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Title: Obama and Double Consciousness
Author: Chris Hobson
Date: August 26, 2009
Language: en
Topics: Barack Obama, consciousness, The Utopian, Blackness
Source: Retrieved on 5th August 2021 from http://utopianmag.com/archives/tag-The%20Utopian%20Vol.%208%20-%202009/obama-and-double-consciousness/
Notes: Published in The Utopian Vol. 8.

Chris Hobson

Obama and Double Consciousness

Author’s Note: My friend and teaching colleague Nicholas Powers first

had the idea of writing an essay applying “double consciousness” to

Obama. Unconsciously I picked up his idea. However, his approach,

focusing on Obama’s autobiographical writings, is distinct from mine.

What is here, including its errors, is my own responsibility.

When I try to sort out my sense of events since the election of

President Obama—my senses both that this election was a major watershed

in U.S. politics and society, and that Obama’s presidency will realize

few if any of the hopes people had in voting for him—I find myself drawn

to a fundamental idea in African American writing about the United

States, W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness.

To set out my argument for this article in the beginning, I see Obama’s

election in a dual way. On one side, I see the election as a

continuation of the historic African American struggle to be fully part

of the United States while remaining mixed (partly distinctly African

American and partly “mainstream” U.S.) in culture. And I think the

election represents a milestone in this struggle. On the other side I

think the election was also the expression of desires by both African

Americans and others for greater economic, political, and racial

justice: fairness to working peoples and minorities and, not least, for

the end of useless wars fought only for U.S. domination, not

self-defense, at a major cost in human lives. And here I think people’s

hopes have not been realized and are not going to be.

To understand the first point it’s necessary to look at the majority

African American attitude to the U.S., particularly as expressed in and

through ideas of double consciousness; the first part of the article

will do this in some detail. To understand the second point it will be

necessary to apply double consciousness thinking in a somewhat distinct

way, to get across the idea that the United States can change over time

in a more inclusive direction and yet remain class divided—and race

divided as well, since class in the U.S. has always intertwined with

race. This part of the discussion will look at some of Obama’s policies

in arguing that someone operating within the limits of the U.S.

political system, as he is, can’t change these basics. I’m not sure I

can explain why that is true except for the most obvious points:

representative democracy fits a class (and race) divided society because

(1) the people with more resources always have better access to power

positions and (2) the economic health of the society does depend on the

good functioning of business, so that whoever is in government acts to

support the business system.

So “double consciousness” in this article will represent several ideas.

One is a historic, majority African American way of looking at the

United States—in effect, the U.S. is oppressive, but can change. The

second is a way of looking at the functioning of the system

(specifically with Obama in office) to see that there can be progress

over time yet the system still remains unjust and oppressive—in effect,

the U.S. has changed but remains oppressive. And finally, third, I’ll

argue that given these points, to try to use the political system to

change the social system is not to truly understand double

consciousness.

Double Consciousness as an Attitude to the United States

As stated by Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), double

consciousness referred both to the way African Americans looked at

themselves and, less directly, to how they looked at the United States.

Du Bois wrote:

“[T]he Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with

second-sight in this American world,—a world which yields him no true

self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation

of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this

double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through

the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that

looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an

American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings;

two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps

it from being torn asunder.

“The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this

longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into

a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older

selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too

much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro blood

in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a

message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to

be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by

his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in

his face.” (Writings, Library of America ed., 304–5)

Among the many ideas in this richly complex passage, three stand out for

my purposes. First, Du Bois thought African Americans see themselves in

a double way—as they appear to themselves and as they appear to the

onlooking, contemptuous white world. Second, that African Americans

actually have a double nature, as “American” and “Negro.” Third, that

they don’t wish to sacrifice either part of this mix but to be “both a

Negro and an American.” The ambiguities make double consciousness a rich

and confusing conception. Is it looking at oneself as “an American” that

represents the intrusion of external judgments, as Black Nationalists

would say, or on the contrary looking at oneself as “a Negro” as that is

understood by whites—and if so what is the relation to seeing oneself as

“a Negro” in a positive sense? Is Du Bois’s idea semi-Black Nationalist

(because “an American” is assumed to be a misconception based on

internalizing white views) or integrationist (because it is explicitly

pro-American) or race-positive (because “Negro blood has a message for

the world”)? Finally, is double consciousness a source of anguish, as Du

Bois presents it at first, or of positive complexity, as the second

paragraph implies? The idea has been seen in all these ways and means

all these things, since the majority of African Americans have

historically felt the doubleness of being a race with a specific history

while being—or intending to be—full and equal citizens. Finally, if Du

Bois meant first of all to explain how the African American looks at

herself or himself, his discussion also implies a way of looking at the

United States, as a country in which it is possible (or may become

possible) to be in reality “both a Negro and an American.”

