THE OBAMA PHENOMENON: The Promise of a Restorative
Justice Micro-Revolutionary Paradigm in Multiracial America
John H. Stanfield,II
PUC-RIO Distinguished Fulbright Chair in American Studies
Professor of African American and African Diaspora Studies and
Sociology, Indiana University Bloomington
Please do not cite without permission of the author. This paper is a
forthcoming publication in the PUC-RIO Department of Sociology and Politics
journal.
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THE OBAMA PHENOMENON: The Promise of a Restorative
Justice Micro-Revolutionary Paradigm in Multiracial America
John H. STANFIELD, II
APPLYING KUHN AND TOULMIN
In the early 1960s, M.I. T. historian of science Thomas Kuhn
published a brief planning document for a course of research
which would instead dramatically transform history writing and
social scientific analysis in the history of science field.
Specifically, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions dramatically
transformed how historians and social scientists of science
study how scientific ideas originate and change. The publication
of Kuhn´s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and it´s
unexpected wide reception in and dramatic influence in
American universities and universities in other parts of the world
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is certainly a profound example of how so often unintentionality
and unanticipation and sometimes just stumbling are important
ways in which academic discourses and controversies are begun
and evolve.
Kuhn´s thesis would encourage a breaking away from the
conventional tendency in historical studies of sciences to view
the origins, popularity, marginality, and decline of scientific ideas
as being natural products of rationality and logic and a turning to
understanding scientific ideas and changes in such ideas as
being the products of human constructs called paradigms.
Paradigms to Kuhn were the conscious and more importantly,
taken for granted norms, procedures, values, and traditions in
which scientists of a particular scientific community were
socialized to and adhered to as cognitive road maps. Such
cognitive road maps embedded in the presumptive language and
other traditions of a scientific community ran along smoothly on
tracks until a problem, that is, an anomaly emerges or is
otherwise encountered which the paradigm cannot address
adequately. After much controversy and competition, through a
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revolutionary change, the old paradigm is replaced with a new
one which adequately addresses the issues the old paradigm
proved inadequate to effectively explain.
Over the years, the critics of Kuhn´s thesis and aspects of
it, such as the concept of scientific revolution have been ample.
One of Kuhn´s earliest critics was social philosopher Stephen
Toulmin in the early 1970s. In Toulmin´s book, Human
Understanding, Volume I, he argues that there is not actually a
clean break between old and new scientific paradigms but are
instead more gradual changes which involve the mixture and
even the mutation of old and new ideas in the formation of what
comes to look like a new paradigm. That is, there are micro
revolutions, not complete revolutions in which over time
certainly the new ideas may come to dominate over most of the
old ones but there are still old ideas still lurking around in
synthetic mutation with the old. It is like what historians have
documented in the history of atomic physics. Namely, Einsteinian
atomic physics is not a complete break away from Newtonian
physics as seen by the continued embracing of the sacred
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physics belief in the atom. It is like what David Harvey says
about how much though neo-Marxist reasoning in the culture of
American urban social sciences appears to be an alternative to
traditional functional and even evolutionary paradigms, in actual
fact, one can see how so often American brands of neo-Marxism
are mutated with more conservative elements of functionalism
and evolutionary beliefs. It was the historian Carl Becker who
many years ago in his account of the enlightment philosophers of
the 18th century who in popular interpretation broke away from
the grip of the church in their ushering in the epistemology of
positivistic sciences with their secular value freeness were
actually men of their times embedded in the theocratic culture in
which they were reared resulting in these luminaries proclaiming
the dawn of the age of human reason actually replacing the
divinity of the God of the church with the divinity of science in
society.
It would not be surprising to you that Kuhn´s concepts of
paradigm, paradigmatic crisis, and paradigmatic revolution and
Toulmin´s concept of micro-revolution all are applicable to how
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we learn and change our every day presumptions, assumptions,
beliefs, attitudes, and lives. What we are, that is, is what we are
socialized into beginning the day we are born and even before
according to researchers of infant development and that
socialization is embedded in the paradigms, that is, the cognitive
maps which those who rear us in families, religious settings,
residential communities, schools, media, government, and other
socializing agency significant others give us. As much as we
enjoy making breaks in our human development into these broad
sweeping chronologies such as primitive modern, post modern, in
actual fact, we are a mixture of all three chronologies as early
21st century Western, Westernizing, Eastern, and Easternizing
people depending upon where we are on this vast globe in which
we all reside. It is the same when it comes to centuries, I guess.
As much as we like to say that we are early 21st century post
modern people, those of us in the urban centers of western and
eastern nations, in many respects and in some very distinct
circumstances and situations, we are not only still quite 20th
century obviously since the end of that century chronologically is
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still so recent but in other respects we are centuries old. Just go
to church during a Sunday and see what I mean as we go through
the rites and rituals of an institution which dates back to the
third century after the death of Christ.
Within the context of this observation, we have to admit
that when it comes to still embracing the concept of race, we are
very much 19th century people. Even though there have been,
since the beginning of the 19th century and even before there
have been advocates for doing away with race as a
dehumanizing tool to justify feelings of superiority to rationalize
exploiting, enslaving, and exterminating others and to subject
others to the dungeons of society, it still continued to root itself
and normalize and routinize over generations.Even though
especially during the past sixty or so years, there has been
mounting evidence by reputable social and life scientists that
race is a myth which creates a dehumanizedd society in which
the human dignity and integrity is taken away and perverted by
both those on top and by those on the bottom, our paradigms of
everyday life in societies in which race remains central or has
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become central. It has even become acceptable in some
quarters, such as post modern theory and identity theories which
essentialize ethnicities, calling us people of color, what ever that
means, to celebrate and embrace something which is really quite
dehumanizing since positively or negatively there is the
presumption that people who look the same real or imagined
have the same cultural traits, intellectual abilities, and other
human qualities which tend to be random in populations and
societies rather than fixated in constructed categories. This
dehumanizing way of presuming and assuming and thinking and
acting on becomes like an addictive obsession and attraction in
multiracialized societies in which so much energy is invested in
presuming what people are or trying to figure out what people
are so we can act accordingly.
