Gary Younge
Cornel West; President Obama (Getty Images)http://www.thenation.com/article/160782/obama-and-black-americans-paradox-hope
"Obama should do more for black people—not because he is black but because black people are the citizens suffering most. Black people have every right to make demands on Obama—not because he’s black but because they gave him a greater percentage of their votes than any other group, and he owes his presidency to them. Like any president, he should be constantly pressured to put the issue of racial injustice front and center....The day he took office, the world may have looked at black America differently, but black America has taken some time to look at Obama differently. When he went from being an aspiration to a fact of political life, the posters that bore his likeness in socialist realist style over single-word commands like Hope, Believe and Change should have been replaced with posters bearing the single-word statement: Power. As Frederick Douglass said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
All,
Gary is of course 100% right...And anyone who thinks he isn't at this late date is a FOOL...We must all grow up and deal with political REALITY and not mere "hopes and dreams." An excellent piece...
Kofi
Obama and Black Americans: the Paradox of Hope
by Gary Younge
May 18, 2011
This article appeared in the June 6, 2011 edition of The Nation.
When Barack Obama was pondering a run for the presidency Michelle asked him what he thought he could accomplish. He replied,“The day I take the oath of office, the world will look at us differently. And millions of kids across this country will look at themselves differently. That alone is something.” His victory was indeed something. The world certainly looked at America differently, though this had as much to do with who he wasn’t—George W. Bush—as what he was, black, among other things.
Polls show that African-Americans indeed look at themselves differently. A January 2010 Pew survey revealed huge optimism. The percentage of black Americans who thought blacks were better off than they were five years before had almost doubled since 2007. There were also significant increases in the percentages who believed the standard-of-living gap between whites and blacks was decreasing.
But for all the ways black America has felt better about itself and looked better to others, it has not actually fared better. In fact, it has been doing worse. The economic gap between black and white has grown since Obama took power. Under his tenure black unemployment, poverty and foreclosures are at their highest levels for at least a decade.
Millions of black kids may well aspire to the presidency now that a black man is in the White House. But such a trajectory is less likely for them now than it was under Bush. Herein lies what is at best a paradox and at worst a contradiction within Obama’s core base of support. The very group most likely to support him—black Americans—is the same group that is doing worse under him.
This condition was best exemplified by Velma Hart, the black chief financial officer for a Maryland veterans organization, who backed Obama in 2008. She told Obama at a town hall meeting in September, “I’m exhausted of defending you…. My husband and I have joked for years that we thought we were well beyond the hot-dogs-and-beans era of our lives. But, quite frankly, it is starting to knock on our door and ring true that that might be where we are headed again.” In November Velma Hart was laid off.
If it were white Americans who remained this loyal to a Republican president under whom they were doing this badly, the left would be claiming false consciousness. If a Republican president were behind statistics like these, few liberals would be offering that president the benefit of the doubt.
So, how do we explain this apparent inconsistency? There would appear to be three main reasons. The first is white people. Not all of them. But enough. Half of white Americans in a Pew survey shared the birthers’ doubt that Obama was born in this country. After the president produced his long-form birth certificate, Donald Trump demanded his college transcripts (claiming he was not smart enough to get into the Ivy League), and Newt Gingrich branded him the “food stamp president.” In the face of such brazenly racist attacks, defending Obama’s right to the office becomes easily blurred with defending his record.
Second, the post–civil rights era concept of corporate diversity, which many black people have embraced, is central to his symbolism. Racial advancement is increasingly understood not as a process of social change but of individual promotion—the elevation of black faces to high places. Instead of equal opportunities, we have photo opportunities. “We have more black people in more visible and powerful positions,” Angela Davis told me before Obama’s nomination. “But then we have far more black people who have been pushed down to the bottom of the ladder….There’s a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference, the change that brings about no change.”
Third and perhaps most important, the discrepancy reflects a mixture of realism and low expectations. That black Americans are doing worse than everyone else, and that the man they elected to turn that around has not done so, does not fundamentally change their view of how American politics works; almost every other Democratic president has failed in a similar way. Conversely the fact that a black man might be elected president, that enough white people might vote for him, that nobody has shot him, really has changed their assumptions.