Building on that dual view of the U.S., in Invisible Man (1952), Ralph

Ellison, who saw double consciousness’s ambiguity as a source of

positive insight rather than debilitating tension, described his first

person narrator’s attitude to the country this way:

“So it is that now I denounce and defend, or feel prepared to defend. I

condemn and affirm, say no and say yes, say yes and say no. I denounce

because although implicated and partially responsible, I have been hurt

to the point of abysmal pain, hurt to the point of invisibility. And I

defend because in spite of all I find that I love. In order to get some

of it down I have to love.... [T]oo much of your life will be lost, its

meaning lost, unless you approach it as much through love as through

hate. So I approach it through division. So I denounce and I defend and

I hate and I love.” (579–80)

Ellison captures what I think is a majority African American attitude to

the United States—there has always been an important rejectionist, Black

Nationalist conception as well— that “denounces and defends,” “hates and

loves” the country. This majority attitude may I think lie behind the

scene reported to me by a friend who was on 125^(th) Street in Harlem on

November 4 in the moments when Obama’s victory became sure. According to

his report, the packed crowd broke into a chant, “USA! USA! USA!”—as if

for victory at the Olympics.

It would be easy to see this chant in a reflexively “left” way as

reflecting illusions in the political system. In such a view the crowd

permitted itself to believe what we, the left, know to be untrue—that

the U.S. system can provide (now provides?) full equality. To avoid

oversimplifying in this way it is important to remember some basics

about African American history; I hope I am not myself oversimplifying

or condescending to readers. These start with the fact that African

Americans did not come here voluntarily but as prisoners, captives—those

who lived to reach these shores at all. Surely, indeed, each person in

the 125^(th) Street throng had not forgotten but was aware of this fact;

had it more in mind than any other. At the same time, another fact is

equally basic: at a certain point, no one can say just when, the

majority of African Americans— both free and slave as far as we

know—came to view themselves not as Africans in forced exile but as

Americans. (As just noted, there have always been those who thought

otherwise.) Thus in 1827 Richard Allen, founder and first bishop of the

A.M.E. Church, arguing against proposals to repatriate to Africa,

stated, “This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood is

now our mother country, and we are well satisfied to stay where wisdom

abounds, and the gospel is free.” This “tears and blood” idea became

foundational, repeated time and again by others. African Americans,

then, were not just enslaved in Africa and transported to the United

States but, in their majority, made the decision to become “Americans”

in an affirmative way, to view the U.S. as “mother country.” Third, in

doing this they were not so much thinking of the U.S. as it was but

imagining it transformed into a more democratic, inclusive

society—partly by themselves. (And also, many believed in their

prophetic version of Christianity, in accordance with God’s will). Thus,

a generation after the Civil War, William J. Simmons, founder of what

became the National Baptist Convention USA and author of the African

American biographical encyclopedia Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive,

and Rising, forecast:

“Here in this new South the Negro shall shine in the constellation of

nations, and by his words and deeds hand down to unborn ages the

glittering pages of our history. We shall in some prominent way mount

the ladder of difficulties, scale the cliff of prejudices and hide our

heads among the stars.”

These words were spoken (at an Emancipation Day celebration, Jan. 1,

1887) when the segregation system was already solidifying, but Simmons’s

eye was clearly on long historical time. Something like this vision, I

would guess—a vision simultaneously of civil equality and of a U.S.

transformed as a whole into a place of justice—was in the minds of those

who chanted “USA!” on Nov. 4. From this point of view what the election

represented was simple: We, who made the decision long ago to become

Americans but were for so many years locked out and seen as noncitizens,

have now secured our right to be citizens to the point where one of our

members has become president. That idea, in my opinion, explains why, on

TV that night, the tears were streaming down Jesse Jackson’s face, and

many more faces besides.

This persistent belief that African Americans can transform their own

situation and help the United States transform itself into something

better—over time and with unremitting efforts both of political reform

and of individual and family improvement—may be right or wrong but is

not stupid or naïve. A version of militant reformism, it rests on the

underlying assumptions, first, that there is a democratic component in

the U.S. foundational ideas and, second, that this component can be used

strategically against the oppressive current reality. This belief is

also a version of double consciousness thinking—it holds that the U.S.

is both an oppressive nation and also a potentially freer society. This

idea, and the efforts it led to, have certainly brought about

substantial democratization in the U.S. in the epoch since World War II.

(Not these ideas alone, of course.) If this vision seemed to have given

way to a kind of weary skepticism in the long years of retrenchment

after the civil rights movement, it still showed its persistence in the

response to Obama.

Nor is this view of things a mere illusion. What has been achieved is a

limited but real breakthrough in the racial inclusiveness of the U.S.

social system. I emphasize this point because the tendency of leftists

is to discount the possibility of such breakthroughs. The breakthrough I

think is not just in the inclusiveness of the political elite or even

the political system as a whole—though these are real—but in the

inclusiveness of the social system. It is obvious that the political

elite has been becoming somewhat more racially inclusive for some time,

as cabinet appointments and Supreme Court memberships show. Obama’s

election also marks a move to somewhat greater inclusiveness in the

political system as such. Since the 1970s, it has opened up to the point

where it’s no longer remarkable to see African American, Hispanic, and

other minority members of Congressmen, mayors, appointed and civil

service officials, judges, etc., some with substantial accumulated

power. Obama’s election belongs to this trend—let us recall, as Sen.

McCain did in his concession speech Nov. 4, that 107 years earlier, in

1901, President Theodore Roosevelt was vilified in much of the country

for merely inviting a Black man, Booker T. Washington, to dinner in the

White House.

Obama’s election also represents a broadening of the social system as a

whole. To state what should be obvious: never again will it be possible

to wonder, as a future speculation, whether an African American can ever

be elected president; and, for the children just now becoming conscious

of the world, Obama’s presidency is normative—“the president” is a Black

man. Over time, these changes must necessarily have an effect on how

people look at the mix of cultures that is the United States.