But, it, meaning race, has proven to be immensely
profitable emotionally as well as economically and politically as
a short hand for deciding how to choose and how to act and for
determining status and abilities no matter how erroneous the
criterion is and so profitable economically and politically that our
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every day paradigms presumptions about the realness of race
remain intact.
This has been the case in the United States until very recently
and when I say very recently, I am referring to decades. The
emergence of Barak Obama and the surprising reception he has
been receiving with American voters, the media, and political
and business leaders tells us much of a micro revolution which
for decades has been excluded or marginal to the American
mainstream which is beginning to become mainstreamed but of
course, there is still very much of the old in beliefs still lurking
around. What this means is that like in science, in public culture
and in private lives, so often micro- revolutionary paradigms are
actually the gradual acceptance of ideas, customs, norms,
values, ways of seeing, hearing, and feeling which are excluded
and then gradually marginalized and then gradually accepted as
the mainstream through time due to the crystallization of
societal conditions which make the micro-revolutionary
paradigm. After all, for decades, indeed for centuries, evolution
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was a micro-revolutionary paradigm long repressed by the power
of the church which would become a dominant paradigm in the
late nineteenth century in the work of Charles Darwin’s The
Origins of the Species due to the break down of church authority
by that time, industrial urbanization, and the emergence of a
secular economic elite in the United States which was much
more embracing of the social interpretation of the evolution
paradigm than their European counterparts.
I believe that no matter what happens to Obama´s
candidacy, be it that he is actually elected or is not or does not
even make it out of the national Democratic convention this
summer, his presence is a symbol of a micro revolutionary
paradigm which is beginning to dance around the edges of
mainstreaming in American society. It is a paradigm of
restorative justice that only a person with his demographic
qualities and context of birth could articulate at this moment in
American history. Be it as a candidate who does eventually get
elected this time around or the next or becomes a catalyst who
never wins the nomination, he has opened the door wider than
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any other public figure in moving towards a restorative model of
the just American society which understands the dehumanizing
stain of race and how distracting as well as destructive it is
when it comes to bringing people together of all ancestries and
other social backgrounds with common challenges in everyday
life.
RESTORATIVE JUSTICE—What Is It?
Restorative justice is the recovery of our humanity.
Restorative justice as a national public policy was popularized in
the early 1990s by the work of Bishop Desmond TuTu’s Truth and
Reconciliation Commission in the earliest years of Black Majority
Rule in post-apartheid South Africa. But, more fundamentally,
restorative justice is a community and a societal practice dating
back to the ancient times of indigenous peoples around the world
as a way of restoring human dignity after some thing terrible has
happened such as murder or theft or war.
Restorative justice as a process of becoming human again
through becoming transparent and authentic open human beings
has begun to be written about extensively over the past several
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years as public policy alternatives in regions of the world such as
East Europe and East and Central Africa as recent sites of
massive genocide. In this emerging literature, on what
restorative justice is as a way of living I dare say as well as a
public policy as the process of becoming human again is seen as
being rooted in the assumption that whenever some thing terrible
happens socially which destroys human beings en mass, be it
episodes such as genocide or slavery and their
institutionalizations or routinized systems such as poverty,
ageism ,racism, sexism, or anti-religiosity, it dehumanizes the
entire community, the entire society. Such horrible human
episodes and systems dehumanize perpetrators as well as
victims. Indeed, in the restorative justice framework, all involved
are both perpetrators and victims. This is why the labor intensive
and deeply painful process of restorative justice involves
perpetrators and victims sitting around the same table, so to
speak, and taking turns in articulating memories of what
happened, then going through the process of confessing they all
had a part in the horrible deed in some shape or form, and then
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going through the phase of taking responsibility by apologizing
and then going through a phase of asking for forgiveness, that is
a request for understanding to at least co-exist and at best to
embrace each other and live together, and then go through the
phase of restoring to each other that which was taken
symbolically such as names and materially such as land which
represent human dignity, and then to enter the phase of a new
way of living sustained through new support systems and new
social circles which continue to confirm the humanity of those
who I used to see as less than human. This intense process of
becoming human again which takes so much humility and
transparency makes restorative justice a very difficult
perspective to grasp let alone embrace and implement in daily
life and in public policy formation and implementation in
societies based on cultures of retribution and cultures of blame
and in cultures which place no value on self reflection and
accountability. It is no wonder then that besides marginally in
the area of criminal justice concerns, there is hardly any mention
in the United States of restorative justice as a viable public
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policy alternative let alone as a way of daily life and as a type of
valuation and even identity. And the same can be said of so many
other societies which experience difficulty in acknowledging and
working through pain of past wrongs which have violated the
dignity of our fellow human beings which results in the
dehumanization of all societal members.
2008 AS WATERSHED POINT IN AMERICAN POLITICS AND
DOMINANT CULTURE
This is why the 2008 election year in American politics and
culture is so fascinating and so historically important. It is in so
many ways a watershed point in a society which has engaged in
an unintentional natural social experiment in restorative justice
which in bits and pieces has appeared here and there in the
societal landscape since the ending of World War I in 1918 and in
some cases much, much earlier in American colonial and
national history. The 2008 primary season in the United States
has already gone down in American history as being the most
diversified political season the nation has ever seen populated
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with leading candidates representative of populations
historically excluded or marginalized in the race for the greatest
prize in American and international politics, of course, the U.S.
