Andrew Sullivan points to this Op-Ed by Thomas Chatterton Williams, another burgeoning intellectual who has figured out the considerable market value of offering Cosby-like pop-psych diagnoses that explain all that ails the hood. Williams thesis–fundamentally unchanged from his Op-Ed in the Washington Post last year–is that the black middle class “cleaves to ghetto culture”. He expands on this theory by offering that Barack Obama being president will heal the ghetto through the magic of self-esteem:
But the impact of the most famous black man in America wearing a suit to work everyday extends far beyond the sartorial sphere and addresses what Ellison had in mind specifically. Black children would be able to avoid internalizing what James Baldwin called “the propaganda of race inferiority,” since every night on the news there would be a visible reminder that there is nothing whites can do that blacks cannot. That is the real change Obama offers—all of a sudden the world young black kids imagine themselves inhabiting would seem a richer place to live, one without an upper limit. To Biggie Smalls’ dismal list of career options afforded young black males—”You either slang crack rock / Or you got a wicked jump shot”—we could add the office of president. And in response to what Jay-Z cynically defined as the black man’s lot in life—”All we got is sports and entertainment/ Until we even, thievin”—we could say, No, not anymore.
To be sure, a President Obama is not a panacea for black America. There will be a lot of kids in failing schools who—let’s be frank—would be wrong to imagine they have a shot at one day being commander-in-chief.
Yeah the homie Jay-Z can rock a suit like no other. Biggie was a fan too. What is a suit but a class marker? As a maker of values, it’s incredibly overrated. Just ask John Gotti.
It’s no small self-indictment that Williams is forced to absolutely butcher both rappers here to make his point–the full line is “The streets is a short stop/either you slinging crack rock/or you got a wicked jump shot.” That’s not a celebration of the hood, that’s an indictment. And it’s not referring to “young black males” it is referring to young black males in the street. His reading of Jigga is only slightly more accurate: “all these blacks got is sports and entertainment/until we even/thieving/as long as I’m breathing/can’t knock the way a nigga eating”. This is an expression of frustration with what Jay sees as the limited avenues of black poverty–a poverty and socioeconomic situation Obama openly admits he never faced. Obama grew up without a dad. He didn’t grow in a neighborhood where no one had a dad. The difference is vast.
At root is this idea that black folks problems are all caused by a sense of low-self esteem rather than other far more compelling factors is an enduring paternalism that subsequently serves for people to divorce themselves for social responsibility. An Obama presidency will surely change things for a generation of children growing up afterwards–just as I am different from my mother, who can remember traveling on segregated train cars. More frustrating is the idea that black social problems were birthed seperately and spontaneously from a generation of saints who brought down segregation. No. James Baldwin also said “Children have never been very good at listening to their elders, but they have never failed to imitate them.” So like so many children, I imitate my mother and father, both of whom went to college and got advanced degrees. The children of the black middle class birthed a bigger black middle class, which can find itself as psychologically divorced from the hood as a white kid on Long Island rocking to Lil’ Wayne. The black poor, meanwhile, remains increasingly concentrated and isolated, which serves to exacerbate the problems they face.
Furthermore, this idea that Hip-hop birthed the hood is pathological. The hood birthed Hip-hop. And to what should be the chagrin of conservatives everywhere, the fact is that Hip-hop is fundamentally conservative, from cutthroat freemarket values to binary understandings of power and gender. As Obama himself said, ” “the underlying values are so square. It’s about bling. It’s entirely cynical, entirely materialistic … [it] doesn’t challenge the social order at all.” In other words, it stands athwart black folks yelling “stop.” The underlying social causes of black poverty, from fatherlessness to poor schools, from the job market to health care, would be here whether Hip-hop existed or not.
Obama’s gift to the country isn’t being a super-role model for disaffected black youth, it’s a rhetorical scheme that doesn’t separate out the problems of the hood from the problems of America. It posits social responsibility as colorblind without ignoring unique circumstances. What Williams does here actually undermines that: it lays the groundwork for the inevitable analysis that an Obama presidency hasn’t magically fixed urban schools, ended the drug war, or caused people to marry the first woman they have sex with, and that’s because niggers can’t stop hating themselves. Yet somehow, despite never having a president in office who isn’t married, white out of wedlock births continue to rise. Is it because white people can’t stop hating themselves for being white? Or could it be because of socio-economic trends that Williams can’t be bothered to even acknowledge as a factor? To say that the only factor here is culture is to ignore the way economics shapes culture.
The reality is that Obama isn’t changing black people’s perception of themselves as it is changing black people’s perception of white people and vice versa. This idea that all poor black people need is to see a black man speak eloquently and the world will change forever isn’t analysis. It’s a cruel joke.
