The Roots of Obama's Rage (19 page)
Read The Roots of Obama's Rage Online
Authors: Dinesh D'Souza
Racism, Fanon argued, was a characteristic feature of colonialism. Not that colonial systems required it; but typically they found it a convenient way to rationalize why the occupiers were on top and the rest were at the bottom. Racism enabled the bad guys to feel good about being bad; to enjoy a sense of entitlement to their violent and exploitative behavior. Recall that this analysis of racism is very similar to the one we derived from Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness
. Even so, Fanon recognized that “racism . . . is only one element of a vaster whole: that of the systematized oppression of a people.”
Heart of Darkness
. Even so, Fanon recognized that “racism . . . is only one element of a vaster whole: that of the systematized oppression of a people.”
Fanon also insisted that colonialism could not be reformed; it had to be totally overturned and eliminated. Fanon wrote that “every Frenchman in Algeria is at the present time an enemy soldier,” even if that Frenchman did not work for the colonial authorities and considered himself uninvolved in colonial oppression. In other words, you are either on the side of oppression or on the side of liberation; there is no middle ground. This is a war to the finish: one side must win and the other must lose. “The struggle is at once total and absolute.... Liberation is the total destruction of the colonial system.”
Fanon’s strategy for eliminating colonialism was violence. “The native is ready for violence at all times,” Fanon wrote. Only through a “murderous and decisive struggle” could colonialism be overthrown. Fanon said that “colonized man is an envious man.” He wants to destroy the colonial system, or to wring the neocolonialism out of every institution of society. In Fanon’s view, the hidden desire of the colonized is to replicate the crimes of the colonizer. “The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor.”
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Is this also Obama’s dream? I think it is, and this helps to explain Obama’s friendship and association with the radical activist Bill Ayers. As a member of the Weather Underground, Ayers participated in the bombings of the New York City Police Headquarters in 1970, the Capitol building in 1971, and the Pentagon in 1972. Ayers, now a professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, held a fundraiser for Obama at his apartment in 1995 when Obama made his first run for the Illinois State Senate. The two formed an acquaintance, which deepened into a friendship when they served jointly on the board of an educational foundation called the Woods Fund. Ayers and Obama also worked together for six years, from 1995 to 2001, on a multimillion dollar educational grant program called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge.
During the presidential campaign, Obama’s media spokesmen pooh-poohed the idea that Obama bore any responsibility for what Ayers did in the early 1970s when Obama was only a child. Yet the issue wasn’t what Ayers did then, but how he feels about it now. A few years ago, Ayers told the
New York Times
that “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Asked if he might do it again, he answered, “I don’t want to discount the possibility.”
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Even so, Obama counted Ayers a supporter and a friend. Surely this is not because Obama himself would contemplate bombing the Pentagon! That would be quite a first for a U.S. president. So what’s going on here?
New York Times
that “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” Asked if he might do it again, he answered, “I don’t want to discount the possibility.”
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Even so, Obama counted Ayers a supporter and a friend. Surely this is not because Obama himself would contemplate bombing the Pentagon! That would be quite a first for a U.S. president. So what’s going on here?
In a letter to the
Times
, Ayers said that his actions must be understood in the context of the Vietnam War. The story of his activism, he said, “begins literally in the shadow of Hiroshima and comes of age in the killing fields of Southeast Asia.” Read Ayers’s memoir
Fugitive Days
, and the anti-colonial themes jump out at you. Of the Weathermen, Ayers writes, “We had been insistent in our anti-Americanism, our opposition to a national story stained with conquest and slavery and attempted genocide.” Vietnam, Ayers writes, was the cause that spurred him to action. “What kind of a system is it that allows the U.S. to seize the destinies of the Vietnamese people?”
Times
, Ayers said that his actions must be understood in the context of the Vietnam War. The story of his activism, he said, “begins literally in the shadow of Hiroshima and comes of age in the killing fields of Southeast Asia.” Read Ayers’s memoir
Fugitive Days
, and the anti-colonial themes jump out at you. Of the Weathermen, Ayers writes, “We had been insistent in our anti-Americanism, our opposition to a national story stained with conquest and slavery and attempted genocide.” Vietnam, Ayers writes, was the cause that spurred him to action. “What kind of a system is it that allows the U.S. to seize the destinies of the Vietnamese people?”
Today we think of the Vietnam War as America’s attempt to stop communism. But that’s not how Ho Chi Minh saw it, and that’s not how Bill Ayers saw it either. For Ho and Bill, this was an anti-colonial struggle. Vietnam was a French colony, and when the French encountered guerilla resistance in that country, they solicited and received American aid. In 1954, in the wake of the disaster at Dien Bien Phu, the French pulled out, and the Americans stepped in to fill the gap. Ayers accurately notes that Americans tended to view Vietnam as a domino: “If Vietnam falls . . . all of Indochina will follow in short order.” Ayers accepted the logic of dominoes but read it in the other direction. If America is permitted to impose neocolonialism on Vietnam, soon it will take it upon itself to occupy the rest of Southeast Asia, and who knows what after that?
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Ayers believed he was using violence in a noble cause, the cause of halting American neocolonialism in Vietnam.
