gradually take shape on American television screens at the beginning of the decade, it would appear to have hit warp-speed in the year 2008 with the influence of the Obama Campaign. Is this the coming of a Post Racial Society of which so many commentators so anxiously speak? Of course it is not. The idea itself is preposterous and crude. It is altogether disrespectful to all of those who have suffered and died in silence along the way. Nonetheless, it is a perspective that now seeks to beg itself into the national conversation, as it is uttered in the midst of just the latest effort to once more escape the honest responsibility of the American ideal. However, we should not be fooled, as it remains nothing more than an indolent race to the intellectual bottom, in an effort one would suspect to make room for the obvious tricknology to come.
Moreover, if truth be told, on the flip-side of this social reality, if it had been left up to the most prominent political figures within the Black community today, Barack Obama would not be the President of the United States. That much is certainly true. Make no mistake about it, if the Talented Tenth had their way in 2008, the name Barack Hussein Obama would today be little more than an enormous source of mockery and scorn. If he had not been so successful, just like Marcus Garvey a century ago, this cabal would most definitely have acted in concert to make sure that he would eventually be made to pay the ultimate price for so brazen an act of social resistance. His political career would be totally over with. That’s for sure. “How dare he walk past the gatekeepers without truly paying the utmost homage to them?” Truth be told, the name Barack Obama is simply counter-intuitive to the anti-nationalist class identity of the Talented Tenth. In the absence of his amazing success, instead of being known as the President of the United States, today the name Barack Hussein Obama would most likely still find itself falling profusely from the corner of most people’s mouths, lampooned, mocked, and torn to shreds as if it were something that’s just far too —‘African’ to be taken seriously. By inference of course this would mean for them that there was just something about this man that must be somehow —‘less civilized’ and therefore just not sufficient enough to lead in this world. “He must be crazy” —for sure they told themselves over and over again. This is what their history has actually shown us.
What’s more, in spite of the crude psychopathology of this marginal cabal, to be sure for Obama to win the Democratic nomination it was necessary for him to gain the overwhelming support of the masses of the African American community. He had to convince them that his uplift was indispensable to their own. In Iowa, he finally passed the political equivalent of the Apollo Ballroom Test. This again however, was counter-intuitive to the pedagogy of the Talented Tenth; simply because aiding in the uplift of the masses of Black people is not what they have actually ever really had in mind1.
Of course, this is a rather sad state of affairs within the Black community; but it is also quite true. Actually, the Jessie Jacksons and the Andrew Youngs of the world have always represented a completely different perspective on liberation than most Black people. The regime change that brought them to power in the wake of Dr. King’s assignation made this all too painfully clear. If this were not so, the former would not have publicly called for Obama’s castration; while all along feigning ignorance of an open mike, and the later would not have been so imprudent as to essentially compare the transmission of Black Consciousness to the transmission of a venereal disease2. If this were not so, nearly a century ago
Dubois would not have so viciously ranted and raved in an effort to fully denounce Marcus Garvey’s program for Black Self-determination. He would not have spent himself calling the beloved grassroots leader a “Gorilla” in public, all the while working earnestly in private to have him incarcerated and his program of Black self-uplift held up to ridicule and then ultimately destroyed. Moreover, truth be told, there has never been much profit for the Talented Tenth in the mass self-uplift of the Black community. Otherwise, they just would not be the Talented Tenth.
As early as 1903 in his book The Souls of Blackfolk, WEB Dubois made haste to clarify the fundamental rationale and the true resolve of the Talented Tenth: — “The purpose of the education of the Talented Tenth he wrote is to keep the best amongst us away from the worst!” Today we are witness to what a century foolishly awash in the pedagogy of the Talent Tenth has actually done to arrest the development of the Black community. Barack Obama’s candidacy has provided a level of sunlight cast widely upon class warfare as it truly exist within the Black community. Today, it is something that can only be ignored at our own peril.
Even today on the campuses of several HBCU’s one can still witness the pathetic lingering neurosis of black-skin-color caste. It is a tragic testimony to a courageous century of struggle for Black human rights in America, that well after chattel slavery had already come to an end, lurking forever in the shadows even in the wake of the most ardent racist atrocities, the ubiquitous presence of at least one member of the Negro Talent Tenth could easily be found unmistakably on hand simply in order to inform the masses of African Americans that by some measure (of their own creation no doubt) they just were not somehow ‘civilized enough’ to be granted full citizenship after all. Today they are the merchants of the tricknology of anti-victimization, acting to distort the real issues of race and class in America. Sadly enough, the active ingredients in cultural suicide no longer require the actions of a White provocateur. If the African American community is ever to reach its true potential, the Tutsi-like betrayal of the Talented Tenth must be fully addressed3. However, as the world has now seen, the
New American Racial Contract is about far much more than the behavior of this marginal group alone.
