Barack Obama: Coalitions of a Purple Mandate

We are a people in a quandary about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community. We are a people trying not only to solve the problems of the present, unemployment, inflation, but we are attempting on a larger scale to fulfill the promise of America. We are attempting to fulfill our national purpose, to create and sustain a society in which all of us are equal.

—Barbara Jordan, Keynote Address, Democratic National Convention, 1976

In 1969 for the first time I traveled for the first time outside the borders of the United States. I went to Ghana, a black country in sub-Sahara Africa. I remember that I marveled at the black flight attendants and pilots on Ghanaian Airways and at the black policemen, bank executives, and professors at the University of Ghana, because at that time these were rare and unfamiliar sights back home. But despite this exposure to new possibilities, I experienced a cataclysmic personal-paradigm shift the first time I came upon a political billboard advertising the merits of a candidate for the position of prime minister. His black, bespectacled face stared down upon passersby, encouraging them to vote for him and the candidates from his party. This was the first time that I ever even thought to contemplate the possibility that a black man could be the president or prime minister of his country (and, what’s more, that his opposition for the position was also black)! I was stunned by the realization that in America, I had been conditioned to believe that this was not only an unspoken impossibility but, even more outrageous, it was also clearly unthinkable!

Fast-forward to October 2008, when I participated in a symposium on Black Womanhood at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. In one of those quiet spontaneous moments that sometimes occur at such meetings, I chatted with three other participants, old friends and colleagues—one from Sierra Leone, another from Ghana, and another from Nigeria. They had all spent years living in this country teaching at institutions of higher education and had, at some point along the line, made the bittersweet decision to apply for U.S. citizenship with the proviso that they could also maintain their citizenships in their home countries. Each was absolutely delighted that these earlier difficult decisions offered them an unprecedented opportunity to participate in the historic vote for Barack Obama to become president of the United States. Spending her sabbatical year back home in Ghana, one of my colleagues had actually traveled back to the United States to cast her early vote so that she could personally deliver it into the hands of the election officials. She believed that her vote was too important to entrust to the mail delivery services in either Ghana or the United States.

My Ghanaian friend is the daughter of the late Kofi Abrefa Busia, the prime minister of Ghana from 1969 to 1972, and it was his picture that I saw on those billboards so many years ago in Ghana. That election in Ghana initiated the notion for me that a particular color or race was not a necessary prerequisite for the position of head of state (the issue of gender would surface much later), and I began to nourish a secret thought that perhaps in the distant future such a day might even come to pass in the United States.

So it is that I write this essay from a place of complicated emotions, including but not limited to an ‘‘audacity of hope’’ for the future and a profound joy at the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States in the first decade of the twenty-first century. But even as I celebrate President Obama, it is vitally important to remember and acknowledge that Americans continue to suffer from two traditional problems: historical myopia and dichotomized thinking, particularly as the second pertains to race and gender. Race continues to play a most potent role in American culture, although we have yet to move beyond the quintessential black/white dichotomy in a manner that accurately and clearly begins to delineate the many shades of race. Even the very notion of ‘‘black’’ begs for nuanced analysis. In an essay entitled ‘‘Interrogating the African-American Identity: How and Where do New African Diasporans Fit in the State of Arizona? A Call for Further Study’’ my colleagues Lisa Aubrey, Abdullahi Gallab, and Aribidesi Usman argue, ‘‘Black serves as an umbrella classification in the US to a multiplicity of groups, without serious regard of how these groups identify and define themselves.’’ These groups have at various times been called Black, African American, Negro, and Afro-American, and sometimes they have been designated by nationality such as Haitian or Nigerian. Aubrey, Gallab, and Usman go on to observe that there are two significant groups of blacks that have been broadly identified. The first wave is often referred to as the Old African diaspora or slavery diaspora. It includes the descendents of those who were enslaved in Africa and endured the transatlantic slave trade between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because they did not come to these shores by choice, they cannot be categorized as immigrants. The second wave, variously called the New African diaspora, colonization diaspora, decolonization dia- spora, structural-adjustment diaspora, and conflict diaspora, came to the United States after the transatlantic slave trade was rendered illegal. Their reasons for immigrating have varied across time and space. Aubrey, Gallab, and Usman go on to suggest that there is a third group of immigrating diasporans that should be included on the list—the educated or professional diaspora that continues to expand in the twenty-first century. [1]