For all these reasons the enormous spontaneous festival of African

American freedom that greeted the election and the inaugural week, and

the sense that a moment awaited for 145 years was now here, were not

wrong, not naïve, and not misplaced. These perceptions were real,

accurate, and true.

Double Consciousness and Obama’s Presidency

The election then, in my view, does represent a milestone historically;

that is one lens of double consciousness for looking at its

significance. The other lens looks at what the election represents

politically and socially—what is likely to change in government policy

and future social reality. In my opinion this a distinct question. What

has been achieved in terms of the historical struggle for African

American equality is considerable, if limited; what is likely to change

in government policies and the economic and social structure of the

United States is negligible. It’s necessary to hold both these

contradictory ideas in mind.

Looked at through the lens of the hopes invested in him for substantial

change in U.S. society, Obama’s administration so far has been a

flat-liner and I believe will remain one. What has changed or is slated

to change is a series of policy and appointment issues that are

important in themselves but that don’t involve major shifts in society

and are also ambiguous— some good, some bad. Specifically, Obama has

moved more aggressively than Bush to rescue banks and big corporations,

in a pro-business way that sets aside workers’ rights, including the

right to jobs. (As of July, the economy was still shrinking, and the

main effect of Obama’s policies may have been to slow the shrinkage.)

Obama has proposed a relatively ambitious health care package that may

include a government-run plan alongside private plans; we’ll see in

coming months if this passes intact (or at all). He has also proposed

good measures on energy and stem cell research, and has rolled back some

of Bush’s antienvironmental actions. His first Supreme Court nominee,

Judge Sonia Sotomayor, confirmed Aug. 6, is a centrist-to-liberal

jurist, more liberal than a Bush nominee or, probably, a McCain nominee

would have been, but not in fact more liberal than Justice David Souter,

whom she is replacing; she will probably maintain, but not shift, the

liberal-conservative balance on the court.

Alongside these somewhat ambiguously liberal steps are more conservative

ones. It’s become common to read in the morning paper that Obama has

embraced or extended Bush policies that he previously pledged to

reverse. Two examples are “national security” and immigration. Obama has

proposed a new system of detention without trial for Guantanamo

prisoners who are “hard to prosecute [meaning the evidence was obtained

illegally] and dangerous to release”; he has defended using a “state

secrets” privilege to keep some cases out of the courts. On immigration,

the new administration is “vastly expanding” Bush’s effort to deport

illegal immigrants in local jails, has “expanded a program to verify

worker immigration status that has been widely criticized as flawed,”

and has rejected proposals for legally binding standards for detention

centers. He recently recommitted himself to proposing a comprehensive

immigration bill in the future, but, besides raids and deportations, the

major additional element this would contain is an amnesty for

undocumented immigrants— hardly a radical measure, and one earlier

presidents have adopted from time to time. (See New York Times, July 2,

July 26, Aug. 4, Aug. 6, Aug. 11; see sidebar article for more

information).

Important as these and other issues may be, they all involve dayto-day

management of the existing social relations in the country; none

involves shifting the balance in the system. I’m not talking about

revolutionary change but just about moving society by incremental steps

in a fairer, more democratic direction—what Obama’s slogan “Change We

Can Believe In” seemed to imply. Three issues can illustrate the point:

rich and poor; war and peace; black and white. Probably many who voted

for Obama believed he would shift the balance between rich and poor a

little, bring some relief for the poor and struggling working class and

middle class people. Probably most believed he would end Bush’s war in

Iraq and emphasize peace and cooperation in foreign relations—his

signature issue. And probably many hoped his election would bring steps

toward greater fairness in race relations, even if this was an area

Obama, for strategy reasons, avoided stressing in the campaign.

RICH AND POOR

A pair of headlines on the same day said all that needs saying on this

issue. The top story in the New York Times for July 13 was headed:

Black-White Gap in Jobless Rate Widens in City Gulf Is Less Across U.S.

Experts Uncertain Why Blacks Lost Jobs in New York Faster

And below this story:

For Goldman, A Swift Return To Lofty Profits

The first story explained that unemployment for African Americans in New

York City had gone from 6% to 15% between the first quarter of 2008 and

the same period in 2009. The rate for whites had gone from 3 to 4% and

for Hispanics from 6 to 9%. By April 1 “there were about 80,000 more

unemployed blacks than whites” in New York City “even though there are

roughly 1.5 million more whites than blacks here.” In the country as a

whole, Black unemployment had gone from 9 to 14% over the same period,

white from 5 to 8%. (Figures for Hispanics weren’t given.) So, to put a

slightly different spin on the figures, unemployment for everyone was

soaring, both nationally and in New York. It should be no surprise (in

the U.S.) that unemployment hits African Americans worse than whites,

but whites aren’t doing very well either. Nothing changed in July, when

247,000 more jobs disappeared (but the spin was that this was a sign of

hope because the rate of loss was slower) and five million people, one

third of the total unemployed, have been out of work more than six

months. (These figures list only those registered as looking for work.

The real numbers are much higher.) Returning to Goldman Sachs, the

investment bank, its actual second quarter profit, posted the next day,

was $3.4 billion. (That’s correct, $3,400,000,000.00.)