Presidency which has usually been restricted to White males
affluent through inheritance or through mobility, married once or
since Reagan twice, and Protestant or since Kennedy, Catholic
as well.. The idea that a Mormon or a more than twice married
person or a woman or a black person could be taken seriously as
a Presidential candidate on either side of the Democratic or
Republican political aisle was at best, until now a fantasy for
novel writers or for the imaginations of film producers. But in
2008 it is happening. As well, no matter who wins in November
2008, there will be a President in the White House who belies
conventional thinking about the cultural imagery and the cultural
functions of the U.S. Presidency. And one of those new things is
having a President who does not think conventionally about race
not only for politically correct reasons in a society which
demands that public figures put on good public smiles when it
comes to saying the right things though, perhaps, privately being
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racially prejudiced but due to having certain beliefs derived from
having value systems which come through the labor intensive
painful experiences it takes to understand the humanity of others
and therefore your own humanity.
We have as the Republican candidate John McCain, a
white male who is viewed as a maverick who lost his sense of
gender privilege and the social privilege of coming from a
distinguished military family as a tortured and tormented
prisoner of war in Vietnam for five and a half years. It was a kind
of social death from which he was resurrected and once you die
socially the way McCain did as a prisoner of war, there is nothing
on this earth which can hurt you so you might as well be who you
are. As is widely known, on numerous occasions, McCain has
broken from his party and has disagreed with his party’s
President on campaign financing reform, the tobacco industry,
and on the Iraqi war which in other ways he supports. The Wall
Street Journal editors reminded their readership soon after he
secured enough delegates for the nomination that McCain may
be a Republican but did not always line up with business as
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Republican candidates for the U.S. Presidency usually do.
McCain’s social stands have made the evangelical and
conservative wings of the Republican Party suspicious of him.
One of those social issues which have not been fully expressed
in the mass media is McCain’s views on race. He is a supporter of
affirmative action though not of quotas. More than that, in the
early 1990s his wife and he adopted a distinctly colored child
from Bangladesh. Even though much has been made out of the
how much the wealth of his wife and her family aided McCain in
launching his political career what is not as well known to the
American public is that the corporation from which his wife
draws her wealth, Anehuser Busch Brewery, is well known in
business circles as being an award winning corporation when it
comes to diversity and inclusion policies. If you haven’t already,
go to the John McCain for President website and read the speech
he gave in honor of the 40th anniversary of King’s death. It is very
interesting though telling that his spell binding words of
admiration for King have not been publicized by a media which
has much more difficulty with a white man than with a white
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woman or with a person of color irrespective of gender who
dares to talk straight about race even to the point of apologizing
for his own past errors such as voting against the effort to make
King’s birthday into a national holiday early in his political
career. And please realize that one of the candidates for the vice
presidential spot on McCain’s ticket is a woman who he has
called on more than one occasion a great American and seems to
have no problem with her being increasingly mentioned as a
possible choice for the vice president spot in the national media:
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
Bill Clinton’s progressive views on race can be traced to his
childhood and adolescent experiences with African Americans
while growing up in Arkansas. Well before Hillary met Bill , she
had begun her own journey in developing a value system which
has given her much empathy for black people. It probably began
in her comfortable middle class suburban home in Chicago with a
father who insisted early on that his children see how the other
side lived and took them to the predominantly black Southside to
drive his point home. Throughout Hillary’s college and her law
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school years, the circles of integrated black and white friends
she was involved in socially became spaces for her to develop a
justice oriented value system which was more empathetic than
the sympathetic and thus paternalistic way too many progressive
whites tend to view people of color. Thus, when it is said that
Hillary has a loyal black following, it should not be seen in the
usual sense of paternalistic political support. She has deeply
rooted friends who happen to be black. I should add that Bill and
Hillary Clinton’s deep emotional ties in black life have been
demonstrated in so many ways which have yet to be made
public. For instance, while Bill Clinton was governor of Arkansas
Hillary and he virtually adopted a brilliant young African
American man who they felt would be destined to become the
first black governor of the state and to go even further. Among
other things, the young man scored the highest in the S.A.T. in
the state of Arkansas in the year he took it. The Clinton’s
sponsored his admission to Yale where he excelled brilliantly.
Unfortunately, around the time he was due to graduate or shortly
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thereafter, the young man was killed in an automobile accident.
A lost which still pain the Clintons.
Bill Clinton’s gaffes which were interpreted as efforts to
racialize Barak Obama during the primary season and the firing
of Geraldine Ferro from Hillary Clinton’s campaign finance team
due to her racially insensitive remarks may have alienated black
voters who do not know her personally but not those who know
her personal history and more than that, know her. Meanwhile, a
media which is having a hard time dealing with a serious woman
contender for the Presidency in mainstream party politics, is
having a more difficult time dealing with a transformed white
woman with a well developed and well tested value system when
it comes to considering people as human beings rather than as
superior or inferior races or just as races.
OBAMA !!
And in this cultural sea change bubbling up so
unexpectedly in American politics we have the extraordinary
achievements of U.S. Senator from the state of Illinois Barak
Obama who was not even elected to the U.S. Senate yet when he
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gave his rousing speech at the 2004 Democratic convention. The
speech would rocket him into national prominence in ways
unimaginable in national politics. He was supposed to wait his
turn if he was going to have a turn at all as a Democratic Party
candidate. “If at all” is a key phrase since after all, in American
cultural terminology, he is a Black man, and there was not even a
hint that 2008 would be the so called right time for a Black
person to be viewed as a serious presidential candidate. It was
similar to the rather sudden rise of a black civil rights leader in
1955 residing in, of all places, Montgomery Alabama, the
heartland of the violent prone legally segregated deep south. May
be a poker player, but no one betting on horses would have put
money on a civil rights movement with such regional, national,
and international influence would occur through the emergent
leadership of a black man who came from a respectful though
not the most prestigious family circles of his Atlanta, Georgia
community and who would rise to the occasion to lead a bus
boycott though he never really lead anything all that big before
he recently became pastor of the most elite black church in
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Montgomery. Of course, I am talking about the rise of Martin
Luther King, Jr. which took every one off guard, the media, the
white and black establishment, the state and federal
governments, and the academic experts.