While Barack Obama’s race is at so many levels both consequential and inconsequential, it was certainly a factor in the campaign. In the earlier stages of the primary process, African Americans who were descendants of slaves (or the Old Diasporans) argued among them- selves as to whether Barack Obama was a ‘‘real’’ African-American brother. He seemed to have resolved that issue long ago for himself on a personal level when he married a woman who possessed that particular credential, became involved in community organization in the black community, and joined a large, prominent black church in Chicago. At the same time that he adopted what Ron Walters has referred to as ‘‘functional blackness’’ [2] he also embraced the complexities of his specific racial heritage, which included a white mother, a black African father, and an Indonesian stepfather. That background would seem to align him with the New African Diaspora as the son of an educated or professional diasporan. Again at the individual level, like other children of divorced parents and blended families, he had to learn how to live in different settings, including Hawaii and Indonesia, with the rules and personalities of his various adult caretakers while coping with what David Roediger calls the ‘‘fictive biological category of race.’’3

As Obama methodically marched through the primary stages of the campaign, building critical coalitions, the question of race moved beyond the internal discussion among African Americans into the broader arena where the Clintons, sometimes covertly and more blatantly at other times, assured likely participants in Democratic primaries and caucuses that race did indeed matter (at least for Obama) and that because of his race he could not win the general election. Meanwhile, Republicans were contending with the problem of how to express their objections to his race without being openly accused of racism or construed as racist. For, while ever more sophisticated forms of racism continue to evolve in this country, we have at least learned to resist the label ‘‘racist.’’ In polite society it is no longer considered good form to be racist, but apparently it is permissible to be religiously intolerant or to use such intolerance as a covert substitute for racism. Despite public verbal and behavioral affirmation of his Christian faith, neoracists insisted that even his middle name (not to mention that his last name rhymes with Osama) was an indication that he was surely a Muslim with nefarious ties to secret terrorist organizations that were working to overthrow the American government.

Throughout the primary and general campaign season, the media scrutinized Obama’s race in a manner that Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Sarah Palin did not have to endure. Although those three candidates benefited from what Zillah Eisenstein refers to as the ‘‘normalized privileging of whiteness,’’ [4] Obama was also forced to contend not just with race but also with racialized gender/engendered racism issues. Both Clinton and Palin presented them- selves as women busily engaged in cracking the glass ceiling, but neither really provided, nor were they required to provide, the electorate with any serious feminist analysis of the problems besetting this country. They certainly never acknowledged the idea that they, too, were members of the dominant racial category—that is, white—that has historically been hidden in plain sight.

Early on in the campaign, white women, including former Democratic vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro and feminist Gloria Steinem, expressed their support of Clinton’s candidacy by belittling Obama’s admittedly slim credentials and by elevating (white) gender over race. The reader may recall that Ferraro insisted that Obama’s campaign would not have been as successful had he been a white man, while Gloria Steinem argued in a New York Times editorial piece that gender was ‘‘probably the most restricting force in American life.’’ She went on to insist that the sex barrier was not taken as seriously as the race barrier ‘‘because sexism is still con- fused with nature as racism once was.’’ Recounting an appallingly simplistic version of history, she wrote, ‘‘Black men were given the vote half a century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot.’’ [5]

Certainly black men were guaranteed the right to vote by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, but their enjoyment of that right was quite short-lived. During the nadir of our history, much of the later part of the nineteenth century was spent denying black men their right to the ballot in the South through the promulgation of post–Civil War state constitutions that included prohibitive grandfather clauses and property taxes, and through terroristic attacks that relied upon threats, destruction of property, and lynching. And when women were granted the right to vote early in the twentieth century, once again the de facto understanding was that ‘‘all the women were white’’ as the same tactics previously deployed against men were resurrected to disenfranchise black women. It took the 1965 Voting Rights Act to finally take the notion of ‘‘we the people’’ toward the inclusion of people of all colors and both genders.