Obama is certainly not to blame for the economic collapse but, as the

headline about Goldman Sachs shows, his strategy has focused entirely on

nursing the giant banks and manufacturers back to profitability, hoping

that will benefit everyone. An Obama official is supposed to negotiate

with big companies about salary levels, but has little leverage. Putting

all this together, the business collapse will eventually end, companies

will start rehiring, some people will get good jobs back, most who lost

jobs will get much lower-paying ones and be glad of it, many will be out

of work for good, and multimillion dollar salaries will be back for

those at the top. Really, multimillion? One recent story lists a

“veteran bond salesman” recently given a two-year contract at $6 million

a year, an interest rate trader offered $10 million a year for two

years, and a former Goldman Sachs partner offered $15 million a year for

two years; but her new employer says the figure is “wildly exaggerated,”

so perhaps it is only $10 million. (New York Times Aug. 10.) This

obscenity passes as economic health, and there’s not a sign in the world

that Obama will or can change it. Eventually, at incalculable human

cost, about the same relative distribution of wealth will be

restored—even more skewed toward big money.

WAR AND PEACE

In overall outline, Obama’s foreign policy looks a lot like Bush’s,

pursued with more skill. It’s an imperialist foreign policy, aimed above

all at projecting U.S. power and control all across the globe, but also

at repairing relations with allies (Europe), rivals (Russia), and

possible opponents (the leftist bloc in Latin America) that were

disrupted by Bush’s unilateralist and overly military approach. Obama

has kept the same list of troublemakers (Somalia) and favored dictators

(Kyrgyzstan’s Kurmanbek Bakiyev, who allows U.S. aircraft to operate in

the country) because the policy goals are similar. Obama is deploying

U.S. global power a little differently from Bush, partly because of

Bush’s successes.

The key Bush success on which Obama has piggybacked is in Iraq. Obama

built his early campaign on opposition to the war. By the time he was

nominated there were qualifiers in the fine print—Obama would “work with

his military commanders to responsibly end the war,” according to his

campaign website (“It’s Your Choice—How the Candidates Stand on the

Issues That Matter to You,” www.barackobama.com). Since Bush’s “surge”

in 2007–8 did succeed in quieting opposition in Iraq for the moment,

Obama was able to agree with the commanders (and Bush) on a “withdrawal”

date of January 2011. At the moment there are still 130,000 U.S. troops

in Iraq, about the same number as in 2006. Supposedly they have

“withdrawn from the cities” and are no longer in “combat roles,” but,

according to a briefing by U.S. commanding general Ray Odierno in May,

something like 30–45,000 combat troops will stay in urban areas through

such creative thinking as redefining these areas as lying “outside”

their cities and “remissioning” the troops as trainers or advisers,

“although many will still go on combat patrols” (New York Times, May 9).

Most troops are supposed to be out by early 2011 but a “residual force”

of unspecified size is supposed to remain at least through that year. It

should be clear that this isn’t a plan for pulling out of Iraq but for

reducing the overt U.S. occupation as long as the pro-U.S. government is

stable. If the antiU.S. forces regain strength, everything indicates

that Obama will stop or reverse the withdrawal.

The other side of Obama’s war-peace profile is Afghanistan, where he is

escalating an ongoing U.S. counterinsurgency into an open-ended war. The

extent and duration will depend on how successful he is. During the

campaign, Obama presented his policy as a plan to “refocus our resources

on al Qaeda”— but, again, the fine print contained qualifiers: “The

Taliban has reemerged in southern Afghanistan while Al Qaeda has used

the space provided by the Iraq war to regroup...” (“It’s Your Choice,”

as above). As Obama’s policy is now unfolding, al Qaeda is merely the

excuse for the major target, the Taliban in Afghanistan and in Pakistan,

which threatens the survival of the U.S.-created Afghan government and

the stability of the U.S. ally, Pakistan. The major focus is Afghanistan

and Obama’s aim is to eradicate the Taliban, which, after all, is a

conservative religious Afghan movement that never attacked the U.S. when

it was in power. It is true, of course, that the Taliban is in a

tactical alliance with al Qaeda, but Obama’s goal is clearly to defeat

the Taliban altogether and stabilize the U.S. client regime led by Hamid

Karzai, who has very little support in his own country. (A recent

article about him was entitled “Karzai in His Labyrinth,” a reference to

Gabriel García Márquez’s novel The General in His Labyrinth, about a

dying and isolated Simón Bolívar.)

The stepped up U.S. war in Afghanistan is imperialist in at least two

senses: it is hated by many Afghan people and it is imposed by the U.S.

on the U.S.’s so-called allies. On the first point, a news account

headed “Marines Land in Caldron of Afghan Resentment” (Times, July 3),

one of many similar dispatches, included the following comments from

villagers in Marja, Helmand province, which the U.S. bombed in May:

“We Muslims don’t like them [foreign forces]—they are the source of

danger” (Hajji Taj Muhammad)

“They come here just to fight, not to bring peace” (Allah Nazad, a

farmer)

“The people are very scared of the right raids. When they have night

raids, the people join the Taliban” (Spin Gul, farmer)

“Who are the Taliban? They are local people” (a villager who wouldn’t

give his name)

“I will not allow them [to raid my house]. I will fight them to the

last drop of blood” (Hamza, a village resident)

The U.S. is also pushing, pulling, and strongarming so-called allies

into reluctantly cooperating. In July, Pakistani intelligence officials,

as an intended counterweight to this pressure, told the New York Times

that Pakistan objects to the expanding military campaign in Afghanistan.

