"Is it The End of White America?," The Atlantic asks this month.
As if. Not even close. But The Atlantic's smart, timely article raises incisive questions about race in these heady times.
Today is just the time to give the King holiday an extreme makeover.
The black-white racial divide that Obama personally bridges, and that Dr. King died to erase, has lost its all-consuming power. Since Latinos are now the largest minority in our multiracial society, dwelling on America's "black-white divide" is as deluded as banking on a two-party system in the Netherlands or Spain.
We're not in a post-racial moment. We're in a multi-racial moment. That moment, personified by a changing poly-racial nation, undermines the creaking nostalgia draining many King holiday celebrations and the over-wrought, contrived worth some people attach to Obama's blackness.
"Already, Texas, California, New Mexico, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia are majority minority," Obama has pointed out, meaning that whites are a "minority" and that "racial minorities" collectively form a "majority." Obama keenly understands that he is taking the helm of an America whose increasing pluralism and mixed populations are turning the notions of "majority" and "minority" upside down and inside out.
Besides, 55 percent of the U.S. population (including me) was born after King's assassination. The majority of the country bared no first-hand witness to his life's work: The Ebenezer Baptist preacher is as much an abstraction as the abolition movement or the Normandy landings.
This week's icons share more in common than cocoa skin. King's genius was most evident in his creation of a movement much larger than himself. (Ditto for Obama.) King spoke some of the most mellifluous speeches of his era. (So does Obama.) But King's rhetoric was the palliative soundtrack of a vast grassroots movement that was complex, sophisticated, and forward-looking. (True for Obama.) When we forget King's movement--both in the breadth of change it demanded and in the thousands of faces and hearts dedicated to the cause--we reduce an experience, from which we still have much to learn, into the sedative mythology of one individual. (Same goes for Obama and his grassroots.)
Powerful people trip over each other to celebrate Dr. King's racial tonic because doing so is the deftest way to sidestep the harder topic: his blunt calls against poverty and war. The King we're peddled in news clips and ad is a soft flicker of the true activist's dynamism and dissent. King's Teddy Bear iconography smooths the thorny substance of his dream.
So goes for Obama. Some whites dismissively pigeon him as a "good black." (Chip Saltsman, the ex-Huckabee campaign chief running to chair the GOP, declined to apologize for circulating a holiday CD to RNC honchos featuring the Rush Limbaugh song, "Barack the Magic Negro.") Saltsman is hardly alone. Even mainstream pols and media focus on Obama's nice racial karma as if to defang him and to deflate his more subversive and ambitious intentions.
At this milestone moment, the media and pols should not pull a King on Obama, lionizing him as a symbolic figure to obscure his more demanding, controversial goals.
For his part, Obama must follow through on those bold intentions and skillfully outflank Congressional and Wall Street conventional wisdom, which seek to cement the status quo.
38 million Americans live in poverty. Present circumstances may push another 10.3 million people into poverty in just eighteen months. On the eve of Obama's inauguration, we need to update the King commemoration.
Multiracial America is in more need of an unflinching brand of self-examination than an empty brand of racial therapy.
Matt Wray, a sociologist at Temple University...“They don’t care about socioeconomics; they care about culture. And to be white is to be culturally broke. The classic thing white students say when you ask them to talk about who they are is, ‘I don’t have a culture.’ They might be privileged, they might be loaded socioeconomically, but they feel bankrupt when it comes to culture …"
Karl Carter, of Atlanta’s youth-oriented GTM Inc. (Guerrilla Tactics Media), suggests that marketers and advertisers would be better off focusing on matrices like “lifestyle” or “culture” rather than race or ethnicity. “You’ll have crazy in-depth studies of the white consumer or the Latino consumer,” he complains. “But how do skaters feel? How do hip-hoppers feel?”
Why not People look at Him with his Words, Actions and Thoughts?
Is this not the "Starting of Racism"?
Because it's a race-conscious world that we're living in, that's why. And that "ain't" changing.
Of course people see a black man when they see Obama. That's like me saying "I don't see gender when I see Arianna Huffington." That's ridiculous. Of course I do. Just as someone would know that I'm a man, and an African-American.
How is recognizing that Obama is a black man, or recognizing that Arianna is a white woman the "starting of racism"? That makes no sense. Attributing negative stereotypes to him because of his color might qualifify as racism. It depends on what's being attributed to him. But recognizing that Arianna is a white woman doesn't make me racist, anymore than recognizing that Eva Mendes is a Latina makes me a purveyor of ethnic bigotry.
You're right, we are indeed in a multi-cultural America. That is why it was so important to Obama to have a cabinet that was clearly competent, but also "deliberately reflective" of the racial and ethnic diversity that is making America more and more diverse everyday.
This is also one of the reasons why Obama will surely name both a Latino, and an Asian-American to the Supreme Court. And he should. Yes, there are matters before the court that are important to us all, but there are also matters before the court that are of special importance and concern to Latinos and Asian-Americans, and, it's vital to have perspectives and views from those groups represented on the High Court.
I'm excited because at the end of his 2nd term, Obama will have changed the way future presidential candidates run for president. No state (mostly white or mostly cosmopolitan) can be taken for granted. No racial or ethnic group can be dismissed or written off. As a former web strategist for The Obama Campaign, I can attest to the effectiveness of his expansive efforts to maximize the total votes in different communities. And he did it...in grand style.
Obama is just simply the right president for a rapidly changing country with eye-popping demographic shifts.