In the black commentariat, opinion is divided over whether African-Americans should demand a more overt commitment to racial justice from a black president or refrain from doing so because it would weaken his appeal to others. The Rev. Al Sharpton insists that calling on Obama to be a “black exponent of black views” is “just stupid,” since it will embolden conservative attacks on projects black people need. Princeton professor Cornel West insists that Obama has “a certain fear of free black men” and “feels most comfortable with upper-middle-class white and Jewish men.”
By concentrating so heavily on race, both sides detract from his responsibilities. Obama should do more for black people—not because he is black but because black people are the citizens suffering most. Black people have every right to make demands on Obama—not because he’s black but because they gave him a greater percentage of their votes than any other group, and he owes his presidency to them. Like any president, he should be constantly pressured to put the issue of racial injustice front and center.
The day he took office, the world may have looked at black America differently, but black America has taken some time to look at Obama differently. When he went from being an aspiration to a fact of political life, the posters that bore his likeness in socialist realist style over single-word commands like Hope, Believe and Change should have been replaced with posters bearing the single-word statement: Power. As Frederick Douglass said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Gary Younge, the Alfred Knobler Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the New York correspondent for the Guardian and the author of No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the Deep South (Mississippi) and Stranger in a Strange Land: Travels in the Disunited States (New Press). He is also a contributor to The Nation.
http://www.theroot.com/views/black-critics-and-president-obama?page=0,0
"Three points need to be made about this issue. First, the challenge to black criticism of Obama reveals the persistence of a certain form of black identity politics. What is at work here is a startling effort to police black dissent in the name of race loyalty...Postracialism is the latest effort to get rid of blackness; it is part of a neoliberal commitment to color-blindness. And it is often used to insulate Obama from criticisms about racial policy. Here, racial distinctiveness is denied. We are all just human beings. And any appeals to race constitute a holdover from a politics of old.
So we're left with the New Deal rhetoric of "lifting all boats" -- a way of talking that is designed, in part, to evade the scorn of Southern Democrats and leaves intact an idea of whiteness that undermines genuine democratic transformation. Obama, when asked to address black suffering, is called the president of all Americans.
Well, damn, aren't we Americans, too? The challenge in such an environment is how to address issues that actually involve race, and to do so without appeals to crude notions of racial solidarity or ideas that all black people hold the same interests because they're black.
This takes me to the last point: that the combination of race loyalty and postracialism effectively banishes black suffering from public view. We see Hispanic organizations demanding the passage of the DREAM Act; we saw the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community push for the repeal of "Don't ask, don't tell"; we witnessed the president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, threaten reprisals for those politicians who refused to support labor's agenda.
In none of these instances have we heard as a response to their demands that the president must be seen as the president of all Americans. Nor do we hear that such appeals are remnants of old forms of bad identity politics..."
Are African Americans expected to shut up and suffer? That's just not democratic.
By: Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Posted: May 23, 2011
The Root
Black America finds itself in an unusual moment. By any measure, many of our communities are suffering heavily during this economic downturn. Black unemployment is officially at 16.1 percent (some believe the real number hovers around 28 percent, making nearly one-third of black America jobless). Even those who have been fortunate to keep their jobs have seen their weekly wages decline.
The foreclosure crisis has also disproportionately affected black communities -- we are 70 to 80 percent more likely to have lost our homes. And it is well known now that there is a direct correlation between racist lending practices and the vulnerability of our communities to foreclosure.
Faced with failing schools (while we wait for Superman) and the destabilizing effects of the prison industrial complex (nearly 1 million of us are locked up; families are destroyed as the rate of black female incarceration skyrockets, leaving many of our children languishing as wards of the state), entire communities -- even entire cities -- have been engulfed in what seems to be spiraling cycles of misery and hopelessness.
And yet we find ourselves embroiled in a heated public debate over whom to hold accountable for the failure to address these conditions. Recently, Cornel West offered a strident critique of President Obama's relative silence on this matter. For him, the president has failed to address substantively the conditions of the poor and the most vulnerable in our society. Instead, West maintains, Obama has been too concerned with appeasing the robber barons on Wall Street.
Many took offense, not only with the personal nature of the criticism but also with the fact that West dared to criticize the president at all. Some African Americans hold the view that this only contributes to right-wing attacks against Obama, making him vulnerable in 2012. Others believe that such criticisms betray an unreasonable expectation that Obama owes something to the black community because he is the first black president -- a troublesome black identity politics, they might say.