The reasons are plain: the war is pushing Taliban forces across the

border into Pakistan, which does not have enough troops to fight them

while defending its border with India. Therefore, the story paraphrased,

“dialogue with the Taliban, not more fighting, is in Pakistan’s national

interest” (Times, July 22). The article summarized Obama officials’

position as “frustration” that Pakistan has “chosen to fight Pakistani

Taliban who threaten their government, while ignoring Taliban and other

militants fighting Americans in Afghanistan or threatening India”

(same). In other words, Pakistan has the insolence to have a national

interest and not act as an automatic pawn of the United States. Obama’s

administration does not need to take lessons from Bush’s in imperialist

arrogance.

Putting all this in historical perspective, there is no difference

except in style and tactics between Bush and Obama. The U.S. interest in

Iraq was to replace Saddam Hussein’s anti-U.S. government, which had

been a U.S. ally as long as it did what the U.S. asked, with a pro-U.S.

regime. In Afghanistan, to its annoyance, the U.S. poured in tons of aid

and special operations to fight the Russians in the 1980s only to lose

control when the Taliban came to power in the 1990s. After the September

11, 2001 attacks the U.S. went to war in Afghanistan supposedly to

destroy al Qaeda but actually (as the focus of its operations shows) to

overturn this anti-U.S. government and install the pro-U.S. Karzai

regime. Obama is simply continuing this policy. Obama’s weak quarrel

with Bush is that Bush took his eye off Afghanistan letting the Taliban

regroup. True enough. But the aim of his policy is identical to Bush’s

aim. The policies, in other words, come from real and lasting U.S.

imperial interests in controlling the shaky parts of the empire.

BLACK AND WHITE

For African Americans, as Nicholas Powers wrote recently in the

Brooklyn-based Indypendent newspaper, “The change we can believe in has

become the change you can drop in a beggar’s cup” (July 29,

www.indypendent.org). There is unfortunately not much that can be said

about Obama and civil rights issues. His campaign listed a basketful of

good-sounding but vague goals—”Strengthen Civil Rights Enforcement,”

“Combat Employment Discrimination,” etc. (“It’s Your Choice”) but Obama

did not campaign on these issues and in fact was as silent as possible.

Months later this remains true, with the exception of inside-the-family

occasions like his address to the NAACP’s 100^(th) anniversary

convention (July 16) and his response to the arrest of Harvard Professor

Henry Louis Gates, where Obama’s main concern, unfortunately, was to

apologize for criticizing the police. (See sidebar article.)

In its omissions and emphases, Obama’s speech to the NAACP reveals a lot

about his approach. (It can be read at www.whitehouse.gov.) As befitted

the occasion, Obama paid tribute to the NAACP itself, referred to the

heroes and martyrs of the civil rights movement, and described himself,

I think sincerely, as standing “on the shoulders of giants.” In

substance, he mentioned two key points about current social problems:

(1) “The pain of discrimination is still felt in America” and (2) that

“the most difficult barriers include structural inequalities that our

nation’s legacy of discrimination has left behind.” Too careful a

politician to omit specific programs, Obama mentioned several, such as

expanding tax credits, “making housing more affordable,” school and

after-school programs, his health proposals, and protections against

mortgage fraud. Obama covered all this rather quickly—in 457 words, if

one counts, just over 10 percent of his speech. For about twice as long,

he spoke about education and about one of his favorite themes, the need

for African Americans to develop “a new mind set” to combat “the way

we’ve internalized a sense of limitation; how so many in our communities

have come to expect so little from the world and from themselves.”

There’s no doubt that both are important. Among my students I myself

have seen the self-crippling effect of internalized low expectations.

But neither education, raised self-expectations, nor the desirable

programs Obama listed briefly deal in an overall way with the

“structural inequalities” he referred to.

For example, what about the unemployment figures I mentioned earlier?

The gap in unemployment is a “structural inequality” that has remained

intact for decades, except that in recent years it has gotten worse.

Obama does not raise this issue by himself. Asked about it in the

context of the current economic mess, he answered that his job is to

“get the economy as a whole moving.... If I don’t do that, I’m not going

to be able to help anybody” (NYTimes.com, June 23). That’s true but

doesn’t answer the question about the unemployment gap. Setting aside

the difficulty of tackling this issue during the recession, Obama’s

stated programs (“It’s Your Choice,” as above) don’t contain any

long-term measures to deal with the problem and in fact don’t mention

it.

To deal with these inequalities will take massive programs of

investments, public works, and job creation. What better occasion than

the NAACP’s 100^(th) anniversary convention to go on national television

and announce the need for such a program—if not for today, then to

follow the economic recovery? For that matter, what better occasion to

use national television to tell the nation as a whole, not just the

NAACP, that “the pain of discrimination is still felt in

America”—especially to tell it to the many people who naïvely think

discrimination ended sometime in the past?

The prophetic version of Christianity I’ve been studying argues that God

will hold individuals and nations up to judgment for failing to provide

justice. The God may be mythical but the judgments are real. Already one

can see the future on the other side of economic recovery, after one or

two terms of Obama’s presidency. It’s one in which, certainly, the

African American and Hispanic middle and upper classes will have

continued to expand, as they have for half a century, and as a result,

government, industry, and public life will be somewhat more integrated.

