Princeton chair of the Center for African American Studies Eddie S. Glaude Jr., attempting to defend his colleague Cornel West‘s shallow, racialized critique of President Barack Obama, offers up the usual parade of strawmen, arguing that West’s critics want black people to “shut up and suffer” through crushing unemployment and the foreclosure crisis’ destruction of the black middle class.
All of West’s defenders have tried this tactic, arguing that objections to West’s assault on Obama’s racial identity, and by extension, black people of multiracial descent everywhere, amounts to a blanket attempt to stifle all criticism of the president period. This is nonsense.
New York Times columnist Bob Herbert was one of Obama’s most persistent and forceful critics until his retirement, but he never accused the president of being afraid of “free black men.” Kai Wright has been the most powerful chronicler of the way sub-prime lending helped obliterate the wealth of the black middle class. But when he called out Obama and Democrats for a lack of political courage, he didn’t suggest the president was “deracinated” or spent too much time around upper middle class whites and Jews. Cynthia Tucker somehow managed to criticize Obama for spending billions on Libya while many Americans remain jobless, without questioning the president’s racial authenticity.
Glaude then moves on to say this:
This takes me to the last point: that the combination of race loyalty and postracialism effectively banishes black suffering from public view. We see Hispanic organizations demanding the passage of the DREAM Act; we saw the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) community push for the repeal of “Don’t ask, don’t tell”; we witnessed the president of the AFL-CIO, Richard Trumka, threaten reprisals for those politicians who refused to support labor’s agenda.
In none of these instances have we heard as a response to their demands that the president must be seen as the president of all Americans. Nor do we hear that such appeals are remnants of old forms of bad identity politics. And of course, they are identity politics.
Whether they’re identity politics or not, all of these groups have a clear agenda. Immigration activists understand that nothing will get done in the current Congress, so they’ve asked the administration to institute a process for preventing potential DREAM Act recipients from being deported. Trumka wants more action from Democrats to curb Republicans efforts to cut worker benefits and eliminate their bargaining rights. West wants Obama to stop being “a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.” That’s not an agenda, that’s an insult.