Worries about Democrats closing ranks for an upcoming election seem, to me, at least, to be a perennial (and uninteresting) concern. I am more interested in the underlying anxiety about black people criticizing Obama. It is as if we are being told to keep our mouths shut.
Three points need to be made about this issue. First, the challenge to black criticism of Obama reveals the persistence of a certain form of black identity politics. What is at work here is a startling effort to police black dissent in the name of race loyalty. This may be rooted in very different sensibilities.
There are those, as Gary Younge notes in the Nation, who hold that presidents, generally, do not affect their conditions of living. And if we are going to have a president, it might as well be a black one, and we should support him no matter the concrete realities of black communities. American politics don't work, and Barack Obama can't change that fact. One could view this as race loyalty from below.
Others maintain that support of Obama reflects a commitment to racial advancement. To criticize him is, in effect, to turn one's back on the black freedom struggle of which Obama is the culmination. One might think of this as racial loyalty from above. It is the latest version of racial uplift rooted in a particular black-elite aspiration to hold on to the levers of power.
In both instances, criticisms of the president by black people are met with impatience or fierce condemnation. Race loyalty joins with a lingering commitment among the broader public to postracialism.
This takes me to the second point. Postracialism is the latest effort to get rid of blackness; it is part of a neoliberal commitment to color-blindness. And it is often used to insulate Obama from criticisms about racial policy. Here, racial distinctiveness is denied. We are all just human beings. And any appeals to race constitute a holdover from a politics of old.
So we're left with the New Deal rhetoric of "lifting all boats" -- a way of talking that is designed, in part, to evade the scorn of Southern Democrats and leaves intact an idea of whiteness that undermines genuine democratic transformation. Obama, when asked to address black suffering, is called the president of all Americans.
Well, damn, aren't we Americans, too? The challenge in such an environment is how to address issues that actually involve race, and to do so without appeals to crude notions of racial solidarity or ideas that all black people hold the same interests because they're black.
This takes me to the last point: that the combination of race loyalty and postracialism effectively banishes black suffering from public view. We see Hispanic organizations demanding the passage of the DREAM Act; we saw the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community push for the repeal of "Don't ask, don't tell"; we witnessed the president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, threaten reprisals for those politicians who refused to support labor's agenda.
In none of these instances have we heard as a response to their demands that the president must be seen as the president of all Americans. Nor do we hear that such appeals are remnants of old forms of bad identity politics. And of course, they are identity politics.
What is going on here? One could be a bit cynical and say that this is just plain old politics. Folks are using race loyalty as way to keep black folks in line. So the Rev. Al Sharpton, Tom Joyner and others appeal to black solidarity as a way of shoring up the base. And yet Obama and the Congress don't have to deliver "the goods" because any race-specific policies are rejected out of hand as holdovers from a time long gone. But I want to resist going there ... for now.
What I do know is that folks are really scared to talk about racial inequality in this country. That fear stems from the belief that any effort to address the suffering of black communities directly would trigger deep-seated prejudices that still animate American life. America would lurch even farther to the right and all hell would break loose.
In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk. He dared to take on the power and influence of Booker T. Washington. Du Bois was concerned about Washington's style of leadership. He believed that it undermined democratic life within black communities. Too many cowered before him. Too many stood by silently for fear of reprisal.
Du Bois wrote: "[T]he hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing ... Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched -- criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led -- this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society."
He was right. What is at stake here is not some idea of race loyalty. Black people are suffering, and we need to engage that suffering publicly and directly. And that isn't an issue of whether someone is black enough. This is about genuine democracy, about holding to account anyone, including ourselves, who fails to muster the moral and political courage to respond to this crisis.
Do the fact of blackness and the fact of Obama's presidency commit us to some kind of uncritical loyalty? Are we to stand by silently in the face of this devastation? Absolutely not! In these critical times, to borrow a phrase from the late Palestinian critic Edward Said, "Never solidarity before criticism" must be our cry.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is chair of the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University.