Curiously, many white feminists embraced Hillary Clinton’s campaign, particularly those in the baby-boom generation, despite the fact that her feminist credentials were, and continue to be, questionable. At a time when many nascent feminist baby boomers were being forged in the crucible of the 1960s era of the civil-rights movement, Hillary was a Goldwater Republican. Although she has been a strong advocate for the rights of children and for health care throughout her career, her most notable contribution to specific feminist discourse and advocacy was the speech she gave at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. While she enumerated many of the injustices and oppressions that women experience around the world, in an odd, old-fashioned way her speech also seemed to essentialize women through its failure to incorporate any kind of analysis that seriously acknowledged the impact of race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, nation, and/or class on the lives of those women. It is as if she somehow overlooked the work of black feminists, other feminist women of color both here and abroad, and progressive white feminists who have seriously interrogated issues of multiple oppression in a manner that has informed the development of sophisticated, nuanced, expansive versions of feminist analysis and critique. One could even argue that Clinton’s version of feminism might best be understood as politically expedient because it was most often deployed to critique the deplorable sexist bashing she was subjected to by conservative news programs, radio talk-show hosts, websites, and blogs. Indeed, her version of feminism seemed more focused on attaining a seat at the patriarchal table of power. There was never a real sense of how her empowerment would translate into empowerment for all women.

Meanwhile, once it became clear that Obama would be the Democratic nominee, the McCain campaign seized upon the demise of the Clinton candidacy to bolster John McCain’s own quest for the presidency. McCain, who has never been in any danger of being mistaken for a feminist or even an advocate of issues of specific concern to feminists, desperately felt the need to energize the conservative Christian base of the Republican Party—and if he could also attract disgruntled former nonfeminist Clinton supporters with his vice presidential candidate, so much the better. Charismatic, ambitious, relatively obscure Sarah Palin, the governor of Alaska, was invited on to the ticket to fulfill those two requirements. She seemed to mesmerize both male and female party members, but in different ways. Women marveled at her capacity to parent five children, including one with special needs, a pregnant teenager, and a son soon to be deployed to Iraq, while she pursued a career even as many bedazzled men were heard to comment on how ‘‘hot’’ she was. It was as if McCain had resurrected and updated the Pinpoint Georgia strategy used earlier by the first President Bush to secure Clarence Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court. At that time, Manning Marable argued that Thomas represented ‘‘a rupture between ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity.’’’ He went on to observe that while Thomas remains defined by the government and recognized by society as a member of a specific racial group, ‘‘Racial identity is essentially passive, a reality of being within a social formation stratified by the oppressive concept of race. Yet ethnically Thomas has ceased to be an African American in the context of political culture, social values and ideals, and commitment to collective interest. Thomas feels absolutely no active ideological or cultural obligations to the disposed, the hungry, and homeless who share the ethnic rituals, customs, and traditions of blackness.’’ [6]

In much the same way, Sarah Palin represents the reality of woman constrained by formations of patriarchal mores. She does not seem to harbor any specific feminist tendencies, nor has she identified concerns about or advocated for any particular issues that have a critical impact on the lives of women. In fact, as Gloria Steinem observed in another more recent redemptive editorial, ‘‘Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton’s candidacy stood for—and that Barack Obama’s still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying ‘Somebody stole my shoes, so I’ll amputate my legs.’ ’’ [7] Thus, Palin represents a kind of disassociation between her female sex and the politics of gender.