For this we can be thankful. Equally predictably the “structural

inequalities” Obama spoke of will continue and probably expand, and with

them the false arrests, police murders, lack of jobs, and yes,

internalized helplessness, low expectations, and self-destroying

despair. If Obama’s presidency unfolds to its end with the majority of

African Americans and Hispanic Americans still in approximately the same

position as at its beginning, as I think likely, the judgments will

follow.

Double Consciousness as a Way to Understand Obama and His Supporters

I’ve been arguing that Du Bois’s idea of double consciousness is first

of all a way of understanding a majority African American view of the

United States as, simultaneously, a land of oppression and the

embodiment of a democratic ideal; and secondly, that double

consciousness is also a way of understanding simultaneously the major

change in the U.S. landscape represented by Obama’s election and the

fact that this event and Obama’s presidency are likely to make little or

no change in how most Americans live and how the U.S. acts in the world.

Double consciousness represents, thirdly, a way of understanding Obama

himself and his supporters, or many of them.

The double consciousness I have in mind now is not the same as Du Bois’s

internalized negative self-judgment by white standards. While perhaps no

member of a racial or other oppressed group can entirely escape such

self-doubts, I think Obama’s biography shows that, much more, as he

reached his maturity he embraced his African American self as a positive

identification alongside his overall American identity. The double

consciousness I am talking about in Obama’s case is one of identifying

fully with the African American community and its historical struggles

and at the same time identifying fully, not necessarily with U.S.

society in its current form, but with its political system and the

economic system it rests on; seeing these—and not struggle inspired by

principles of freedom—as the source of progress; and identifying with

the United States’ world role. Because of these identifications Obama is

capable of seeing clearly the need to overcome “structural inequalities”

that enforce racism while being unable to name any programs to overcome

them. He is capable of identifying with poor and working people most

hurt by the economic collapse while working to restore the profits of

the financial system that caused the collapse. And he is capable of

opposing Bush’s war in Iraq while fully accepting the politics of

imperial domination that led to that war and to the Afghan war he is

escalating.

There’s a large measure of political calculation in all this, of

course—my article on Obama in Utopian 7 referred to some of the radical

early positions he dropped when convenient. And there is also, as I

stressed in that article, the “vetting” process by which the political

system tested Obama along with other candidates to be sure that his

positions and affiliations were “mainstream” enough for the presidency.

If he hadn’t made those adjustments he would have been sidelined. But

underlying these processes is the double consciousness through which

Obama, fully aware of the U.S.’s historical inequalities and class and

racial discrimination, and subjectively eager to change them, is led by

his ideas to embrace methods and goals that make it impossible to change

them.

Something of the same kind may apply to Obama’s supporters, or some of

them. Their identification with Obama, with the hope of change that he

represents, with the idea that change is possible in and through the

political system and through the Democratic Party in particular, has led

them—so far—to be blind to his flaws. Obama’s approval ratings have

fallen, but it is conservatives and ordinary voters who have fallen

away, not those who were most mobilized by hope in him. As an example, a

month or so ago, at a family gathering, I sat listening as talk turned

to Obama. One of the young people, a college student, a bit of a social

rebel, had done a little legwork for Obama, and exulted in his victory

because of hatred for the Iraq war, hatred of racism, hatred of Bush

specifically, and a general longing for change. Now, he told with

delight the story of the Navy Seals who, you’ll remember, back in April

took out the Somali pirates holding a U.S. merchant captain hostage.

Aside from buying into an inherently unbelievable official story (the

three Seals stood on the pitching deck of a boat, aimed at another

pitching boat thirty yards away, and shot two men on deck and one in the

cabin just as that one threatened the captain), my young friend had just

expressed complete approval of how the armed forces of the world’s

mightiest country executed pirates belonging to one of its poorest

countries who had tried to scrape off some of the untold millions the

U.S. extracts from those countries every day. What happened in my

friend’s mind I think (discounting a love of action films and games) was

an effect of double consciousness. That is, on one side there was the

desire for change in the United States, on the other an embrace through

Obama of the U.S. political system, which Obama’s victory seemed to have

sanitized— resulting in hot approval of an act of piracy (by the U.S.).

If I haven’t alienated all six of my readers—sorry, I was on the side of

the Somalis and no, I don’t believe the official account—I want now to

make a serious point. On the part of far too many, not only did Obama’s

apparent ability to offer change through the U.S. political system lead

to voting for him, but now confusion between identification with change

and identification with Obama and the political system is leading to a

surrender of critical intelligence, to making excuses for Obama’s

failures, and to blunting the desire for change. If there is to be real

“change we can believe in,” or change of any kind, it must begin by

breaking free of Obama and launching struggles for everything he is not

delivering and more. And so we must maintain double consciousness. That

is, we must be aware that Obama’s victory changed something fundamental

in the racial history of the U.S., and simultaneously, that he and the

political system are an obstacle to the changes people wanted when they

voted for him.