"Obama should do more for black people—not because he is black but because black people are the citizens suffering most. Black people have every right to make demands on Obama—not because he’s black but because they gave him a greater percentage of their votes than any other group, and he owes his presidency to them. Like any president, he should be constantly pressured to put the issue of racial injustice front and center....The day he took office, the world may have looked at black America differently, but black America has taken some time to look at Obama differently. When he went from being an aspiration to a fact of political life, the posters that bore his likeness in socialist realist style over single-word commands like Hope, Believe and Change should have been replaced with posters bearing the single-word statement: Power. As Frederick Douglass said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
--Gary Younge
All,
Gary is of course 100% right...And anyone who thinks he isn't at this late date is a FOOL...We must all grow up and deal with political REALITY and not mere "hopes and dreams." An excellent piece...
Kofi
Obama and Black Americans: the Paradox of Hope
by Gary Younge
May 18, 2011
This article appeared in the June 6, 2011 edition of The Nation.
When Barack Obama was pondering a run for the presidency Michelle asked him what he thought he could accomplish. He replied,“The day I take the oath of office, the world will look at us differently. And millions of kids across this country will look at themselves differently. That alone is something.” His victory was indeed something. The world certainly looked at America differently, though this had as much to do with who he wasn’t—George W. Bush—as what he was, black, among other things.
Polls show that African-Americans indeed look at themselves differently. A January 2010 Pew survey revealed huge optimism. The percentage of black Americans who thought blacks were better off than they were five years before had almost doubled since 2007. There were also significant increases in the percentages who believed the standard-of-living gap between whites and blacks was decreasing.
But for all the ways black America has felt better about itself and looked better to others, it has not actually fared better. In fact, it has been doing worse. The economic gap between black and white has grown since Obama took power. Under his tenure black unemployment, poverty and foreclosures are at their highest levels for at least a decade.
Millions of black kids may well aspire to the presidency now that a black man is in the White House. But such a trajectory is less likely for them now than it was under Bush. Herein lies what is at best a paradox and at worst a contradiction within Obama’s core base of support. The very group most likely to support him—black Americans—is the same group that is doing worse under him.
This condition was best exemplified by Velma Hart, the black chief financial officer for a Maryland veterans organization, who backed Obama in 2008. She told Obama at a town hall meeting in September, “I’m exhausted of defending you…. My husband and I have joked for years that we thought we were well beyond the hot-dogs-and-beans era of our lives. But, quite frankly, it is starting to knock on our door and ring true that that might be where we are headed again.” In November Velma Hart was laid off.
If it were white Americans who remained this loyal to a Republican president under whom they were doing this badly, the left would be claiming false consciousness. If a Republican president were behind statistics like these, few liberals would be offering that president the benefit of the doubt.
So, how do we explain this apparent inconsistency? There would appear to be three main reasons. The first is white people. Not all of them. But enough. Half of white Americans in a Pew survey shared the birthers’ doubt that Obama was born in this country. After the president produced his long-form birth certificate, Donald Trump demanded his college transcripts (claiming he was not smart enough to get into the Ivy League), and Newt Gingrich branded him the “food stamp president.” In the face of such brazenly racist attacks, defending Obama’s right to the office becomes easily blurred with defending his record.
Second, the post–civil rights era concept of corporate diversity, which many black people have embraced, is central to his symbolism. Racial advancement is increasingly understood not as a process of social change but of individual promotion—the elevation of black faces to high places. Instead of equal opportunities, we have photo opportunities. “We have more black people in more visible and powerful positions,” Angela Davis told me before Obama’s nomination. “But then we have far more black people who have been pushed down to the bottom of the ladder….There’s a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference, the change that brings about no change.”
Third and perhaps most important, the discrepancy reflects a mixture of realism and low expectations. That black Americans are doing worse than everyone else, and that the man they elected to turn that around has not done so, does not fundamentally change their view of how American politics works; almost every other Democratic president has failed in a similar way. Conversely the fact that a black man might be elected president, that enough white people might vote for him, that nobody has shot him, really has changed their assumptions.
In the black commentariat, opinion is divided over whether African-Americans should demand a more overt commitment to racial justice from a black president or refrain from doing so because it would weaken his appeal to others. The Rev. Al Sharpton insists that calling on Obama to be a “black exponent of black views” is “just stupid,” since it will embolden conservative attacks on projects black people need. Princeton professor Cornel West insists that Obama has “a certain fear of free black men” and “feels most comfortable with upper-middle-class white and Jewish men.”
