Obama juggles being too black, and not black enough
For much of his public life, Barack Obama has been navigating between people who think he is too black and people who think he is not black enough.
The former group speaks mostly in dog-whistle innuendo and focuses on proxy issues to emphasise Mr Obama’s ostensible otherness: his birth certificate, his supposed adherence to ‘‘black liberation theology’’ (presumably before he converted to Islam), his ‘‘Kenyan, anti-colonial’’ worldview.
Jonathan Alter’s recent book on Mr Obama’s presidency sums up these notions as symptoms of ‘‘Obama Derangement Syndrome’’ — a disorder whose subtext is more often than not: he’s too black.
On the other side are AfricanAmericans and liberals who are disappointed that Mr Obama has not made it his special mission to call out the racism that still festers in US society and rectify the racial imbalance in the country’s economy, schools, and justice system.
‘‘It has, at times, been painful to watch this particular president’s calibrated, cautious and sometimes callous treatment of his most loyal constituency,’’ radio and TV host Tavis Smiley told The New York Times’ Jodi Kantor last year. That was one of the gentler rebukes from the not-black-enough camp.
Mr Obama believes he best serves the country, and ultimately the interests of black Americans, by being the president of America, not the president of black America. Even when he speaks eloquently on the subject, as he did in his 2008 speech in Philadelphia, he presents himself as a bridge between white and black rather than the civil rights leader-in-chief.
And even when his administration has undertaken reforms that address racial injustice — reinvigorating the moribund civil rights division of the Justice Department, for example — he does not call a news conference and make a big deal of it. This is certainly calibrated and cautious. But callous?
Mr Obama’s remarks on the death of Trayvon Martin — ‘‘could have been me 35 years ago’’ — reanimated the old divide. From the he’s-too-black sideline, the president was predictably accused of indulging in ‘‘racial victimology’’ and ‘‘race baiting’’.
On the other side, some of those who had yearned for Mr Obama to be more outspoken seized on his riff as a turning point; the president, a Detroit radio host exulted, ‘‘showed his brother card’’.
Charles Ogletree, a Harvard law professor who has known Mr Obama for 25 years, told National Public Radio he felt like ‘‘turning cartwheels’’ when he heard the remarks, and he declared he would now have to rethink a pending book in which he had planned to criticise the president’s timidity on race.
‘‘It seems to me he threw caution to the wind,’’ Prof Ogletree told me. ‘‘It opens up a whole new chapter of Barack Obama.’’
Does it? I, too, found Mr Obama’s words moving in their emotional warmth and empathy. But if you go back and read them, now that the heat of the moment has cooled, you will see they were carefully measured and completely consistent with what he has said in his writing and speaking since he entered public life. The warrior against racism that critics on the right deplore and critics on the left demand is nowhere to be found. His comments on the pain and humiliation of racial profiling, which got the most attention, reprise a theme that goes back at least to his days as a state senator. His respectful treatment of the court that acquitted Martin’s killer, George Zimmerman, and his nod to the pathologies of the black underclass got less notice.
‘‘He basically says: try to understand this issue from the perspective of people different from yourself,’’ said Thomas Sugrue, a University of Pennsylvania historian who has written a book-length study of Mr Obama and race. ‘‘And he says it to black folks and white folks.’’
But somehow listeners on both sides hear what they expect to hear, Mr Sugrue said. On one side they hear ‘‘a prophetic Martin Luther King Jr’’, on the other side ‘‘a pent-up Black Panther’’.
There’s a name for that: racial profiling. People may no longer give Mr Obama suspicious glares in department stores or clutch their purses when he enters an elevator, but they have typecast him according to their own fears and expectations of a black man in the White House. They are still profiling Barack Obama.
Those who hope his Trayvon talk signalled a new presidential activism on race will be watching two litmus tests. The first is whether Mr Obama’s Justice Department will file a civil rights suit against Mr Zimmerman, the neighbourhood watch enthusiast who shot Martin dead. The National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) says more than a million people have signed petitions calling for the Justice Department to prosecute Mr Zimmerman for a hate crime.
The second is whether the president will offer a Cabinet post to Ray Kelly, the New York police commissioner who has presided over the aggressive stop-andfrisk policing of mostly black and Latino men. Mr Obama’s public praise of Mr Kelly as a possible secretary of homeland security prompted anger and amazement, some of it on this page. Was the president indifferent to Mr Kelly’s role as, in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ words, ‘‘the proprietor of the largest local racial profiling operation in the country’’, or simply inattentive?
