Monday November 10th, 2008
On the Thursday after the election one of my 15 year-old African American male students still had Obama tattoos on his fingers. “Obama” on his index fingers, “Hope” on his middle fingers and “Change” on his pinkies. Like most of us in the black universe he had celebrated Obama’s victory on Tuesday night and emerged in the Wednesday morning sun blinking, buoyant and slightly incredulous at what America had wrought. Unlike generations of older black folk who never thought their grandkids would even see this day his generation is seemingly too young to grasp the incongruity of Obama’s election in a nation still steeped in Jim Crow justice. Yet during a discussion on racial profiling, when his fellow classmates nodded in solidarity about another indignity one of them had suffered by the police, he stated flatly that this is the way “they” see us and this is the way “they” will always see us. In the surreal aftermath of Obama’s victory the divide between the symbolic promise of his election and these young peoples’ realities are staggering. In September, a widely cited AOL poll found that blacks were viewed as “violent,” “lazy,” and less motivated to succeed than whites. And yet Obama’s victory in former red states captured by Bush in 2000 and 2004 demonstrated that his so-called crossover appeal and the moribund economy were enough to counter any lingering doubts among white undecided's about his ability to take the reins of power.
Obama’s victory has thrust us into a decidedly postmodern moment, one in which the global symbol of American imperial power will have a kinder gentler black face, while the face of mass incarceration remains young and black. It is a moment in which the corporate media’s fatuous postscripts on the redemptive racial progress of his presidency are dispatched by the largely all white and all male punditocracies of cable network news. And one where the downsizing of print media at big city papers like the L. A. Times has led to the termination of scores of journalists of color, rendering mainstream coverage of urban communities whiter than a grandmaster’s sheet.
Yet, somewhere after January 20th, in those “Rockwellian” hamlets that the McCain-Palin junta courted so feverishly, there will be little white children flipping TV channels in search of their Zack & Cody Hannah Montana fix who will come across the sight of the Obama daughters shuttling off to school or playing with their puppy. Over the next four years these images of wholesome Klieg light domesticity will become commonplace as whites begin to assimilate the idea of a nuclear black first family. How will this imagery transform the cultural messages that young whites receive about the value of black life from the dominant culture? And what will the mainstreaming of an Obama childhood do for white children accustomed to seeing images of white imperial power seamlessly juxtaposed with white movie action figures and romantic heroes? How will white children, fed on a sanitized diet of Cosby show reruns, Will Smith blockbusters and black sports figures with multi-million dollar shoe contracts negotiate the schizoid “black yet not black” disassociations that mainstream media has socialized them to make? And what implications will this have for an image industry based on the global export of whiteness as the normative standard of Americanness? As the euphoria over Obama’s victory fades it remains to be seen whether the new administration will make good on its debt to inner city America or trend further to the right in allegiance with the Democratic Party establishment. And for young people of color who remain enemies of the state in our public schools, streets and prisons having the audacity of hope will not be enough.
Sikivu Hutchinson is the editor of blackfemlens.org and a commentator for KPFK 90.7 FM
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