By concentrating so heavily on race, both sides detract from his responsibilities. Obama should do more for black people—not because he is black but because black people are the citizens suffering most. Black people have every right to make demands on Obama—not because he’s black but because they gave him a greater percentage of their votes than any other group, and he owes his presidency to them. Like any president, he should be constantly pressured to put the issue of racial injustice front and center.
The day he took office, the world may have looked at black America differently, but black America has taken some time to look at Obama differently. When he went from being an aspiration to a fact of political life, the posters that bore his likeness in socialist realist style over single-word commands like Hope, Believe and Change should have been replaced with posters bearing the single-word statement: Power. As Frederick Douglass said: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
Gary Younge, the Alfred Knobler Journalism Fellow at The Nation Institute, is the New York correspondent for the Guardian and the author of No Place Like Home: A Black Briton's Journey Through the Deep South (Mississippi) and Stranger in a Strange Land: Travels in the Disunited States (New Press). He is also a contributor to The Nation.
http://www.theroot.com/views/black-critics-and-president-obama?page=0,0
"Three points need to be made about this issue. First, the challenge to black criticism of Obama reveals the persistence of a certain form of black identity politics. What is at work here is a startling effort to police black dissent in the name of race loyalty...Postracialism is the latest effort to get rid of blackness; it is part of a neoliberal commitment to color-blindness. And it is often used to insulate Obama from criticisms about racial policy. Here, racial distinctiveness is denied. We are all just human beings. And any appeals to race constitute a holdover from a politics of old.
So we're left with the New Deal rhetoric of "lifting all boats" -- a way of talking that is designed, in part, to evade the scorn of Southern Democrats and leaves intact an idea of whiteness that undermines genuine democratic transformation. Obama, when asked to address black suffering, is called the president of all Americans.
Well, damn, aren't we Americans, too? The challenge in such an environment is how to address issues that actually involve race, and to do so without appeals to crude notions of racial solidarity or ideas that all black people hold the same interests because they're black.
This takes me to the last point: that the combination of race loyalty and postracialism effectively banishes black suffering from public view. We see Hispanic organizations demanding the passage of the DREAM Act; we saw the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community push for the repeal of "Don't ask, don't tell"; we witnessed the president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, threaten reprisals for those politicians who refused to support labor's agenda.
In none of these instances have we heard as a response to their demands that the president must be seen as the president of all Americans. Nor do we hear that such appeals are remnants of old forms of bad identity politics..."
--Eddie Glaude, Jr.
Black Critics and President ObamaAll,
Kofi
Eddie, like Gary, is right on target. As citizens we can't simply let the President and his administration off the hook just because we all happen to be black. That's a passive abdication of one's essential human responsibility to a genuine critique and real social transformation, not pathetically clinging to a seriously misguided and distorted idea of "racial loyalty."
Kofi
Are African Americans expected to shut up and suffer? That's just not democratic.
By: Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
Posted: May 23, 2011
The Root
Black America finds itself in an unusual moment. By any measure, many of our communities are suffering heavily during this economic downturn. Black unemployment is officially at 16.1 percent (some believe the real number hovers around 28 percent, making nearly one-third of black America jobless). Even those who have been fortunate to keep their jobs have seen their weekly wages decline.
The foreclosure crisis has also disproportionately affected black communities -- we are 70 to 80 percent more likely to have lost our homes. And it is well known now that there is a direct correlation between racist lending practices and the vulnerability of our communities to foreclosure.
Faced with failing schools (while we wait for Superman) and the destabilizing effects of the prison industrial complex (nearly 1 million of us are locked up; families are destroyed as the rate of black female incarceration skyrockets, leaving many of our children languishing as wards of the state), entire communities -- even entire cities -- have been engulfed in what seems to be spiraling cycles of misery and hopelessness.
And yet we find ourselves embroiled in a heated public debate over whom to hold accountable for the failure to address these conditions. Recently, Cornel West offered a strident critique of President Obama's relative silence on this matter. For him, the president has failed to address substantively the conditions of the poor and the most vulnerable in our society. Instead, West maintains, Obama has been too concerned with appeasing the robber barons on Wall Street.