AMERICAN ANOMIE AND THE CIVIC HEALER
The rise of Obama as a secular prophet who as more than
one commentator says, rises more and more as more and more
people go and hear him about the road to change has much to
do with several factors. The major factor which has to do more
with historical and cultural need than race is that Obama has the
message for a public with anxious ears and excited hearts
wishing and dreaming about change which will re-establish hope
and faith in a society in deep civic crisis with declining
international prestige. The massive quality of life problems in the
United States which cut across class, ancestry, and gender—
uncontrolled personal debt, the soaring costs of health care,
education, and housing; massive unemployment and other
mobility problems; lost of major industry abroad, and negative
domestic affects of the war in Iraq, are some of the major
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problems which are binding most Americans together in a bond
of deepening misery and despair. And this bond of deepening
misery and despair is massaged by a mainstream mass media
with opinion polls which are increasingly out of touch; a
mainstream media more concerned with letting us know about
the latest regarding Brittany Spears and her pregnant sister or
gossip about the latest guest on the Oprah Winfrey show than
soberly informing American viewing, listening, and reading
audiences what is really going on around us, what is really
happening to us and what is really happening to others around
the world.
Generation gaps between the old and young are common
place in all societies. In contemporary America, the distance
between the baby-boomer generation, those Americans that is
between 48 and 63 on the average, and their children and
grandchildren embedded in a multicultural hip hop, My Space
culture is particularly a deep cold ocean. When one thinks of
both perceived and real leadership blunders of baby-boomer
leaders who began to emerge in the late 1980s and 1990s such
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as the Enron scandal, the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, scandals in
religion and in science, the building of a massive prison complex
with no rehabilitation relief for the ex-incarcerated, the
seemingly lack of resources to deliver quality k-12 education and
the super pricing of college education,
the deepening neglect of
care for children and families and the earlier mentioned quality of
life problems in the United States, it is no wonder that so many
young Americans are disillusioned. And their disillusionment is
shown in the increase in suicide among the young, the increase
in stress related diseases among the young, the number of
suicide murders involving young people, and so many other tragic
indicators of this widening gulf between the old and the young.
The generational gap problem in the United States is certainly
symptomatic of the break down of basic civic culture in
American residential communities and in American public life
sectors which scholars and opinion leaders have been
commenting on during the past ten years such as Robert
Putnam’s Bowling Alone. Our sense of civic belonging and social
bonding has been replaced with living amongst strangers,
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including our own children and spouses and certainly our
neighbors who we do not know any more. Fear, suspicion, and
social cynicism have replaced norms of trust, loyalty, and social
optimism in an over spending mass consumer society with its
back against the wall. In the spirit of late nineteenth century
sociologist Emile Durkheim, the breakdown and fragmentation of
traditional moral regulators such as families, faith communities,
educational systems, and media have all tossed many if not
most Americans into the deep pit of anomie, that is a massive
state of social rootlessness with drifting identities and massive
lost of personal purpose and social intention.
So Obama in chronological age and in inspirational
perspective is the inspirational leader emerging generations of
highly alienated young people and highly frustrated progressive
older Americans have been waiting to arrive for a very long time,
especially since we have begun to drift into this phase of a
society becoming unglued through polarization, massive
alienation, declining global prestige and in a society in which we
have grown accustomed to talking past each other or at each
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other rather than talking with each other and a powerful nation
which needs to learn how to talk to our allies, rivals, and
enemies in ways in keeping with the emerging twenty first
century world.
While his rivals may boast of having more years in the
international and domestic political arena than Obama, what he
offers is civic healing, a point echoed by powerful more
politically experienced people who are endorsing him. The test
for Obama is, if elected as President, if he can do what other
inspiring Presidents have done when elected during times of
national crisis, during times of societal disunity, such as
Abraham Lincoln on the brink of the American Civil War, Franklin
D. Roosevelt in the midst of the Great Depression, and John F.
Kennedy in the heat of the Cold War, to have the gift of
surrounding himself with an experienced brain trust inner circle
with implementation leadership gifts to astutely carry out his
vision .
This is why Obama is so popular, why such an
unprecedented number of Americans in so many states are
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running to the polls to vote for him, why it is that not only the
young and blacks are captured by his confidence that we can
change, we can heal civically if we change ourselves but also
members of establishments of both political parties speaking of
his civic healing touch in their glowing endorsements of him. It
is not only members of American influential political families
such as the daughter of Democrat President John F. Kennedy or
the grand daughter of Republican President Dwight D.
Eisenhower but again, to the amazement of the media, there are
hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans of much more
humble backgrounds of all ancestries in the urban and rural
lands of America who have become disciples of the Obama
symbolism of civic healing as an emerging cultural idea which
will more than likely have a profound impact on American culture
and politics no matter what happens at the political party
conventions this summer or on national election day on the
second Tuesday in November.
But, besides the present state of America which makes the
emergence of a mass appeal leader with Obama’s qualities so
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appealing, there is the man himself who personifies in amazing
ways the complexities, paradoxes, and contradictions of
American society and our need to repair old bridges and to build
many new ones in our lives domestically and internationally.
Obama has brought back into politics that which has been seen
and more than that felt in the personal touch of American
Presidents such as Abraham Lincoln who is said to have the
capacity to transform his more politically experienced rivals
when they met them one on one and to do the same to the
cynical crowd of people which came initially to make fun of
this awkward woods man from then frontier of Illinois
say
some thing and then could not stop clapping their hands once he
finished some spell binding speech about civic commitment or
about healing the nation in the brink of or in the midst of civil
war.
