opinion • president obama
Over the weekend,
President Obama took
time out of addressing graduates at the celebrated, historically-black,
all-male, private college, Morehouse, to remind about black men who
make bad choices, chalking up failures to The Man and myriad other
excuses.
“We know that too many young men in our community continue to
make bad choices. Growing up, I made a few myself. And I have to
confess, sometimes I wrote off my own failings as just another example
of the world trying to keep a black man down. But one of the things
you’ve learned over the last four years is that there’s no longer any
room for excuses. I understand that there’s a common fraternity creed
here at Morehouse: ‘excuses are tools of the incompetent, used to build
bridges to nowhere and monuments of nothingness.’ We’ve got no time for
excuses – not because the bitter legacies of slavery and segregation
have vanished entirely; they haven’t. Not because racism and
discrimination no longer exist; that’s still out there. It’s just that
in today’s hyperconnected, hypercompetitive world, with a billion young
people from China and India and Brazil entering the global workforce
alongside you, nobody is going to give you anything you haven’t earned.
And whatever hardships you may experience because of your race, they
pale in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured – and
overcame.”
True.
But why do a roomful of young, black male college graduates, in
particular, need this admonishment against excuse-making and expecting
goodies they have not earned? Surely our Commander-In-chief would argue
against conservative charges that real racism is dead and that his
America is rife with lazy, irresponsible and demanding (black and brown)
“takers” Why, then, do his speeches to black Americans so often warn
against creeping pathology? (For instance, the
2008 Father’s Day speech that
centered on shiftless and absent black sperm donors, instead of men who
take the role of fatherhood seriously and are present and active in
their children’s lives, whether or not they are part of a married
couple.)
Of course, our President isn’t the only person seemingly
subconsciously invested in the idea of inherent black dysfunction. In
Michelle Obama’s speech to graduates at historically-black Bowie State
University, the First Lady complained about young, black students with
dreams of hip hop celebrity and urged parents not to accept failing
schools. Ta-Nehisi Coates brilliantly addressed hand-wringing over hip
hop aspirations in his piece, “
How the Obama Administration Talks to Black America.” But it is also worth noting how offensive it is to suggest that the average black parent needs to be
told to seek the best education for their children. And why lecture black
college graduates, who have clearly demonstrated a belief in the power of education?
Hyperfocus on alleged black faults and how “we need to do better” is
an outgrowth of the way black people have absorbed the race biases and
stereotypes of the majority culture over centuries, combined with our
desire to prove our own decency.
This isn’t just about the President and First Lady. I’ve sat in many a
pew and auditorium seat, wedged between other black folk, wondering why
a speech meant to inspire me instead sounds like an unspoken accusation
or a caution against some sin I never dreamed of committing. There is
something about a chance to speak to a room full of fellow African
Americans that seems to make the siren song of respectability politics
nigh irresistible. And amidst the “show ‘em you’re one of the good ones”
boot-strapping oratory is always a clutch of disturbing implied
messages: Mainly that WE are the ultimate problem; not centuries of
systemic racism or classism or educational and prison systems rife with
inequality. And that, deep down, we are who they say we are. That even
the best and brightest of us are one good, finger-wagging speech away
from every affront to mainstream Judeo-Christian, middle-class,
patriarchal American values. (Of course, the only values that matter.)
This sort of thinking reveals itself in many ways. For example, the entire let’s-teach-black-women-how-
to-be-marriageable
industrial complex hinges on the idea of inherent black, female
dysfunction. But this scolding of black America is even more problematic
and damaging when conducted by our country’s leader–the person
ultimately in charge of education, healthcare, housing and countless
other systems. Black people don’t need Barack Obama to lecture us about
why education is important for our children; we need to know what steps
his administration is taking to ensure that our children have an equal
shot at good, accessible education. And we don’t need a black president
tacitly confirming the worst ideas of the African American community by
using nearly every engagement with us to urge us to fix ourselves.
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