My guess is that the president will navigate those straits as he always has when race looms, carefully and without fanfare. If he is true to form, he will quietly pass over Mr Kelly, because it’s now clear the appointment would become a major distraction from his agenda, because racial profiling is a lifelong personal sore spot for Mr Obama, and because he has other, less polarising options. He will leave George Zimmerman’s fate to attorney-general Eric Holder, who seems likely to conclude that a hatecrimes case would not stick and would be seen as putting politics over law. (The federal statute says it’s not enough to prove Mr Zimmerman pursued Martin because of his race; the government would have to prove that racial prejudice was his motive for killing the teenager.)
In his remarks on the case, Mr Obama seemed to hint that the feds would not step in where the state has already ruled.
So if Mr Obama’s Trayvon moment was not the debut of a new, more activist president, was it at least the beginning of a national conversation about race? If so, I doubt it will be a conversation led by the president. When race came up in an interview published in Sunday’s New York Times, he promptly segued into a discussion of economic strains on the social fabric.
And that’s OK. Mr Obama has an economy to heal and a foreign policy to run — a daunting agenda blockaded by an intransigent opposition.
Randall Kennedy, another Harvard law professor who has studied Mr Obama and criticised him for a lack of audacity, says frustration should be tempered by realism. ‘‘My view of Obama is as a Jackie Robinson figure,’’ Mr Kennedy told me. ‘‘Jackie Robinson breaks the colour barrier and encounters all sorts of denigration, people spitting on him, and because he was a pioneer he had to be above it all.
‘‘People expect Obama now to all of a sudden jump into this totally messy issue of race and the administration of criminal justice? It’s completely implausible. To do it would require a major investment of political capital.’’
And, come to think of it, why is that his special responsibility anyway?
‘‘There’s sort of a persistent misperception that talking about race is black folks’ burden,’’ said Benjamin Jealous, president of the NAACP, when I asked him about Mr Obama’s obligation. ‘‘Ultimately, only men can end sexism, and only white people can end racism.’’
Wouldn’t you like to hear John Boehner or Mitch McConnell or Chris Christie or Rick Perry own up as candidly as the president has to the corrosive vestiges of racism in US society? Now that might be an occasion to turn cartwheels. ©2013 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Worse, temples do not even have a proper accounting system, according to research by Nada Chansom of the National Institute of Development Administration.
In an effort to understand how temples manage public donations, she talked to monks and temple committee members at 490 temples nationwide as well as relevant authorities. They all painted the same picture of temple fund management — horribly disorganised and prone to corruption.
According to monastic discipline, monks cannot even touch money. In practice, monks routinely treat donations they receive at merit-making ceremonies as their own while the abbots enjoy full control over temple money.
We are talking here about 100-120 billion baht per year that the public donates to 37,075 temples.
According to the research, most temples have only a make-do accounting system which does not meet accounting standards. There is no monitoring nor auditing of temple finances either. Asked why, the monks simply said they do not have a knowledge of accountancy.
Which raises another question — what is the Supreme Sangha Clergy doing?
The answer — the elders did order temples to keep proper accounting and records of temple funds and assets, but the order stopped there. Senior monks down the line are supposed to monitor temples in their jurisdictions. In reality, it is to each his own, until scandals erupt.
The abuse of temple money by Wirapol Sukphol aka Nen Kham has been exposed by his public display of material indulgences. We are astounded by his wealth. But there are many wealthier monks. They are just more discreet and better protected by politically powerful patrons. And they can go on using temple money as their own as long as there is no effective system to prevent it.
To tackle temple corruption, Ms Nada suggests giving monks accounting training and making it mandatory for temples to have annual financial audits conducted by professionals.Temple committeemembers should also come from civic groups to ensure checks and balances. At present, the abbots select their own men.
The National Office of Buddhism (NOB) should also do more to make temple management more transparent and accountable. It won’t be easy. Temples are now officially required to send annual reports on temple money and assets to the NOB. But out of those 37,075 temples, only 1,321 did so in 2011. There is no punishment for non-compliance, so why bother?
This is why temple corruption is the norm, and this is why public faith in monks and temples is declining.