In a highly complex and impersonal society in deep civic
and international crisis, having a President who seems to be
able to relate to the basic needs of people and to transform them
from self centered individuals into civically minded citizens is a
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quality which Obama has which none of the other Democrat or
Republican Party candidates have. Up until very recently at least,
the more a cynical media has tried to capture Obama in a lapse
of good judgment, they are dismayed by his authentic response
which means that, for the most part, what he says is how he
lives, rather than what he says being only for public consumption
with contrary private values. I should say as a quick digression
that it was the same about Martin Luther King, Jr. His concern
for people was genuine; he wanted no glory for himself. This is a
man who wore the same clothes practically, who continued to
live in a modest house as his fame increased, who drove a car so
old that you could see the road on the driver’s side of where the
floor used to be. And he gave his Noble Prize for Peace money to
the movement.
HIS MOTHER
The extraordinary background of Obama makes him in a
class alone when it comes to the history of blacks in American
national mainstream politics in terms of demographic origins,
personal background, and educational credentials. Keep in mind
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the phrase “ national mainstream politics” since though there
have been African Americans involved in national mainstream
politics since the late 18th century, even those who have been
taken seriously have for the most part been outsiders such as
movement leaders or public intellectuals or politicians on the
margins of their parties such as Jesse Jackson but do not have
the influence to become a sustained serious candidate in the
electoral process.
Obama’s mixed heritage, having an African father from
Kenya and a white mother from Kansas who raised her children
in Hawaii and in Indonesia placed him in environments in which
he had to become a bridger to survive, to achieve. His extended
family which in his own words looks like the United Nations, he
learned early on how to consider individuals as people with a
broad range of personalities, abilities, and character rather than
making presumptions based upon skin color. Growing up in such
atypical environments as an African descent American citizen
meant that he did not develop the phobias, the fears, the
inferiority complex which too often operate to limit if not
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eliminate the social mobility of blacks, especially black males.
His consequential ego strength and interpersonal skills have
allowed him to do things which blacks had never done before
such as becoming the first Harvard Law Review editor, the first
black male senator elected in the north, and now the first black
to be taken seriously in presidential election politics. When you
read his career history, what is striking is that though this is a
man who wanted to go places and had the historically white
rather than black elite educational and vocational credentials as
an attorney and as a state elected representative to do so, he
made his name working for the marginalized and oppressed when
he could have turned his back and joined some majority white
conventional establishment.
In understanding Obama in this way, we need to bring his
mother from the shadows of an emergent public life much and his
own personal accounting on his search of his African father who
left his mother during his early childhood. Obama’s inspirational
message of change which has captured the imagination of so
many people in the United States and around the world comes
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very much from Stanley Ann Dunham Obama, his white mother
from Kansas who was a remarkably transformed woman very
much with a restorative justice consciousness. We are just
beginning to learn more about Stanley Ann Obama since his
published memoirs are more about his search for his African
father than about his mother who actually raised him. Stanley
Ann had him when she was a late adolescent University of
Hawaii student. Stanley Ann was an anthropologist years before
she finally received her doctoral degree in that discipline from
the University of Hawaii not long before she died at age 52 in
1995 in Jakarta, Indonesia where she was a Ford Foundation
officer supporting efforts of community people to empower
themselves. She raised her children both in Hawaii and in
Indonesia, both highly pluralistic societies, to respect people as
human beings. And Stanley Ann Obama also made sure that her
son appreciated his African descent heritage while being open to
other people. It is this perspective, that of his mother, which you
hear in his speeches about change and unity and about civic
empowerment. It was in the household of Stanley Ann where
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he learned how to take advantage of his privileged status to be
of assistance to the oppressed and to the marginalized.
CHANGING MOBILITY RULES
There are some other emerging cultural changes in this
election year which are becoming apparent and greatly
symbolized by the public discourse around the astounding
presence of Barak Obama in national politics. First, his support is
coming significantly from younger Americans for another reason
besides his unique gifts in reaching out to young people and
addressing their civic needs and desires. Namely, many of his
white young supporters have grown up or wish they had grown
up in integrated neighborhoods, classrooms, malls, cyberspace
communities. Their musical and other cultural tastes, which
include Rap and Hip Hop as well as My Space, supplements the
fact that these post-baby-boomers have been accustomed to
seeing powerful Black persons and other people of color in media
images outside stereotypical roles such as only sports and
entertainment. They are growing up in a society in which mobility
33
is becoming highly unpredictable in terms of the ancestry of your
physician in organized health care, the ancestry of the judge you
appear before, the ancestry of the school teacher who will
determine your grade and the same with the college professor,
the priest of your parish who takes your confession or baptizes
your child or you, medical school professor in your area of
specialty, the ancestry of the President of the corporation who
can hire you or fire you or the person who interviews you for the
job, the ancestry of the police officer who gives you the traffic
ticket.
Because it is bad public relations for business, people who
make racial slurs, even while claiming they did not know any
better, increasingly find themselves getting demoted,
transferred, and fired from their jobs or positions. America is no
longer a society in other words in which racial categories neatly
line up with who people are and what people do and you can get
yourself in mobility trouble if you are not aware of that and say or
do something even out of ignorance which is offensive because
of the person’s skin color. Again, in a country and in a world in
34
which cultural pluralism is big business, which is one of the
reasons why by the way Obama is the darling of so many
corporations, expressing bigotry is not good for business these
days in the States. Even though recent events have shown that
racism is far from dead in America in all age ranges, it no longer
has the public support in the leadership of key institutional
sectors. The publicity and the lawsuits and the possibility of
insulting people of color domestically and internationally with
deep pockets of financial resources is bankrupting overt forms of
racism and making persons with covert racist tendencies less
and less effective in such a changing society and world.
