HAVE WE REALLY OVERCOME?

On January 22, two days after the inauguration of Barack Obama, Common Dreams published still another in that website’s seemingly endless stream of paeans to Obama. Joyce Marcel, under the title of “We Have Overcome,” describes her emotional reaction to the Obama inauguration, one of crying in joy as she saw a sign in the hand of a black person with that slogan repeated in her title. My reaction to her article is expressed in my entry on the comments section for this article, as follows:

“We have overcome”: that hand-held sign that made Ms. Marcel cry evoked quite a different feeling in me, one of deep dismay with the underlying message for blacks and other oppressed people with the election and inauguration of Barack Obama. The change of tense: from will to have overcome, is critical to notice. While the inspiration of the Obama speech was in the “hope” of what will happen, the celebratory mood (the cheering and the crying) of the time puts his election in the “now” mood of our national psyche. For all Obama’s admirable admonitions that the “real work” for change has yet to begin, far too many Americans—white, black and every other color—are treating his election as an accomplished campaign: the culmination of MLK’s dream rather than as the passing of the baton for new struggles toward a dream that is FAR from accomplished. For all the talk of young and old, the well-off and the poor, people of all ethnicities being “mobilized” and energized by the Obama campaign, where ARE these newly mobilized people? I’ve been engaged for some time with struggles to realize some pieces of the “dream,” but I’ve yet to see people knocking at the doors of activists wanting to express their new inspiration in their own activist participation. Maybe they are waiting for the celebration of the “moment” to wear off so they can engage in working for the future. Time will tell, but not too much time can pass before the struggle is submerged under the weight of continuing injustice, conflict and environmental destruction, as people of this passive celebrity-worshipping culture lapse back into their customary passivity and become the idle Americans who so enjoy American Idol.

I would add in the same vein that the belief among black Americans that they have accomplished a great deal toward improvement of their situation by the election of members of their own race to public office has, for the most part, been a cruel delusion. When Richard Hatcher in 1968 became the first elected black Mayor of a U.S. city, hopes were raised that the blacks of that city (Gary, Indiana) would gain a great deal of advantage for local blacks, as he would, for example, restrain the overwhelming white power structure in that city as represented by U.S. Steel. This never happened, and Hatcher’s efforts on behalf of black improvement were focused instead on what he could “get for” Gary in terms of federal grants; as it turns out quite a bit since the Democratic party was finally vying with the Republican one for major black political support in the wake of voting expansion after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Absent that unique political situation, most blacks in most other states were not able to accomplish even what Hatcher did in Gary.

To take a case close at hand. The black men and women represented in the Black Caucus of the U.S. Congress—32 of them—are hardly advantaged by the competition of the Democratic and Republican parties for their support, as they are virtually all safely in the pocket of the Democratic Party. In this situation, as Glen Ford notes, their voting records hardly distinguish them from that of their white colleagues in the Democratic Party. For example, only 2 of them voted against the House resolution giving unconditional support to Israel in its invasion of Gaza and condemning Hamas for the violence that precipitated the invasion.

Perhaps we could say, as have so many, that the problems of America both domestically and abroad have not been overcome by Obama’s election, but that this event is a step in the direction of such overcoming. Whether this is the case remains to be seen. There is the ominous alternative, suggested by a fewer number of observers, that a “black” President simply puts a black face on the foreign and domestic domination of a corporate elite, adding a still steeper gradient to the hill of obstacles to peace, justice and ecological wisdom that must be overcome.

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Jerry D. Rose – Editor, The Sun State Activist