Given the Republican Party’s record on issues of concern to women, McCain’s choice should not have been surprising. However, her selection as the vice presidential candidate despite her lack of qualifications should have been insulting to many highly qualified women within the party. McCain’s candidacy might have been successful in attracting independents had he chosen one of the Republican senators such as Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Olympia Snow, or Elizabeth Dole, for example, or even Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state in George W. Bush’s second term. They, too, lack strong feminist credentials, but each was certainly more qualified and pre- pared to be vice president of the United States than was Palin. No doubt they at least, unlike Palin, had a clear understanding of the role of the vice presidency, despite Dick Cheney’s record of misuse and abuse of the position. Indeed, once the novelty of McCain’s selection wore thin, it did more to attract unfavorable attention to his erratic decision-making skills than to attract new voters. Furthermore, many Republicans were dismayed and disgruntled by the decision, and some even went so far as to repudiate her candidacy publicly.

As the political pundits complete their work of critiquing the results of this election, the Republicans are engaged in postmortem speculations about what went wrong and what must be done to regain power. Meanwhile, the political scientists have begun to analyze the most technologically sophisticated, disciplined, and determinedly inclusive campaigns ever run for the highest office of the land.

Beginning with his keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama has expressed determined support for the notion of ‘‘E pluribus unum.’’ Using language that he would return to repeatedly throughout his campaign, he said

There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black American and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits . . . like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states, red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes, we’ve got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq, and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

His political astuteness, adroitness, and commitment to the inclusivity of coalition building rests in part upon his familiarity with critical incidents in American history. His campaign mantra, ‘‘Yes, I can,’’ for example, recalls the slogan ‘‘Sí, se puede’’ used by Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, and the United Farm Workers in their heroic struggle for living wages and improved working conditions for Mexicans and Mexican Americans in the 1970s. Likewise, in his acceptance speech Obama evoked the memory of Martin Luther King’s reference to the Promised Land in his last speech before the sanitation workers, when he said, ‘‘I promise you, we as a people will get there.’’ Later in that speech he reminded his audience of John F. Kennedy’s admonition, ‘‘Ask not what you can do for your country,’’ when he assured them, ‘‘It can’t happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice.’’

Obama won the election with a clear majority of the popular vote that in turn provided the basis for a wide margin of victory in the Electoral College. He won with overwhelming support from African Americans (some 96 percent of their votes), with 67 percent of the Hispanic vote, 63 percent of the Asian vote, and 77 percent of the Jewish vote. He also received 71 percent of the votes of gays and lesbians, 68 percent of the votes of first-time voters, 66 percent of the votes of voters under the age of thirty, 59 percent of the votes of union members (who finally voted their class interests as opposed to their racial prejudices), and 55 percent of the votes of women. Exit polls indicated that he won two-thirds of those voting between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine, which is by far the largest margin of the youth vote received by any candidate since such records have been kept. His candidacy benefited from Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean’s fifty-state strategy as voters began blurring the lines between red and blue states. Three states from the old Confederacy, three states in the Southwest, and some traditionally Republican states in the Midwest took on a purple hue as they voted for the top of the Democratic Party ticket for the first time in decades. Democrats won not only the presidency but also a governing majority in both houses of Congress.

In 1976, when Barbara Jordan, an African-American congressional representative from Texas, called for inclusivity and equality in her historic address to the Democratic National Convention, she cautioned us, ‘‘For all of its uncertainty, we cannot flee the future,’’ and went on to exhort us to ‘‘address and master the future together.’’ She said confidently, ‘‘It can be done if we restore the belief that we share a sense of national community, that we share a common national endeavor. It can be done.’’ Whether intentional or not, Obama’s speech on race invoked the prophetic words of Barbara Jordan and signaled the need to reconfigure a more fluid, expansive, and inclusive understanding of race/ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in the twenty-first century. In essence, Obama has challenged us to revision our historical future in a manner that builds a national community responsive to the diversified similarities of all who embrace the promise of America. He was presented with a purple mandate in this election to confront boldly the complicated interrelated challenges of our time. And now the real struggle begins.