As much as many younger Americans have adjusted to this
kind of unpredictable world of not knowing the ancestry of the
person who can determine or derail your mobility, through
developing intercultural lives, friendship circles, and other social
circles, there are many who have not but wish to yet can only do
so with a new kind of national political leadership which for the
first time in American history understands the need to
deracialize as an every day practice and to engage civically
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around resolving common problems rather than remaining
imprisoned in racialized boxes. There is now a need for political
leadership which knows how to create the safe spaces—in
communities, in educational institutions, in faith communities, in
government agencies, and in media for people to not only discuss
race but to talk through race as a laborious restorative justice
process. This is what made Obama’s historical speech on race
so important since it was the first time an American leader in a
presidential selection electoral process who is being taken
seriously by such a large per centage of voters spoke of the
need for the nation to learn how to acknowledge and talk
through race to destroy it as a dysfunctional distract keeping
Americans divided and thus unable to focus on resolving critical
common problems.
I am speaking of this matter from the experience of
teaching for most of my thirty year career in major historically
white research universities in the area of race and racism.
Presently where I am at, Indiana University Bloomington, a huge
overwhelmingly white university with 40,000 students with only
36
about 1500 black students, most of my students in my large
African American studies courses are white students from little
towns around Indiana or from one of the major urban areas. What
I hear from these students over the years is the confession that
they are ignorant, they just don’t know about racism, they just
don’t know about the history of African Americans and other
people of color but they realize if they are going to do well in life,
this deficiency in their awareness must be remedied. There are
American university campuses on which I have been on and have
heard about where it is white as well as non-white students who
have petitioned their university administrations and faculties to
increase the number of American born non-white faculty given
the changing nature of the society and the world. They astutely
realize that if they are to have good careers and do well socially
in the plural society and world in which they live, it is essential
for them to have the opportunity to learn from culturally different
professors. They realize that to be educated in homogenous
environments in which the curriculum, degree requirements,
faculty mentor opportunities do not include the experiences of
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non-whites then it is detrimental to their 21st century lives. And
as a quick digressive note, don’t forget that in the restorative
framework, race is a form of societal dehumanization which
involves and includes every one; victims as well as perpetrators
are one and the same. Therefore just as much as white youth,
non-white youth are also acutely in need of having safe spaces
created in places such as universities, workplaces, media, and
faith communities to enable them as well as their white peers in
developing genuine intercultural values and lives.
So, Obama’s generational appeal to younger
Americans as well as to progressive minded older Americans is
a response to their sense of social rootlessness and to the
outcomes of living in a society which though still has its daunting
racial disparity problems is culturally becoming very much of a
plural society in which living with culturally different people both
residentially and virtually is becoming part and parcel of every
day life.
THE DECLINE OF THE TRADITIONAL BLACK ESTABLISHMENT
38
There is still yet another cultural change Obama’s
presence symbolizes which is in some senses generational when
it comes to Americans younger than baby boomers but it is also a
cohort impact among not a few Baby-boomers and older
Americans. Obama greatly symbolizes shifts in Black identity
formation and more than that, the break down of a dominant
ideology of black identity which has been present in America
since the end of the American Civil War in 1865. The African
descent population since its colonial origins has always been
greatly complex and diversified but like in the case of whites, the
way in which racial privilege and racial oppression works in
America as in the case of other multiracial societies is
constructing myths of sameness. In the United States, the
mythology has been two tiers: whites – blacks with increasing
expansion of the grand narrative of races with the demographic
growth of Asians and Hispanics in America and their increasing
economic and political power. And we should not forget about
the continued chronic marginalization and exclusion of
39
indigenous people from mainstream American society and
dominant culture.
Since the end of the American Civil War, the dominant
homogeneous black identity caricature is that there is one black
experience and it is rooted in southern slavery which
transformed into a cotton sharecropping tenancy and into an
urbanization process of economic exclusion and oppression
called ghettos. Slavery, the cotton share cropping, and the big
northern and southern urban ghettos created ecological spaces
for the development and passing down of homogenous black
culture.The litmus test of whether or not you were black is
whether or not, according to this caricature, your life history fits
into a slave, share cropping or ghetto framework or on rarer
occasion, traced to free black people. Being able to identify with
the”black language,” “black religious beliefs,” “black gender
styles,” “black music, “ “black values,” etc these idealized
ecological contexts generated became over time part of the
litmus test which was culturally owned by what E. Franklin
Frazier once called in the 1950s the Black bourgeoisie or what I
40
call the traditional black establishment which emerged during
the years after the American Civil War and may have gone
through numerous generational transformations in other ways
but continued to embrace the mentioned conception of who a
black person is and is not.
This traditional black establishment black identity
caricature, that every black person must come from a house or
field slave past or a rural southern share cropping or just poor
background, or from the ghetto, is also commonly believed by
the media, the general public, and by academics. But, since the
1970s, it is a caricature which has been on the decline along
with the black establishment which culturally owns it. And
certainly the rise of Obama is symbolic of this erosion of national
power, prestige, and influence of the black traditional leadership
and of its institutions such as the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, the National Urban League, the
black college sector, black fraternal organizations, and black
printed media such as Ebony and black newspapers. There are
several reasons for this decline of the traditional black
41
leadership symbolized by the emergence of Barak Obama. I will
briefly discuss two.
