On Thursday July 18, David Greene of NPR’s Morning Edition interviewed me for about a half hour or so on the shift in President Obama’s rhetoric on race and racism.
Although I haven’t performed the “for real for real” type of analysis to definitively show that a shift has occurred, it’s worth comparing. Here’s the commencement address he delivered at Morehouse College in May 2013. [foot]Transcript here.[/foot]
Tuesday July 15 (the same day Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me was released)[foot]I noted on Facebook that there are three books I’ve read over the past few years that deserve all the accolades they’ve received–Kiese Laymon’s Long Division, Joe Soss, Sanford Schram, and Richard Fording’s Disciplining the Poor and now Coates’ book.[/foot] he delivered a powerful speech to the NAACP detailing the pernicious effects of the prison industrial complex–the most powerful speech on the issue a president has ever delivered. Below, the speech.[foot]Transcript here.[/foot]
The next day, the show aired.
As I noted in the interview we don’t hear any of the “no excuses” rhetoric when he’s talking about reforming prisons. No sense that prisoners are in jail because they didn’t keep their pants up, no sense that prisoners are in jail because they made excuses instead of doing hard work.
David Greene probably selected me for a couple of reasons. The first is that I was one of the few folk of color to routinely appear on NPR, through my work on News and Notes and then Tell Me More. But secondly he interviewed me on the same subject in March 2012.
The President is undoubtedly constrained. The institution of the presidency was designed to be constrained, by the legislative branch, and by the judicial branch. And he’s [foot]Perhaps “he” until this next election.[/foot] constrained by his desire for re-election, and then even in his second term by his desire to see his party keep the office. These constraints are very real. But these constraints didn’t prevent him from pardoning/commuting the sentences of unfairly imprisoned citizens. These constraints didn’t cause him to spend a significant portion of his time castigating black audiences.[It’s really worth listening to the speech he gave Morehouse graduates in These constraints DID prevent him from promoting an urban new deal that could’ve radically altered the life chances of black men and women. But those constraints didn’t cause him to come up with My Brother’s Keeper. He made choices. Problematic ones.
In the end this President will likely go down in history as one of the greatest presidents of the modern era.
But he had a very very low bar.
P.S. Written more for the historical record than anything else. Later Friday evening I got a chance to perform onstage with George Clinton. (Yes. That Clinton.) I’m sure there’s video somewhere–I don’t have it. To make a long story short, Clinton’s “Atomic Dog” is my fraternity’s unofficial anthem, and we’ve kind of adopted him. He saw one of my fraternity brothers and I performing in the audience and he called us onstage. What I’ve tried to do over the past several years is show folk–particularly but not exclusively black folk–that there’s a way to be productive, to be critical, that doesn’t require embracing the bankrupt trappings of “seriousness”. We all have to do more to get free from the constraints preventing us from doing the work while we live the life.
“Cowardice asks the question – is it safe? Expediency asks the question – is it politic? Vanity asks the question – is it popular? But conscience asks the question – is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it because it is right.” — Dr. Martin L. King, Jr
Obama’s 2015 NAACP speech was driven by safety, expediency, and vanity. Conscience is never a factor with this politician. He recognized the problem when he spoke to the NAACP in 2009: “We know that even as we imprison more people of all races than any nation in the world, an African American child is roughly five times as likely as a white child to see the inside of a prison.” Obama did not offer any policy or legislative solutions in 2009. Apparently it was neither politically safe, nor politically expedient, nor politically popular for him at that moment.
When Congress debated what became the Fair Sentencing Act in 2010 Congressman Bobby Scott presented a bill that would equalize the crack to powder cocaine sentencing ratio 1:1. The Obama Administration accepted a compromise bill which reduced that ratio from 100:1 to 18:1. Given the opportunity in 2010 to push for equality in cocaine sentencing, Obama did what he does best–expediency.
However, the decision by his administration in 2013 to oppose a ruling in Blewett v United States was nothing less than an “illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality.”
“Last month (May 2013), President Obama quietly did something that should shake every American to the core. Seeking to enforce federal crack cocaine laws that have since been repealed, the Obama administration asked a federal appeals court to ensure that thousands of human beings, mostly poor and mostly black, remain locked in prison – even though everyone agrees that there is no justification for them to be there.” –By Alec Karakatsanis / The Guardian July 23, 2013
Let us not forget that Radley Balko identified “7 Ways The Obama Administration Has Accelerated Police Militarization.”
What changed between 2009 and 2015? Michelle Alexander’s “New Jim Crow” thesis (mass-racial incarceration) gained a lot of traction. The Ferguson Rebellion spurred consciousness and activity which called the entire criminal justice system into question. Clearly Obama was on the unjust side of the criminal justice equation. Bipartisan support for some criminal justice reforms provided him with enough cover to politically shift his position. Does anyone believe that these bedfellows who periodically engage in illicit intercourse will produce anything approaching true justice?
Obama isn’t becoming anything other than the opportunistic mirage he is. The next time he starts singing to Afrikan people they should sing this Smokey Robinson classic back to him.
“You only filled me with despair
By showing love that wasn’t there
Just like the desert shows a thirsty man
A green oasis where there’s only sand
You lured me into something I should have dodged
The love I saw in you was just a mirage”