Many took offense, not only with the personal nature of the criticism but also with the fact that West dared to criticize the president at all. Some African Americans hold the view that this only contributes to right-wing attacks against Obama, making him vulnerable in 2012. Others believe that such criticisms betray an unreasonable expectation that Obama owes something to the black community because he is the first black president -- a troublesome black identity politics, they might say.
Worries about Democrats closing ranks for an upcoming election seem, to me, at least, to be a perennial (and uninteresting) concern. I am more interested in the underlying anxiety about black people criticizing Obama. It is as if we are being told to keep our mouths shut.
Three points need to be made about this issue. First, the challenge to black criticism of Obama reveals the persistence of a certain form of black identity politics. What is at work here is a startling effort to police black dissent in the name of race loyalty. This may be rooted in very different sensibilities.
There are those, as Gary Younge notes in the Nation, who hold that presidents, generally, do not affect their conditions of living. And if we are going to have a president, it might as well be a black one, and we should support him no matter the concrete realities of black communities. American politics don't work, and Barack Obama can't change that fact. One could view this as race loyalty from below.
Others maintain that support of Obama reflects a commitment to racial advancement. To criticize him is, in effect, to turn one's back on the black freedom struggle of which Obama is the culmination. One might think of this as racial loyalty from above. It is the latest version of racial uplift rooted in a particular black-elite aspiration to hold on to the levers of power.
In both instances, criticisms of the president by black people are met with impatience or fierce condemnation. Race loyalty joins with a lingering commitment among the broader public to postracialism.
This takes me to the second point. Postracialism is the latest effort to get rid of blackness; it is part of a neoliberal commitment to color-blindness. And it is often used to insulate Obama from criticisms about racial policy. Here, racial distinctiveness is denied. We are all just human beings. And any appeals to race constitute a holdover from a politics of old.
So we're left with the New Deal rhetoric of "lifting all boats" -- a way of talking that is designed, in part, to evade the scorn of Southern Democrats and leaves intact an idea of whiteness that undermines genuine democratic transformation. Obama, when asked to address black suffering, is called the president of all Americans.
Well, damn, aren't we Americans, too? The challenge in such an environment is how to address issues that actually involve race, and to do so without appeals to crude notions of racial solidarity or ideas that all black people hold the same interests because they're black.
This takes me to the last point: that the combination of race loyalty and postracialism effectively banishes black suffering from public view. We see Hispanic organizations demanding the passage of the DREAM Act; we saw the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community push for the repeal of "Don't ask, don't tell"; we witnessed the president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, threaten reprisals for those politicians who refused to support labor's agenda.
In none of these instances have we heard as a response to their demands that the president must be seen as the president of all Americans. Nor do we hear that such appeals are remnants of old forms of bad identity politics. And of course, they are identity politics.
What is going on here? One could be a bit cynical and say that this is just plain old politics. Folks are using race loyalty as way to keep black folks in line. So the Rev. Al Sharpton, Tom Joyner and others appeal to black solidarity as a way of shoring up the base. And yet Obama and the Congress don't have to deliver "the goods" because any race-specific policies are rejected out of hand as holdovers from a time long gone. But I want to resist going there ... for now.
What I do know is that folks are really scared to talk about racial inequality in this country. That fear stems from the belief that any effort to address the suffering of black communities directly would trigger deep-seated prejudices that still animate American life. America would lurch even farther to the right and all hell would break loose.
In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk. He dared to take on the power and influence of Booker T. Washington. Du Bois was concerned about Washington's style of leadership. He believed that it undermined democratic life within black communities. Too many cowered before him. Too many stood by silently for fear of reprisal.
Du Bois wrote: "[T]he hushing of the criticism of honest opponents is a dangerous thing ... Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched -- criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led -- this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society."
He was right. What is at stake here is not some idea of race loyalty. Black people are suffering, and we need to engage that suffering publicly and directly. And that isn't an issue of whether someone is black enough. This is about genuine democracy, about holding to account anyone, including ourselves, who fails to muster the moral and political courage to respond to this crisis.
Do the fact of blackness and the fact of Obama's presidency commit us to some kind of uncritical loyalty? Are we to stand by silently in the face of this devastation? Absolutely not! In these critical times, to borrow a phrase from the late Palestinian critic Edward Said, "Never solidarity before criticism" must be our cry.
Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is chair of the Center for African American Studies at Princeton University.
