Racial Justice in the Age of Obama

by Daniel HoSang

Friday, July 31, 2009| Community Strategic Training Initiative, Portland, OR

I’m going to speak with you today broadly about the subject of racial justice in the Age of Obama, but I first want to make a few prefatory comments to situate this moment in a particular historic context.

With respect to racial justice—that is, towards eliminating race as a category of oppression--it is possible to speak of two distinct periods of reconstruction in US history. 

We have what many refer to as the “First Reconstruction” which peaked in the 12 years following the Civil War, ended a particular system of slavery. Women and men in bondage fought to regain control over their bodies—and in doing so enhanced the horizons of freedom for everyone.  Consider the 13^th, 14^th and 15^th Amendments—eliminating slavery, establishing the principle of birthright citizenship, equal protection under the law, the right to vote—these laws passed during the First Reconstruction provide the legal and moral basis for much of our politics today. When we organize for citizenship rights, when we demand due process, when we insist our votes be counted, when we fight discrimination, we are invoking the traditions and legacies of the First Reconstruction.

We know also that our government, with the support of most of the white populace, largely abandoned this First Reconstruction after 15 years, and new forms of racial power and domination were developed. Over the next 75 years we witnessed the violence of lynchings, the expansion of segregation into every part of the country, the wholesale extermination of many Native peoples, the continued subordination of women, and a policy of immigration restriction built on an explicit ranking of the world’s peoples, sorting newcomers into categories of the superior and inferior, the fit and the unfit, the welcomed and the excluded. This regime took hold in every corner of the country; in the Northwest, whiteness was the necessary precondition to participate in public affairs, to be considered of the people.

These events eventually gave birth to the Second Reconstruction—culminating in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and 1970s—though its roots can be traced back far earlier. These efforts, to dismantle formal policies of segregation and the violence it wrought, to smash the notion that there exists a ranked, natural order of humanity, again nourished the freedom dreams of many people. The feminist movement, lesbian and gay organizing, struggles among Native peoples, immigrants, Chicanos in the Southwest all flourished during the Second Reconstruction. And again, our world today is marked by the gifts and legacies of these struggles. When we insist on freedom from sexual harassment and for reproductive freedom, when immigrant workers fight against exploitation, when we demand an end to an unjust war, when we press for a seat on the Supreme Court, an end to racial profiling by the police, indeed when we elect a Black son of an immigrant as President, we are drawing from the inheritance of the Second Reconstruction.

But what has happened since we witnessed the end of the Second Reconstruction some 30 years ago? We’ve built a prison and jail system unmatched in human history—more than two million people living in cages, the large majority black and brown men, but also a growing number of women, and many hundreds of thousands of persons whose whiteness did not protect them.

Our policies governing global migration and immigration have designated nearly 12 million people—again, the vast majority from the darker nations of the Global South—as “illegal” and stripped of most basic civic recognition. Thus, our immigration and criminal justice systems alone have produced nearly 15 million persons, equal to the entire population of New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, who in many cases have a legal status comparable to former slaves following immediately after the Civil War—persons who are not legally enslavable but who lack most recognized civic rights or recognition; persons who are in a “state of exception;” persons who are in the nation but they are not of the nation.

We’ve seen the victories for women’s rights and LGBT rights become subject to dramatic hierarchies—in which the modest protections won for reproductive authority, domestic violence protections, equal pay, and safeguards against discrimination become differentiated on the basis of race.

And many of the other pressing issues that bring us here today—militarization and ecological destruction, the crisis in health care, union protections, the right to food, shelter and work--implicitly draw on racial assumptions as their basic building blocks. That is, assumptions about racial superiority and inferiority serve as the necessary precondition to justify broad forms of human suffering and deprivation, even when experienced by those recognized as white. Race becomes the silent alibi to answer questions fundamental to a society structured in dominance: Who is us and who is them? Who is innocent and who is guilty? Whose shit stinks and whose does not?

So what does this have to do with racial justice in the Age of Obama? I want to suggest that we might place many of the debates that have been taking place about the first six months of the Obama administration in this context. That is, did last year’s dramatic campaign portend the rise of a movement on behalf of the Third Reconstruction—the eradication of race as a category of domination—or does it foreclose this possibility?

