Spring Break
Racism past, present: King, Obama, and the legacy of Katrina
Robert Zaller
Issue date: 2/8/08 Section: Ed-Op
Poor Billary. The once and (they hope) future co-presidents are the last people you'd have expected it of, but the Clintons are so tone-deaf to anything but their own ambition that they elected to play the race card in, of all places, South Carolina. I can't count the ways in which Hillary Clinton's comment that Martin Luther King had dreamed the dream of racial equality but that it took Lyndon Baines Johnson to realize it would have offended any black constituency, but suffice it to say that pejorative comment about Dr. King in any context is off limits, at least in Democratic Party politics. King is as close to a secular saint as we have, excepting only Abe Lincoln. To suggest that he did not work his miracles unaided is, well, blasphemy; to suggest it in the vicinity of Martin Luther King Day is suicidal.
Since I'm not running for office, I may as well confess that the treacly rhetoric that has become obligatory on King Day makes me squirm. I've never seen such sadness in any pair of human eyes as I do in King's, and I think they would be sadder still if they were open on today's America. Blacks remain, along with Native Americans, the most immiserated social group in America, and it would be deeply dispiriting to him to see that the two African-Americans who have risen to the highest political positions of any in our history, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, have been principal authors, or at least enablers, of our Vietnam-like disaster in Iraq.
But what about Obama?
Yes, Barack Obama is a phenomenon. I did not expect to see even a mulatto with more or less racially homogenized features contend seriously for the presidency in my lifetime, but here he is. How his candidacy will fare it is far too early to tell. But Obama has conducted a campaign that is as far from the festering realities of racism in our country as it is possible to get. Even when he puts on his southern accent and King-like cadences to address black audiences, he speaks only in the most general terms of poverty, and certainly not of black poverty.
Since I'm not running for office, I may as well confess that the treacly rhetoric that has become obligatory on King Day makes me squirm. I've never seen such sadness in any pair of human eyes as I do in King's, and I think they would be sadder still if they were open on today's America. Blacks remain, along with Native Americans, the most immiserated social group in America, and it would be deeply dispiriting to him to see that the two African-Americans who have risen to the highest political positions of any in our history, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, have been principal authors, or at least enablers, of our Vietnam-like disaster in Iraq.
But what about Obama?
Yes, Barack Obama is a phenomenon. I did not expect to see even a mulatto with more or less racially homogenized features contend seriously for the presidency in my lifetime, but here he is. How his candidacy will fare it is far too early to tell. But Obama has conducted a campaign that is as far from the festering realities of racism in our country as it is possible to get. Even when he puts on his southern accent and King-like cadences to address black audiences, he speaks only in the most general terms of poverty, and certainly not of black poverty.
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