Obama is exactly what we observe a mild manner colored man handcuffed by his bi-racial cultural dna..Obama's restraint and tilt toward avoidance is his deliberate posture..His entire inner circle is absence of any strong outspoken Black males and this truth has hurt him...Obama is not going to change his true being..,We are stuck with a guy driving the car that likes to stay within the speed limit when we need him to race the engine and get to the ER...
This comment was worth bumping up. And let's tread carefully as we want to avoid the essentialist politics of blood and identity. But, maybe Thrasher has stumbled upon something of note.
I have been thinking a bit about our earlier conversation on the psychologizing of President Obama as either battered partner or hostage. The jury is still out on his tax deal with the GOP (some think it is pragmatic brilliance), but I have been struck in recent weeks by how the pundit classes seem unwilling to address how the sum of Obama's life experiences and racial identity are interrelated variables, variables that are most certainly impacting the president's approach to politics.
Sure, race is omnipresent as a narrative framing for the presidency of Barack Obama. For example, he is routinely tarred and feathered as an "uppity" black man by his enemies, an anti-white bigot, or somehow "unAmerican." Conversely, the president cannot show the type of passion and anger that his populist base demands because he would then risk being branded as an "angry black man." Thus, being reduced to being like those "other" black people--a political liability if there ever was one.
What we have not seen to this point is an explicit reference to how Obama's experiences as a black man of a mixed racial background, and the President's struggles to negotiate his identity, have impacted his approach to politics and life. Now, we most certainly don't want to be hand-tied by old, flat, and binary narratives of tragic mulattoes that 1) either want nothing to do with their blackness and run toward whiteness and imagined salvation or 2) become anti-white firebrands who hate all white people. And as I am so fond of saying, there are some 30 million ways to be black.
Ultimately, there has to be a nuanced middle role that acknowledges the complexity of Obama's life experiences, while also signaling to how, like Commander Data in Star Trek, he is more than the sum of his parts.
Obama's biographies are a great and obvious place to start: He openly discusses the processes through which his identity was negotiated, and the ways in which blackness for Obama came to have meaning--politically, socially, culturally, and intellectually. President Obama is a brother: a healthy and whole black man who happens to have a white mother.
I would propose that the true Rosetta Stone for understanding Obama, both as the pragmatic politician and as a black man of mixed race background, lies in his much lauded "A More Perfect Union" speech. While justly praised for how it was a sophisticated and mature reading of race in the post-Civil Rights era, I found the speech noteworthy for a different reason. There, Obama made a subtle tactical move that telegraphed the type of President (and decision maker) he would soon be.
In "A More Perfect Union," Obama made the frustration, hurt, and struggle of Black Americans as they fought for their fair share of the full fruits of American democracy somehow equivalent to White rage, anger, and resentment at having their centuries of de facto race privilege challenged. This was not a shocking move on Obama's part. Part of then candidate Obama's appeal was precisely because he does not share the blood lineage or family legacy of slavery. For some, a vote for President Obama could be a get out of white guilt free pass; he was a candidate without the blood of slaves, and thus a perfect salve and leader for post-racial, twenty-first century America.
However, the way in which Obama so casually conceded the moral justice and superiority of the Black Freedom Struggle to the petty spitefulness of white anger was and remains troubling. If then candidate Barack Obama was willing to surrender the metaphorical Mount Rushmore of moral high ground, what else would he be willing to surrender at the bargaining table if elected President? At the time this was just speculation. Two years later we are seeing just how "pragmatic" President Obama actually is.
To what ends remains the question.