Second, and perhaps most importantly, in our work as activists, writers, advocates, and organizers in the Northwest, what do we have to contribute to dreams of a Third Reconstruction? How do our specific experiences in this region shape how we might define the aspirations of a Third Reconstruction? What analytic insights, what principles of solidarity, what stories of struggle might we contribute?

Regarding the connection between Obama and the possibility of a Third Reconstruction, I think some sobriety will serve us well. Imagine for a moment the worst case scenarios that were being discussed amidst Obama’s election last fall—the apocalyptic conditions that he was charged to prevent from occurring: Unemployment levels reaching 15-25%; a collapse in housing values that would leave most households with little net worth; chronic exposure to environmental toxins; public schools in disarray; a safety net no longer capable of meeting basic human needs. These are the baseline conditions in many Black communities in this country; they are the baseline conditions in many immigrant communities; they are the baseline conditions among many Native peoples and on many reservations. President Obama was not elected to address these conditions, but to keep them from spreading to a wider and whiter public; that is, to insulate a broad section of the middle and working class from experiencing a life of subordination and immiseration already familiar to many people in this country.

In addition, the fundamental narrative of Obama’s campaign was his promise to overcome deep-seated divisions that had long stymied the country. In this regard, references to Obama as a “post-racial” president do not refer to the elimination of racism or the realization of racial justice, but the promise that Obama will not “take sides” as it were when it comes to matters of race. I would argue that the uproar over Obama’s suggestion that an officer who arrests someone for disorderly conduct in his own home acted “stupidly” demonstrates this dynamic in clear terms—that at this moment, Obama is more constrained in explicitly addressing matters of racial justice and inequality than any president in recent memory. His election, by itself, may have little bearing on the possibility of a Third Reconstruction.

Let me quickly take up the second question—what role might we in the Northwest play in keeping alive the possibility of a Third Reconstruction? How might our organizing and political projects help to create more political space both for the Obama administration, but also state and local leaders, in acknowledging that there is little that is post-racial about our world?

These are the questions I’m hoping you can take up in the time we have left—I just want to offer three brief possibilities. First, it seems to me that many groups in the region have really led the way in challenging the idea that when we organize around particular issues—immigration, reproductive justice, LGBT issues, racial profiling, and so forth—that we are somehow being inherently divisive, because these issues are particular rather than general, and are therefore not issues of broad public concern. But in Oregon, groups like Basic Rights Oregon, CAUSA, the Rural Organizing Project and others have really demonstrated the interdependence of these issues, and that having groups with a wide range of issue expertise is a strength, not a weakness. Rather than thinking we should be seeking some kind of least common denominator politics, these groups have shown us that our organizing can grow stronger and more sophisticated by addressing, rather than ignoring, the diverse facets of people’s identities and politics.

Second, the Northwest we have something to contribute regarding the most effective ways for talking about and making claims for racial justice to predominantly white audiences. This doesn’t mean that we embrace a politics of appeasement—that we ensure that the mythical white median voter somehow approves of everything we do. But groups like the Partnership for Safety and Justice have done extremely important work in demonstrating how an issue like the criminal justice system can have dramatic racial impacts while also affecting many white people. I think this will be a critical contribution to a Third Reconstruction—that our fates are indeed linked—and that to struggle for racial justice is to broaden freedom dreams for the many, not the few.

There is finally the question of “tolerance.” To many people, calls for “tolerance” have come to define the meaning and substance of anti-racism and racial justice in our current moment—that if we simply learn to tolerate those who are different from ourselves, racial inequality will subside. Indeed, many cities and towns in the Northwest take great pride in their commitment to tolerance. But we know that tolerance is fully compatible with dramatic forms of racial inequality and power; to tolerate means to preserve the distinction between who is doing the tolerating and who is being tolerated; it is not a politics of justice. I think our experience in this region of moving people past discussions of tolerance on to matters of justice can be an important contribution.

So what else do we have to contribute to dreams of a Third Reconstruction? I want to say in closing that the purpose of keeping these dreams alive is not because we think this moment of reconstruction is around the corner, or that our next grant report or legislative lobbying session has to include some reference to this possibility. It is because in times like these, if we stop talking about freedom dreams, dreams of transformation and reconstruction, we risk losing them forever.

Thank you.

Daniel HoSang is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and Political Science at the University of Oregon in Eugene, and a longtime community organizer and trainer. He can be reached at dhosang(at)uoregon.edu.