First, is the growing political and economic power of
recent waves of African immigrants as well as recent African
descent immigrants from other parts of North and South America
and world—but mostly the rising power of Africans. Ever since
the United States liberalized immigration policies in the 1960s in
regards to Africans, the U.S. has been experiencing a dramatic
increase in the African immigrant population. In fact, the
demographic increase of African immigrants in the U.S. is seen in
that as of 2000, 20% of the most recent general black population
increase is due to the immigration of Africans. Unlike previous
waves of African descent immigrants, more recent waves prefer
to develop their own power bases and maintain their homeland
ethnic identities rather than assimilate into the historical black
population. In many k-12 schools and in many college campuses,
the black students who are the highest achievers are African and
Caribbean immigrants or their descendents. In cities around the
country, especially on the East coast, African immigrants are
42
developing significant economic enterprises through their own
ethnic community networks. They are developing their own faith
communities separate from historical black populations. The fact
that Islam is the fastest growing religion amongst African
descent people in the United States can be in part attributed to
the growth of the social and economic influence of African
immigrants. Particularly since so many African immigrants prefer
not to identify with the historical black population and at times
are perceived as being used as tools of the dominant to
disempower and to disenfranchise historical black populations
tracing their roots to the American slave regime there is a great
deal of tension between the traditional black establishment and
African immigrants. Certainly that resentment was displayed
when Obama’s blackness was questioned by black establishment
and media people since his life history as a son of an African and
of a white mother from Kansas who grew up in Hawaii and
Indonesia does not pass the minimal requirements for being a
black person with stereotypically speaking with the slave and
the ghetto roots. But, as we observed, given the growing
43
marginality
of the traditional black leadership class in national
politics, they could make Obama squirm and get defensive but
did not have the political clout to stop him from becoming a
viable candidate.
The inability of the traditional black establishment to
mobilize against Obama says much about their decline in power
which is seen in other examples over the past twenty five years
such as their failure to block the appointment of black
conservative Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court; to
stop the rise of black conservative Ward Connerly who was
instrumental in launching a successful anti-affirmative movement
in California which became a national effort, and who have not
been able to stop the trend of universities and businesses in
counting African immigrants as blacks in affirmative action
target populations. Black establishment leaders such as those of
the NAACP and Vernon Jordan, the “best black friend” of then
President Bill Clinton misread and even dismissed the possible
appeal of Black Muslim leader Louis Farakahn’s extraordinarily
successful and effective One Million Black Men March. Others
44
have condemned hip hop, black language movements, and the
black under classes in general. While criticizing or turning up
their noses in regards to the black poor and under classes, in
similar veins as their white counterparts, many black
establishment leaders and citizens are experiencing a
tremendous lack of cultural reproduction since their children and
grandchildren are in many cases not producing a significant
number of children; their children and grandchildren are not
performing well at all in school or in college; many of their
children and grandchildren are not following a noticeable
numbers of their parents or grandparents into the black ethnic
family business , church, or civic association or into black
colleges. And last, since historically speaking establishment
black leaders in their various movements and organizations for
racial justice made the fatal mistake of not developing alliances
with Hispanics and Asians in past civil rights movements and in
other justice areas, the black leadership establishment, indeed
black people in general, are becoming increasingly marginalized
and ineffectual in national, state, and local politics as Hispanics
45
and Asians continue to rise in economic and political power in
the United States, especially since both Asian and Hispanic
populations have higher per centages of voters than blacks.
The second reason for the decline of the black
establishment as symbolized by the rise of Obama is because he
represents the post-baby boomer generation of African American
who fall outside the black identity caricature. Like many other
African Americans born in the 1960s and especially afterwards,
Obama did not attend segregated, inner city or rural majority
black schools, he received his college education in elite white
universities, worked his way up in majority white careers, and
may even live in a majority white residential neighborhood. More
than likely in other ways as an elite black male, like so many
other African Americans of his status characteristics, he lives for
the most part in a majority white world. Look at the demographic
composition of his national campaign committee as a case in
point. He did not grow up in a traditional black church, which
would be to his detriment in some paradoxical ways I will briefly
touch upon shortly.
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The moderate to conservative social views of these new
kinds of African American middle and affluent classes (as defined
in the tradition of Max Weber in terms of relative buying power in
marketplaces) are no different than white middle classes about
consumerism, welfare, crime control, affirmative action, and
patriotism. Incidentally, about patriotism, it should now not come
as a surprise to see that Obama, with all of his powerful vision of
change expresses so much militaristic American patriotism when
addressing foreign affairs views.
What is important to understand about these new
middle class African Americans is that they do not
necessarily reject being ethnically black, as seen in how
much many of them embrace black ethnic holidays, most
noticeably Kwanza which is an African American invented
African ritual celebrated during the Christmas season.
Many of them still belong to black fraternal orders, read
black literature, drive to inner city black churches from
their suburban homes, and even send their children to black
colleges to find their blackness but they fall outside the
47
traditional caricature of black identity and are thus
developing different kinds of black ethnic identities we
social scientists have yet to study properly since we are
embedded in terms of the traditional caricature of
blackness. But, keep in mind that there are many young
African Americans who do reject a black ethnic identity,
especially biracial people with “white” and “black” parents
or African Americans reared in culturally white households,
who in the past would be labeled as black but now can
choose what they are, especially when they have the
economic resources such as golfer Tiger Wood who is of
African American and Thai heritage, who, again to the
horror of the black establishment, identifies himself as
being something else besides black.
BUT STILL ONLY HUMAN
Restorative justice as a way of life, a way to be, is of
course a life long process. Obama’s journey down that road,
paved by his mother and through his life experiences as an elite
American with seemingly a common touch is certainly much
48
more sophisticated than many but like any one else, he still has
a long way to go.
One of the major challenges of Obama is that some times,
like in the cases of all politicians who are truly desirous of
moving up the political ladder, his ambition blinds him to such
an extent that there becomes contradictions between what he
says and how he lives. One can shrug the shoulders and say, “so
what, are we not all human?” Yes, that is true, but when a
political leader is trying to convey a moral, higher road message,
then he or she has to be much more careful that the values they
publicly articulate are reflections of their private life. Otherwise,
it is just a matter of time that some incident exposing the
possible discrepancy between public views and private life will
come to the light of day and the media will have a feast.