With regard to the larger issues raised above, I don’t know, for sure,

whether the African American “double consciousness” view of the U.S.

that I’ve tried to describe is true or false. This is an issue of

whether the U.S. system can be transformed over time, not totally, but

made better, through belief in and use of U.S. political ideas. On the

one hand, this attitude of critical constitutionalism—the main African

American strategy for change for a century and a half—has led to some

profound, if incomplete, democratic changes. (Visiting a friend in her

beach rental house a few weeks ago, I saw a group of about twenty,

evenly mixed between African American, Hispanic, white, and some Asian

American men and women, walk together down to the sea. Granted it was

probably an office party, but no such office could have existed forty

years ago.) This is more than the competing social philosophies,

Marxism, Black Nationalism, and anarchism, have done—though they have

been part of the ferment. So in the sense that by repeatedly struggling

for justice one can get some of it—the African American strategy—the

reform idea is not wrong, or at least not ridiculous.

On the other hand the repeated reform upheavals in the U.S. (and

elsewhere) over the same century and a half—the Civil War, populism, the

socialist and trade union movements, civil rights—have changed to some

degree the fairness and inclusiveness of the social structure but never

the structure itself. I believe we need to change the structure.

Although I’ll admit I don’t know how, I think we start by recognizing,

stating, and teaching (so far as we can) the need to do so, and

therefore I didn’t and don’t back Obama. But I also think the

revolutionaries (broadly speaking) need to listen more, and more

respectfully, to others’ political and social philosophies and their

(not stupid or trivial) reasons for holding them; and that is why I’ve

spent time in this article on the underlying double consciousness

assumptions about the U.S. If we do practice this respectful openness,

it may help our own ability to work out, as well as communicate, our

ideas.

---

Sidebar article 1: PROMISE HER ANYTHING, BUT GIVE HER ARPÈGE

“As a senator, Mr. Obama ... voted against a 2006 bill authorizing

military commissions, but it passed anyway. While Mr. Obama initially

halted the trials, he has since proposed reviving them in a revised

form.” (Charlie Savage, “Obama’s Terror Policy Looks a Lot Like Bush’s.”

New York Times, July 2, A14.)

“On the campaign trail and in more recent statements, President Obama

has indicated that he wants to limit the use of the state secrets

privilege. In courtrooms, however, there has been little evidence of a

new approach.” (Adam Liptak, “Obama Administration Weighs In on State

Secrets, Raising Concern on the Left.” New York Times, Aug. 4, A11.)

“The time to fix our broken immigration system is now. It is critical

that as we embark on this enormous venture to update our immigration

system, it is fully reflective of the powerful tradition of immigration

in this country and fully reflective of our values and ideals.” (Obama

Statement in U.S. Senate, May 23, 2007. From “Barack Obama and Joe

Biden: Fighting for Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” Immigration Fact

Sheet, www.barackobama.com.)

“Barack Obama supports a system that allows undocumented immigrants who

are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, not violate the law,

and go to the back of the line for opportunity to become citizens.”

(Same.)

“The Obama administration is vastly expanding a federal effort begun

under President George W. Bush to identify and deport illegal immigrants

held in local jails.... ‘We are interested in identifying and removing

all offenders if we can,’ Mr. [John T.] Morton [assistant secretary of

homeland security] said in an interview. ‘But we have limited resources,

and in a world of limited resources we are focusing on violent serious

offenders first.’”(James C. McKinley Jr., “Debate Intensifies as a

Federal Deportation Program Is Set to Expand,” New York Times, July 26,

13.)

A “review of the illegal immigrants selected for deportation in jails in

Harris County, Tex.” shows that out of a total of 2,313, some 2,173, or

94 percent, were arrested on the following charges: 670 for drunk

driving, 670 for drug possession, 446 for simple assault, 150 for

various traffic violations, 101 for running from the police, 81 for not

having identification, and 55 for not giving an officer information.

140, or 6 percent, were arrested on more serious charges: 90 for

aggravated assault, 30 for aggravated robbery, 13 for sexual assault on

a child, and 7 for murder. (“Charges Against Immigrants Sent Home,”

sidebar, same article.) No information was provided on convictions;

arrestees found to be illegal immigrants can be deported whether or not

they are convicted on the arrest charges.

“After early pledges by President Obama that he would moderate the Bush

administration’s tough policy on immigration enforcement, his

administration is pursuing an aggressive policy for an

illegal-immigration crackdown.... That approach brings Mr. Obama around

to the position that his Republican rival, Senator John McCain, espoused

during last year’s presidential campaign, a stance Mr. Obama rejected

then as too hard on Latino and immigrant communities.” (Julia Preston,

“Firm Stance on Illegal Immigration Remains Policy Under Obama,” New

York Times, Aug. 4, A14.)

“The Obama administration intends to announce an ambitious plan...to

overhaul the much-criticized way the nation detains immigration

violators, trying to transform it from a patchwork of jail and prison

cells to what its new chief called a ‘truly civil detention system.’ ...

The government will stop sending families to the T. Don Hutto

Residential Center, a former state prison near Austin, Tex., that

drew...scathing news coverage for putting young children behind razor

wire.... Hutto will be converted into an immigration jail for women.”

(Nina Bernstein, “U.S. to Overhaul Detention Policy for Immigrants,” New

York Times, Aug. 6, A1, A4.)

---

Sidebar article 2: PROFESOR GATES IN HANDCUFFS

The now-famous July 16 encounter between Henry Louis Gates, Alphonse

Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois

Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard

University, and a white Cambridge Massachusetts police officer, Sergeant

James Crowley, plus the varying responses to the incident by President

Obama, offer a snapshot of what it is like to be African American in the

United States at the moment.

