Paul Street has published a thought-provoking piece at Black Agenda Report: The Deeper Racism in Iowa: Beneath the White Obama Craze.
I recommend clicking through and reading this whole article, but here are some passages that illustrate the argument he is making:
Barack Obama’s January 3rd Democratic Caucus victory in Iowa demonstrated that a Black man – or, at least, this particular Black man – could attract winning numbers of white voters. The candidate’s supporters claimed Iowa signaled a new day, that “race doesn’t matter” anymore in the United States. They are in a fantasy of denial. Not only does race remain imbedded in American social relations, but Iowa is especially afflicted with the compulsion to throw African Americans in prison more frequently than any other state. “Liberal” Iowans, proud that their state began a cascade of Obama victories, find it more difficult than ever to face up to the racism that distorts all cross-racial interaction in their cities and towns.
Interestingly enough, you don’t see many if any white liberal Iowa City Obama supporters involved in efforts to fight and overcome routine institutional racism and racial harassment in their city and state.
Given the purported anti-racism behind their support for Obama, they seem remarkably indifferent to – and ignorant of – Iowa’s status as the nation’s leader in disproportionate black imprisonment.
Some of the black and liberal students here find this a paradox. I have a different perspective. Two days before the heavily Caucasian Iowa caucus, one forthcoming and self-critical caucus-goer and neighbor told me something I’d been suspecting for some time. Obama, he said, was “a way for liberal and moderate whites around here to pat themselves on the back for not being too prejudiced to vote for a black guy.” But it was all premised, he agreed, on Obama being a “good,” that is non-threatening, middle-class, academic-friendly, and “not-too fiery black” – one who seemed unlikely to confront institutional white supremacy in any way more meaningful than attaining higher office. Like the racially accomodationist, white-friendly media mogul and mass Obama marketer Oprah Winfrey (who came through Iowa to stump for him a few weeks before that state’s critical Caucus), Obama capitalized on middle class whites’ rejection of openly bigoted “level-one” (state-of-mind) racism only because he reassured them he would honor their refusal to acknowledge and confront the continuing power of deeper, “level two” (state-of-being) – societal and institutional – racism in American life. I have spoken with local middle-class whites for whom loving the “good” (bourgeois) black Obama is the other side of the coin of hating the “bad” and “underclass” blacks who are becoming more evident in Iowa City.
The town’s white liberals don’t seem interested in tackling the deeper institutional racism that lives on beneath the surface while they congratulate themselves for being willing to back a certain non-threatening kind of black candidate. They certainly don’t want to look closely at the unpleasant picture of how racial and class oppression produce pain and inequality in their own schools, neighborhoods, and community. They respond very well to what Black Agenda Report’s Glen Ford has identified as Obama’s “strategy to win the White House” by “run[ning] a ‘race-neutral’ campaign in a society that is anything but neutral on race.” As Ford notes, “the very premise – that race neutrality is possible in a nation built on white supremacy – demand[s] the systematic practice of the most profound race-factual denial, which is ultimately indistinguishable from rank dishonesty.”
I would like to hear your views on this piece, especially if you are an Obama supporter and/or an Iowa City resident.
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