Certainly, this is what happened when it came to the
controversy around the alleged racist remarks made by Jeremiah
Wright, the pastor of Obama’s church and a member of Obama’s
campaign team. The entire incident which though allowed, I
should say, forced, Obama to have to give what became an
49
unprecedented speech on race by a mainstream politician with a
restorative justice ring, still revealed Obama’s naiveté about
black people since he was not raised in a black community and
may have worked in such communities but again, is not from a
black community. His concern for being accepted by the black
establishment rather than continuing to be who he is, resulted in
him blundering in inviting his pastor to be a formal member of his
national campaign committee.
He invited his pastor to join his committee realizing full well
that his pastor had a history of saying things which could be read
by the national media as being racist or just strange and odd. To
assume that the media was not waiting to bounce on him about
him or a member of his campaign committee being militant or
racist or just more than a bit strange, was to say the least,
strangely naïve for an otherwise brilliantly astute politician
already viewed by many as being the best campaigner America
has seen in decades.
But it is a common mistake not a few contemporary blacks
make who are well connected but not of or from the black
50
community and therefore try to find ways of demonstrating that
they are indeed black and have the backing of establishment
blacks to prove it. In many cases, they end up being manipulated
and used as in the case of Jeremiah Wright using the national
exposure space Obama’s campaign gave him to push his
personal ego centered agenda in spite of the consequences for
Obama, consequences which Obama rose to the occasion
brilliantly rose to respond to but with the cost of doing something
to ignite insidious racist fears in dominant American society
and culture about the tendency for even the most harmless
appearing blacks to really be angry militants against white
racism which can now be easily applied to him and used as
excuses by many to be ambivalent or negative about supporting
him as a serious candidate for the American presidency.
Specifically, it is more than apparent that the Jeremiah
Wright incident indicates how little Obama understood the
politics of the black church, the capacity of powerful pastors
irrespective of ancestry, who view themselves as prophets and
therefore not beholden to any human being to push their own ego
51
centered agendas when the opportunity presents itself no matter
how it harms others, and cultural changes which include the
diversification of black identities and it’s impact in national
politics.
Who knows why Obama joined Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s
church in Chicago which of course was his private choice, but
some suspect it had much to do with the fact that Wright is a
political power house in Chicago and nationally. Wright was after
all, the pastor who ordained Jesse Jackson. The flap about
Wright is that this was a man who would over the pulpit from
time to time make racially prejudiced comments and would
weave conspiracy theories such as about HIV-AIDS epidemics in
the black community. Obama finally acknowledged before and
during his race speech hearing Wright saying such things over
the pulpit but pointed out that like all persons of faith, he did not
agree with every thing his pastor said. In his speech on race, he
made it clear that he understood Wright’s perspective on race in
America, a view he claimed to reject, to be a generational
perspective which was now obsolete. He rejected the message
52
but not the messenger. On the surface, this appeared to be a
humane thing to say. There are others who have jumped to
Wright’s defense noting that he was a prophet being concerned
about the welfare of his flock in a long standing cultural tradition
addressing the needs of a population long excluded,
marginalized, and mistreated by whites as if to say that made it
ok for him to make racially prejudiced remarks and to weave
conspiracy theories.
There are some who say that though Obama should be
appreciative of Wright for leading him to Christ as an adult and
for baptizing his children, when he became aware about Wright’s
racial views years ago, as a person interested in being a genuine
Christian he should have remembered what his restorative
justice living non-church going mother taught him and left and
joined one of the many churches in Chicago though perhaps
more modest than the social grandeur of Wright’s church with a
pastor who does not express the social prejudices that he has
spent a life time rejecting. Instead, he chose to sit in the pews
all these years, so his critics now claim, and after his speech,
53
as his critics more strongly claim, he is still sitting there in
Wright’s church contradicting what he claims he stand for as a
life practice of openness. He may be surprised to find that if he
had in his speech on race not only condemned the message of
Wright and made it clear that he had made a mistake in even
remaining a member of the congregation and would resign
immediately, that there would be more people, than he assumes,
including black people in and increasing numbers outside of the
pews of churches which stress genuine Christian love, who are
searching for ways to live genuine, authentic lives who would be
supportive of him since it would be consistent with the values he
claims are anchors of who he is. But, his personal desire to
become a traditionally defined black person, with the support of
his black community grounded wife who boasts that she is the
one who taught him how to be black, life time longing
to fit
into a community in which in regards to skin color he is part of
but in terms of cultural history he is not, has resulted in him
stumbling into defending the behavior of a member of the
declining black establishment which due to who he is, he should
54
have condemned, confessed his error,
and moved on, consistent
with the message of who he is and what America must become.
And any one who assumes that what happened to Obama was
inevitable, that there is some kind of public race speech every
Black person eventually has to make to clear the air, rather than
understanding how it is that Obama simply exercised poor
judgment due to his private need to be accepted by a black
political patron or perhaps even by the black father figure he
never had, needs to look at other examples of the new
generation of Black politicians emerging these days in majority
white communities and states, such as Deval Patrick , Governor
of the State of Massachusetts, who may ethnically identify as
black persons but who have the ego strength and interpersonal
skills as bridgers who do not allow themselves to become the
racialized pawns of blacks, whites, or others.
But we human beings, we all have our limitations; we are
all not there fully yet in disentangling ourselves from our egos,
ambitions, and agendas. What matters, is that the emergence of
the Obama Phenomenon with all its promises and limitations at
55
least symbolizes without perhaps changing the course of race
and racism in America very much in the long run, the
possibilities of a journey of we Americans coming back and
embracing each other again and in brand new ways. At best The
Obama Phenomenon is a symbolic catalyst for what America
shall increasingly become as a long hard road ahead with
stunningly wonderful possibilities of authentic cultural inclusion,
it is a micro-revolutionary paradigm historically excluded or
marginalized in American society and dominant culture since the
colonial era which is now finally beginning to worm its way into
the very core of who we are and who we must become as a plural
people in a plural society and in a plural world. We shall see what
happens.
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