Andrew Sullivan reads about a non-peer-reviewed study showing black test-takers closing the performance gap with whites on a test after Obama's nomination speech and again after the election and writes:
A small anecdote. I know a neighbor in my hood from walking my beagles. She teaches in a local school and is even more aware than the rest of us in this city how challenging it is to teach and rear a self-confident generation of minority kids. She's African-American and has long bemoaned the ubiquitous use of the n-word by young black teens. But she pointed out to me months ago that there was one man they never used the n-word to describe. It was Obama. If he can help lift eyes to a larger horizon for more generations of minority children, then surely liberals and conservatives and everyone in between can be glad.
Sullivan needs to get out more. "Nigga" is ubiquitous and not just among blacks. In New York City, teenagers of every persuasion use the word: Puerto Ricans, Italians, Arabs, Dominicans, everybody. Not even just for people. I've heard it used for everything from a dilapatated bike ("that nigga needs new brakes") to a mediocre Cabernet Sauvignon ("this nigga has aged past its vintage"). Black folks who use the word "nigga" sometimes use it to describe Obama, and not out of nastiness, hatred or shame. The word isn't going away because Obama is president, and it's long past time that pop psychology about its use relative to black American self-esteem be recognized as useless, since it's use among people of other ethnicities now has to be measured in NPM.
I understand that Sullivan made the above statement out of a desire for things to be better. But this is a manifestation of a particular strain of white guilt that seeks to decouple itself from the social responsibility Americans bear toward each other when the Americans in question are black. Obama's election changes some things, but it doesn't change the hard circumstances many black kids grow up in. For all the power Obama's presidency will have symbolically, the most important relationships young people have are those with the people who are physically present--or absent, in their lives. Having a white president hasn't eradicated cocaine use among whites, Obama's presidency will not solve the most difficult social circumstances that many black children find themselves in.
It may be unfair to refer to this as "white guilt" since white people aren't the only ones who manifest it. Take House Majority Whip James Clyburn, expressing a popular sentiment even among black pundits that "“every child has lost every excuse.” I don't know what that means except that the difficult social circumstances facing someone born in Berry Farms or East New York are meaningless. It's not "white guilt" because Clyburn is not white, but it's something similar, a desire to be free of obligation and perhaps embarrassment. But it's not helpful, in fact what both Clyburn and Sullivan's statement do is provide a rhetorical framework for distancing oneself from social responsibility after the fact, after the magic improvements among blacks engendered by Obama's presidency have dissipated. "If those people can't succeed after Obama," the argument goes, "then what can we do?"
There's nothing particularly mysterious about the obstacles facing black folks or about why many of them persist despite a growing black middle class, Charles Blow listed many of them on Sunday. But it's his conclusion that's most important:
So black people have to keep their feet on the ground even as their heads are in the clouds. If we want to give these children a fighting chance, we must change the worlds they inhabit. That change requires both better policies and better parenting — a change in our houses as well as the White House.
Among the more frustrating obstacles to a better public policy is the idea that these problems can be solved with symbolic victories that don't require anyone thinking hard about them or getting their hands dirty. It's not just about "self-esteem," it's about the hard realities of poverty, education, housing, and criminal justice. It requires a great deal of work and thought, not a lot of self-congratulatory pap about how wonderful and race-blind the country is for electing a black man president.
-- A. Serwer