As most people know, Gates found the door of his Cambridge home stuck

when returning from a trip to China and enlisted the help of his cab

driver in forcing it open. A woman down the street phoned a woman across

the street from Gates, who, not sure if anything bad was happening,

called asking the police to check up. Crowley responded, found Gates

inside the house, asked or ordered him to step outside (Gates refused),

saw proof of Gates’s identity but continued questioning him and, after

Gates protested and yelled at him, arrested Gates for disorderly

conduct. The next day the Cambridge police, sensing a no-win situation

after arresting a senior Harvard professor inside his own house, dropped

the charges.

There are some uncertainties: Crowley’s report stated that Gates at

first refused to show ID while Gates said he did so at once. I know how

to read police reports (a police report is a document that shows that

the police, who know what are lawful commands, acted according to the

law) and in any case, Crowley lied about several other matters, notably

whether the call to the police specified the “intruder’s” race (Crowley

said yes, transcripts say no). So on balance what happened is that Gates

showed ID, Crowley wasn’t satisfied, Gates blew his stack and got

arrested. Asked about the case, Obama responded that Gates was a friend,

so he wanted to be careful, and that everyone should be cautious in such

cases, but that it seemed evident that the police had “acted stupidly,”

and additionally that “there is a long history in this country of

African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement

disproportionately. That’s just a fact” (“News Conference by the

President,” July 22, posted July 23, www.whitehouse.gov). The word

“stupidly” backfired amidst a campaign by police and conservative

bloggers to defend Crowley as having acted professionally and as a

dedicated officer who even leads training sessions on how to avoid

racial profiling. (This means: how to conduct stop and frisk operations

that don’t meet legal definitions of racial profiling.) Conservatives

seized on Obama’s comments to show that he is biased against the police.

Two days later Obama walked into the White House briefing room and

backed down: he said he still thought the arrest “an overreaction” but

that Gates “probably overreacted as well,” that he, Obama, “obviously

contributed to ratcheting it up,” and that “in my choice of words, I

think I unfortunately gave the impression that I was maligning the

Cambridge Police Department or Sergeant Crowley specifically—and I could

have calibrated those words differently” (“Statement by the President,”

July 24, same source).

What really happened?

Some insight is provided by Al Vivian, president of Basic Diversity,

Inc., a consulting service in Atlanta, who summarized what he called an

“unwritten code” among African Americans: “Quiet politeness is rule No.

1 in surviving an incident of racial profiling, he said. So is frequent

use of the word ‘sir’” (New York Times, July 24). Any young African

American man knows these rules, or has had them explained by his parent

or a counselor, and knows that he is at risk if he ignores them. So from

this point of view Gates forgot the basics of being Black in the U.S.

Knowing that he is a world-famed scholar, holder of more than forty

honorary degrees and author of fourteen books—and perhaps tired from a

long flight and on edge from the problem with his door—Gates forgot

double consciousness, neglected to switch codes, reacted as “an

American” rather than “a Negro,” and failed to use “quiet politeness”

and frequently say “sir.”

What happened to Gates, in other words, shows that the tactics of

surviving while Black have not changed at all since Jan. 20, 2009. Bob

Herbert, Op-Ed columnist for the New York Times, reminds us of what

anyone with reasonably sharp eyes knows: “Black people are constantly

being stopped, searched, harassed, publicly humiliated, assaulted,

arrested and sometimes killed by police officers in this country for no

good reason.” And: of the half-million police stops of private citizens

in New York City every year, “the overwhelming majority of those stopped

are black or Latino, and the overwhelming majority are innocent of any

wrongdoing” (Aug. 1). It is worth thinking about how this case would

have unfolded if the “intruder” had not been Henry Louis Gates, famed

professor and author, but an ordinary African American homeowner, say an

accountant or electrician returning from an out of town trip. Perhaps

that person, more on guard, would have remembered the rules. If not, at

best he would now be facing repeated court appearances; at worst,

beating—or worse.

As for President Obama, he too forgot the rules. That is, in his initial

remarks, while speaking crisply and calmly as always, he forgot (in

effect) to use “quiet politeness” and frequently say “sir”—by affirming

respect for the police and Sgt. Crowley and all the other words he

forced from his mouth two days later. He spoke, for the moment, honestly

as a Black man in the United States, got slapped down for it, and backed

off. He too forgot double consciousness and code switching, forgot that

a Black man in the United States must choose when to speak as a Black

man in the United States and when to speak as a Black man is supposed to

speak in the United States. And he forgot the basic bargain that led to

his presidency: that he could become president if he did not act as a

president for African Americans, if he did not provide leadership on

race issues, if he upheld the fiction that there is already (with a few

lapses) impartial legal justice for all.

Let us imagine, for a moment, that Obama had acted differently. Let’s

imagine that he had scheduled a prime-time speech. (He is the president;

he can schedule such a speech if he wants, especially on an issue that

already has the country’s attention). And then let’s suppose that with

time to prepare his remarks with care, he had told the nation,

momentarily focused on this issue, the truth about police conduct toward

African Americans and had spoken of the need for change, enforceable

reforms. To do this, of course, would have meant making equal rights for

all a defining theme of his presidency.

The Gates affair teaches us much about the state of race relations in

the U.S. at present, and about the country’s president as well.