Race in America, reassessed
As the Obama presidency draws to a close, we should acknowledge that America held the national conversation about race Obama called for, even though it ended up sounding more like an angry shouting match than the earnest, enlightening discussion he clearly hoped for.
In fact, the “conversation” ultimately brought race relations to the current, troubling moment of backlash.
“There was a shocking amount of resentment that a black family had been in the White House for two terms. I think it would be naive to overlook it — the irony that one of the legacies of Obama’s presidency was an enormous amount of resentment,” Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates said after the election. “I don’t think a Donald Trump could have emerged without a black President. Donald Trump tapped into and fueled and stoked an enormous amount of racial resentment. And Obama symbolized it.”
Gates is right. President-elect Trump, let it never be forgotten, launched his successful campaign on a multiyear campaign of conspiracy theories and lies, dubbed “birtherism,” that purported Obama was not born in the U.S. and was a fundamentally illegitimate President.
The fact that Trump has never renounced, or even acknowledged, the obvious racism of his birther falsehoods will remain a stain on his presidency.
Playing the politics of resentment puts Trump in the company of other backlash politicians we’ve seen over the decades: angry, brash-talking, big-city mayors who reveled in the use of force and in flaunting their indifference — and outright hostility — to the political and economic demands of black Americans and the civil rights movement.
In the 1960s, there was Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, who once said during a campaign: “Black people are really racist. They vote for black people because they are black.” After six days of riots in Watts that left 34 dead, Yorty stunned members of Congress when he came to testify and didn’t know the city’s unemployment and welfare statistics.
In the 1970s, there was Philadelphia’s Frank Rizzo, a former police commissioner whose heavy-handed response to protests and crime included the memorable vow to “make Attila the Hun look like a faggot.” In Newark, an outrageous city councilman named Anthony Imperiale fanned the flames for years, at one point organizing armed vigilante patrols of the city in the wake of riots and warning: “When the Black Panther comes, the white hunter will be waiting.”
The HBO series “Show Me a Hero” perfectly captured the backlash politics of the 1980s that tainted Yonkers, where a string of mayors and city council members nearly bankrupted the city rather than desegregate its public housing.
And in 1993, New York elected our own backlash politician, Rudy Giuliani. One of his first actions as mayor was to dismantle a program created by Mayor David Dinkins to help minorityand women-owned businesses get a share of city contracts.
Rudy initially refused to meet with black politicians, including Carl McCall, who was then the state controller, and Manhattan Borough President Virginia Fields. It was a short trip from those calculated snubs to the protests and mass arrests that roiled the administration after the police killing of Amadou Diallo.
One key question about race in the postObama era is whether Trump wishes to be one more backlash politician, or strive for something better. Despite the foul falsehood of birtherism and Trump’s calculated, angry indifference to black concerns — “What the hell do you have to lose?” was his “appeal” to black voters — it’s possible to build bridges with conservative black religious leaders.
“As a black pastor to the poor I see great opportunities to work with the Trump administration for social justice,” my friend the Rev. Eugene Rivers recently wrote in The Hill. “Historically, from slavery to the present, the black preacher has been a realist who was willing to work with anyone to advance the interests of his people.”
Rivers and his fellow preachers, who happen to be staunchly anti-abortion, skeptical about gay marriage and tough on crime, could help steer Trump from the politics of resentment to a more inclusive vision.
A final factor we’ll see in the months ahead is the rise of a cadre of young, liberal activists who got their political baptism in the Obama campaigns, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter and other movements.
They are still in shock over Trump’s victory. When the shock wears off, expect them to take to the streets in significant numbers and continue the raucous debate about race Obama has left us.