So it is that while the election of 2008 helped to bring sunlight to the true resolve of the Civil Rights Intergrationalist Talented Tenth Cabal, so too it provided the world with a transparent gauge of the true level of intellectual racism that still exists however inconspicuously cloaked just below the surface of life within the United States; and its influence upon the White community as a whole. With the stakes so high and the temptation so great, no longer could the real racists simply conceal their feeling deep within the shadows, cleverly hiding the greater measure of their own latent psychopathology as parts indistinguishable from the overwhelming whole. The alarming number of death threats aimed at Barack Obama, along with the shocking rise in hate groups and the wild proliferation of reckless racist comments and innuendo, all helped to bring transparency to the nation during the campaign season and for weeks to come. The serious candidacy of a Black man became a kind of long-overdue sunlight for the entire nation. It helped us all to take a true measure of ourselves.
Yet, even as the nation appeared to be regurgitating some of the vilest aspects of its xenophobic past, all the while throughout 2008 an often sick never-ending racist montage was quietly playing itself out in front of the eyes of the world; featuring shamefully profuse iconoclastic reminders of the gruesome age of Jim Crow violence. The trade-off appeared to be that many Black people were absolutely amazed simply to discover for the first time in their lives, that in point of fact the great majority of White Americans actually do not have a single drop of racist blood after all. Coming from a people who bear such unique and unattended scars as the African American community, this had been understandably difficult for many to witness up until this moment. What should not be taken for granted is the fact that this remains a community for whom the Criminal Justice System all too often has appeared to be criminally applied. One need only refer to the abysmal record of Black prison incarceration and the re-birth once more of private prison plantation slavery, in order to witness this tragic reality. Not to mention the fact that when you see dreadful reminders like a 92 year old grandmother who is somehow blown away in her own home right in your own neighborhood by the very police who should have been working everyday to protect her life, and the popular outrage seems to remain far out of the ear-shod of the White House, it is easy for some to see a conspiracy in “whiteness”.
What Barack Obama’s election has done is to forever alter the American Racial Contract. Gone forever is the ritual perception of Black racial inferiority. Beyond the den of extremist hate groups, just how much validity could this illusion have anymore? Nonetheless, while many people are quick to champion Obama’s election as proof that the prevalence of racism is no longer an excuse for failure in the Black community, so too the abolition of the ritual perception of Black racial inferiority can no longer be used as an excuse for racist abuse. Everyone must now be treated by the same human rights standard.
Suddenly, during the Campaign of 2008 unlike never before Black people were being incontestably humanized in the American media. All of a sudden, the world was exposed to the oddity of conservative Negroes publicly debating liberal whites in a dire effort to secure Obama’s defeat. Although predictably all of this is now simply taken for granted, at the time just a few months ago, this was all actually rather new. We should not be so naïve however simply to assume that it was Barack Obama’s candidacy alone that all of a sudden leveled the American media playing field. History has shown us that these kind of developments, whether we as speaking of Truman’s decision to integrate the military in 1948 or Montgomery Alabama’s decision to integrate the public buses in 1956 have always been wholeheartedly driven by the marketplace.
Lastly, while he famously avoided the issue of racial injustice altogether during the campaign, choosing instead to vie for his very own Sista Souljah-like moment by excessively singling-out and criticizing Black men4, many people now seem to believe that as president Obama should completely be given a pass on all things racial. Respectfully but firmly I disagree. This can become a somewhat dangerous position for him for quite a number of reasons. However, by and large, by continuing to ignore racial injustice within the United States altogether, at the same time that his presence in the White House alone continues to be a powerful source of racist antagonism, Obama stands the chance of becoming just another Jack Johnson. Johnson was the charismatic boxer at the turn of the Twentieth Century who became the first Black Heavyweight Champion of the World. Even in the midst of Jim Crow’s macabre heyday, with brutal racist lynch mobs running rampant throughout the nation, still Johnson continued to publicly flaunt his notorious penchant for White woman. Just as a White Supremacist in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania recently went on a rampage and murdered three police officers ostensibly for fear that President Barack Obama just might take away his guns, many Black men actually lost their lives a century ago ostensibly due to Jack Johnson’s ostentatious behavior. Nevertheless, none of these murders seem to concern him very much. Ultimately Johnson was convicted of violating the Mann Act which makes it a crime to transport a woman across state lines for the purpose of prostitution. Unlike former New York governor Elliot Spitzer who actually did commit a crime by violating this act, only to ultimately get away with it, the woman that Johnson was convicted of illegally transporting across state lines was actually his White wife. President Barack Hussein Obama may ultimately come to realize that even for him there comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.
TS Aschenge he is a fulltime Freelance Author who telecommutes his vast writing services throughout the world. His writing service is called I CAN WRITE THAT 4 U! His Blog is titled:IF NEAL STREET COULD TALK! Follow him on Twitter at: taschenge.
End Notes
1 In the book edited by Dr. Karen Ferguson has a essay titled which presents an eloquent example of real life events which exposed the true motives of the Talented Tenth during WW11.
2 A caller into radio talk show host Derrick Bozeman’s afternoon talk show on Atlanta radio station WAOK was the first to make this comparison.
3 A point of clarity is needed. This statement should in no way be taken to mean that I actually condone what the Hutus did in 1993. I do not. However, who has really studied the history of Rwanda and Burundi and can honestly say that some extreme level of violence and even genocide did not appear inevitable?
4 Unlike racial disparities in sentencing, there has never been any statistical proof that would even began to suggest that Black men are somehow more delinquent when it comes to taking care of their children that any other race of American men. The only thing that exists is the media-contrived perception.
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