{"id":26265,"date":"2012-10-28T15:56:49","date_gmt":"2012-10-28T15:56:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=26265"},"modified":"2013-07-14T15:56:05","modified_gmt":"2013-07-14T15:56:05","slug":"the-price-of-a-black-president","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=26265","title":{"rendered":"The Price of a Black President"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Price of a Black President<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2012-10-27<\/p>\n

Frederick C. Harris<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Political Science;\u00a0 Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies; Director of the Center on African-American Politics and Society
\nColumbia University<\/em><\/p>\n

WHEN African-Americans go to the polls next week, they are likely to support Barack Obama<\/a> at a level approaching the 95 percent share of the black vote he received in 2008. As well they should, given the symbolic exceptionalism of his presidency and the modern Republican Party\u2019s utter disregard for economic justice, civil rights and the social safety net.<\/strong><\/p>\n

But for those who had seen in President Obama\u2019s election the culmination of four centuries of black hopes and aspirations and the realization of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s<\/a> vision of a \u201cbeloved community,\u201d the last four years must be reckoned a disappointment. Whether it ends in 2013 or 2017, the Obama presidency has already marked the decline, rather than the pinnacle, of a political vision centered on challenging racial inequality.<\/strong> The tragedy is that black elites \u2014 from intellectuals and civil rights leaders to politicians and clergy members \u2014 have acquiesced to this decline, seeing it as the necessary price for the pride and satisfaction of having a black family in the White House.<\/p>\n

These are not easy words to write. Mr. Obama\u2019s expansion of health insurance coverage was the most significant social legislation since the <\/strong>Great Society<\/strong><\/a>, his stimulus package blunted much of the devastation of the Great Recession, and the Dodd-Frank financial overhaul added major new protections for consumers.<\/strong> His politics would seem to vindicate the position of civil rights-era leaders like Malcolm X<\/a>, who distrusted party politics and believed that blacks would be better positioned to advance their interests as an independent voting bloc, beholden to neither party…<\/p>\n

…But as president, Mr. Obama has had little to say on concerns specific to blacks. His State of the Union address in 2011 was the first by any president since 1948 to not mention poverty or the poor. The political scientist Daniel Q. Gillion<\/a> found that Mr. Obama, in his first two years in office, talked about race less than any Democratic president had since 1961.<\/strong> From racial profiling to mass incarceration to affirmative action, his comments have been sparse and halting.<\/p>\n

Early in his presidency, Mr. Obama weighed in after the prominent black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr.<\/a> was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Mass. The president said the police had \u201cacted stupidly,\u201d was criticized for rushing to judgment, and was mocked when he invited Dr. Gates and the arresting officer to chat over beers at the White House. It wasn\u2019t until earlier this year that Mr. Obama spoke as forcefully on a civil rights matter \u2014 the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin<\/a>, in Florida \u2014 saying, \u201cIf I had a son, he\u2019d look like Trayvon.\u201d…<\/p>\n

…Mr. Obama deserves the electoral support \u2014 but not the uncritical adulation \u2014 of African-Americans. If re-elected he might surprise us by explicitly emphasizing economic and racial justice and advocating \u201ctargeted universalism\u201d \u2014 job-training and housing programs that are open to all, but are concentrated in low-income, minority communities. He would have to do this in the face of fiscal crisis and poisonous partisanship…<\/p>\n

Read the entire opinion piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Price of a Black President The New York Times 2012-10-27 Frederick C. Harris, Professor of Political Science;\u00a0 Director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies; Director of the Center on African-American Politics and Society Columbia University WHEN African-Americans go to the polls next week, they are likely to support Barack Obama at a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,8,26,394,20],"tags":[12610,12609,12611,2640,2327],"class_list":["post-26265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-socialscience","category-usa","tag-fredrick-c-harris","tag-fredrick-cornelius-harris","tag-fredrick-harris","tag-new-york-times","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}