Black leadership class in crisis? Obama on race and policing

Comments (0) Activism, Politics, Uncategorized

Pres. Obama’s Town Hall and its critics
“A reluctant mediator between blacks and the police, he’s avoided explicitly taking sides,” read the NY Times account of the Pres. Obama’s televised town hall meeting on race and policing. The equivocating was widely unappreciated: The Politico headline summed up the reaction: “Obama confronts critics at town hall on race.” The (white) right accused him of insulting police, the left of defending the police and paying lip service to racism. But the worst blow was dealt by the Black media: The Root, the Defender, News One … as well as, of course, Cornel West.

Obama with Mick McHale, President, National Association of Police Organizations

Pres. Obama meets with the Pres. of the National Association of Police Organizations. White House Photos by Pete Souza

 

Balancing: He hugs the daughters of Reverend Clementa Pinckney who was killed in the 2015 Charleston church shooting.

Balancing: He hugs the daughters of Reverend Clementa Pinckney who was killed in the 2015 Charleston church shooting.

 

What the Black activists said

ABC, who televised the event, invited black activists, and their criticisms dominated coverage in progressive and black media, even if muted or missing in the mainstream. The activists may have been invited, but their voices were suppressed. Erica Garner, whom ABC promised a chance to put a question to the president, left preparations for protests on the anniversary of her father’s killing by police to come to the town hall. She walked out  shouting that she had been silenced. Pastor Traci Blackmon of the Christ the King United Church of Christ wrote a viral Facebook post:

The entire event was orchestrated. Imagine sitting in a room of uncalled pain for 90 minutes … and hearing instead, stories that remind us primarily of how dangerous we are … and of how much we need the police … and of how we all make “mistakes.”

Imagine being strategically seated in a room in ways that imply agreement with a narrative that you think is from the pits of hell.

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrice Cullers was also there:

ABC used the faces of the black community to exhibit a watered-down message of hope and reconciliation. And Obama collaborated. … We’re not dense. We know checks and balances exist, and that it is not the job of one man to remedy the entirety of violence against black people. But we expect him to try harder.

Cullers, Garner and Blackmon want more than talk about compassion and understanding; they want him to use his last months to take meaningful executive action toward police reform.

When Obama talks about racism
Obama electrified millions with his first “race” speech, “For a More Perfect Union,” when his presidential campaign was threatened by attacks on his pastor, Jeremiah Wright. This was the first of  a number of occasions on which, as at the Dallas Memorial and the Town Hall,  he confronted the nation with the realities of racial injustice, from institutional racism to racist policing. True, he had been slow to speak publicly about Trayvon Martin’s murder; still, he finally said, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”

Obama believes in the power of words; he may really believe words can heal. He may really believe in the power of recognition — that if police and the black people will only recognize each other’s experience and pain, they can come together.

Or maybe what he believes is that, like black elites in the years following the waning of the black power movements, he can replace protest with promises.

So when he talks about police killings, he wants to balance any words of support for the protesters with more emphatic recognition of the dangers of policing and the nobility of our police. But for the activists it’s too late for the balancing act and too late to minimize police violence, because they see that racism is in the DNA of American policing.

Sophie Lucido Johnson Baton Rouge

Illustration by Sophie Lucido Johnson from F Newsmagazine.  CC BY-ND 2.0  

In Baton Rouge, another side of policing
After the police murder of Alton Sterling, police met thousands of peaceful protesters  with military weaponry and armor, brutalizing and arresting hundreds in an attempt to end the protests by force.

Alison Renee McCrary, president of the Louisiana chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and a Catholic nun:

Alton Sterling is on the long list of Black people killed needlessly by our nation’s police, and protests in his honor have turned into circuses of violence where the First Amendment is tossed aside.”

Marjorie Esman, ACLU of Louisiana:

“I witnessed firsthand as peaceful protestors were violently attacked and arrested, assault weapons pointed at them with fingers on the triggers, some dragged across the cement, their clothes ripped off of them.”

BLM Baton Rouge

Swat vehicle pushes back protester in Baton Rouge, 7.10.16. Photo by Antrell Williams, Flickr. CC BY-ND 2.0

This is a reality of policing that Obama never addresses: the brutality with which police are used to crush mass movements. Perhaps the reason is that this brutality is federal policy. The massive police operations against Occupy Wall Street encampments was federally coordinated; the Baton Rouge police action followed an FBI warning of a terrorist threat to kill police, priming and justifying a crackdown.

Crisis for the black elites?
The difference marking black politics after the seventies has been that now when police kill unarmed blacks, it can be in cities with black mayors, black police chiefs, and even black prosecutors (Baltimore after Freddie Gray). When the mass movements force the elites to acknowledge police terror, they follow the old playbook of urging restraint, criticizing excesses “on both sides,” defending police action, and promoting an illusion of racial unity. But often the talking points fall back on racial stereotypes demonizing the black urban poor, calling on them to lift themselves up, strengthen their families,  and set an example (“We’ve got no time for excuses,” Obama tells black college students), and when blacks rise up, denouncing them as rioters and  “thugs.”

But we may be entering a new period, in which the leadership class is losing its credibility. The mass action sustained over two years now by Black Lives Matter activists has forced police terror into the public sphere; it has forced widespread acknowledgement of pervasive racism because the killing of unarmed African Americans stands for all of the rest, exposes the state itself as the machinery of racial violence. We are in a period when even the framing of presidential campaigns invites us to see the “system” as itself the problem (“the system is rigged”).

Obama may have taken black leadership as far as it can go in this period. He still tells black people they have to stop making excuses, strengthen their families and set an example; he still scolds protesters for “yelling” but not being willing to talk to elected officials and offer solutions. But in Dallas and in the Town Hall meeting, he also lays out an indictment of systematic racial injustice and talks about police killings and the racial disparities in the policing, prosecution and incarceration. But will the his black supporters continue to give him a pass when he equates black anger with white racism, balances protesters with police? When black media give voice to the activists who reject this way of thinking as collaboration?

Jesse Jackson, Black Friday march

Rev. Jesse Jackson set up the mic, the crowd took it away. Photo by niXerKG in Flickr. CC BY-NC 2.0

Lesser black leadership gets no respect
On Black Friday in Chicago, activists “hijacked” a march called by Rev. Jesse Jackson. The Sun-Times report is priceless. Jackson, Congressman Bobby Rush and other ministers were trying to channel the protesters’ anger and deflect their anger at Mayor Rahm Emanuel for protecting police killers and  suppressing the video of the police killing of Laquan McDonald.

As they began to pray and speak, several young men with bullhorns approached from all sides, overpowering their sound with chants of “Indict Rahm.”

“This is about indicting Mayor Rahm Emanuel,” one called. The ministers countered, “Let us pray, let us pray.”

“We’re not here to pray,” a voice repeated over a megaphone.

They pulled Jackson’s microphone and stormed the stairs. Someone yanked the cord to the speakers, knocking out Jackson’s audio.

“Indict Rahm!” the protesters shouted as a brief shoving match ensued.

Those who interrupted Jackson, included a group shouting “black power!” and carrying red, green and black flags.

Amid cries of “Send Rahm to jail,” Jackson and the other officials quickly dispersed as the masses hijacked Jackson’s presentation, and competed with the shoppers who flocked downtown to take advantage of Black Friday sales.

The marchers did not come to pray.

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