Glenn Loury and John McWhorter do a fascinating bloggingheads on Cornel West's criticism of Barack Obama:
There are two key points that each of them make here that I don't think are contradictory but are worth noting. First there's Loury:
The outsiderness of the African-American, the kind of, nose against the candy store window not quite allowed in, so you don't drink the kool-aid, you don't believe the hype a little bit, the city on a hill narrative of america, the perfect leader of the free--we know from the seamy underside of racism and Jim Crow, we know from the the mean streets of the ghetto city et cetera...This is where West's disappointment is coming from, and he feels, and I feel...that to a certain degree that the kind of integrity of that tradition of protest against the mainstream of American political tendency is diminished somewhat by its being assimilated into the office of the president in the person of Barack Hussein Obama. Just by virtue of occupying that office, he makes normal the excercise of American power that does actually draw lines and put people to different sides of it, that is to some certain degree is neocolonial and militaristic, and that is inconsistent with values of equity, fairness and justice in terms of social arrangements whether it's our prisons, our ghettos or whatever it might be.And so that Obama kind of assimilates some of this legacy of African-American struggle, and normalizes it, and brings it into the house and domesticates it, is something that a person like Cornel West and like Glenn Loury has reason to be concerned about.
McWhorter points out that there's "very little engagement with the details" of what Obama could have actually done in West's critique. That's my problem, whatever legitimate points might have been hidden in West's remarks, they were obscured by a very personal attack on the president's racial identity, and they weren't exactly well made to begin with. He adds that, "One of the ironies of the Civil Rights Movement is that what it freed us to be was normal, and normal means not only excellent but mediocre and compromising."
I think part of the issue here is that black Americans remain mired in an inbetween state, despite whatever symbolic hope Obama's presidency engenders. Black people are "normal" enough that a black man can get elected president, but many still have "our nose against the candy store window" so to speak, in the sense that that being black means having less access to shared American prosperity. The institutional barriers have eroded enough that Jim Crow no longer exists, but not so much that black people don't face an unemployment rate double that of whites. But it's just a fact of life that the closer black people get to something approaching equality, the less that the black experience symbolizes what it once did. But that's the point isn't it?