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Ayers believed he was using violence in a noble cause, the cause of halting American neocolonialism in Vietnam.
With this background information, it is easy to see why Obama should admire Ayers—they are fellow anti-colonial warriors—even if Obama himself eschews violence. Obama, of course, made the same intellectual compromise with Fanon, embracing his anti-colonial cause while rejecting his call to violence. Fanon advocated violence on the grounds that oppressors never concede power without a fight. He was all in favor of the oppressed exchanging places with the oppressor and giving the bad guys a taste of their own medicine. At the same time, Fanon insisted that the colonized should not imitate the racism or even the race-consciousness of the oppressor. In Fanon’s view, colonialism was rooted in racism, but anti-colonialism needed to transcend tribal and racial boundaries.
Fanon’s reason for rejecting race and color-consciousness was eminently practical. Since the colonizers had incomparably greater resources and also the best weapons, the colonized needed massive numbers to make up for what they lacked in resources and firepower. Fanon called for the unity of the oppressed: he sought initially to unite the various African tribes and nationalities into a joint African resistance. Ultimately he envisioned the possibility of the black, brown, and yellow races coming together in a global front against white European supremacy. Fanon even saw the possibility of a few white European sympathizers who might join the liberationist cause. In Fanon’s case the most prominent was the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote the introduction to Fanon’s
The Wretched of the Earth
.
The Wretched of the Earth
.
Obama embraced Fanon’s call for a transracial and even nonracial politics of resistance. But he seems to have seen a possibility that Fanon missed, or perhaps one that was not available in Fanon’s time but became available in Obama’s. This was the possibility that went beyond forming a coalition of the oppressed. It involved winning a substantial number—perhaps a majority—of whites over to the cause of anti-colonial politics. If this could be done, it would eliminate the need for violence. Indeed it would be a feat of political diplomacy, to be able to recruit your enemy to participate in his own overthrow!
Still, how to do this? Curiously, Obama may have found the answer in Fanon, right in the very same passages where Obama pirated his
Life
magazine story. In
Black Skin, White Masks
, Fanon spoke of laboratories that were searching for a “denegrification” serum, a serum that would turn black people white. He also wrote of West Indian black women who were determined to marry a white man with blue eyes, in part so they could have lighter children. Fanon called this phenomenon “lactification.”
Life
magazine story. In
Black Skin, White Masks
, Fanon spoke of laboratories that were searching for a “denegrification” serum, a serum that would turn black people white. He also wrote of West Indian black women who were determined to marry a white man with blue eyes, in part so they could have lighter children. Fanon called this phenomenon “lactification.”
The term, which comes from milk, means whitening. Fanon’s point wasn’t merely that blacks sought greater social prestige by being associated with a lighter skin color; rather, it was that lactification was a metaphor for the way in which colonized people deny their own heritage and seek to copy the ways of their oppressors. Fanon mocked the Africans and West Indians who learned without irony French poems about “our ancestors, the Gauls.” For Fanon, lactification doesn’t just refer to looking white; it also refers to acting white, to people with “black skin” who seek to put on “white masks.” As Fanon put it, “The more the colonized has assimilated the cultural values of the metropolis, the more he will have escaped the bush. The more he rejects his blackness and the bush, the whiter he will become.”
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Here Obama seems to have had an original idea that turned Fanon on his head. Obama’s idea was: what’s wrong with putting on the white mask? Let’s clarify the difficulty facing Obama. In the last chapter we saw how Obama benefited from Saul Alinsky’s transracial strategy to assemble an effective coalition. Alinsky’s goal was for the activist to reach America’s white middle class because, as he put it, “that is where the power is.” Alinsky had nothing but contempt for left-wing activists who treated the white middle class as a bunch of square, sexually uptight, gun-toting, small-minded racists. Yes, Alinsky wrote, the middle class is mighty screwed up. But it has become that way because it’s desperate; its economic condition is deteriorating and so people turn to guns and religion to give them consolation. (Sound familiar?)
Alinsky advocated that a successful activist must not disdain the middle class but rather join it. Certainly he wasn’t calling for an embrace of the provincial values of the middle class. Rather, he urged that activists adopt the style and attitude of the middle class. If the middle class is “square,” then be square. Don’t wear the black leather jacket and the hippie bandana; wear a suit and tie. Don’t come across as an angry misfit; come across as a nice young man who is only upset because of manifest injustice. Smile a lot; smiles are a great way to disguise rage and contempt. In this way, Alinsky argued, the activist could build a rapport with ordinary Americans and mobilize them on behalf of radical causes.
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Obama’s genius was to figure out a simple but effective way to achieve both Fanon’s goal of advancing the anti-colonial vision and also Alinsky’s goal to win over mainstream America. Obama knew from his experience at Columbia and at Harvard that there was an immense fund of white racist shame that had given rise to an equally large fund of white racial guilt. This guilt was ready to be tapped, and in Chicago Obama saw how it was being tapped by Jesse Jackson and his fellow shakedown artists. But what if it could be tapped in a much bigger and more consequential way?
Author Shelby Steele, one of America’s most insightful commentators on race relations, notes that whites have been looking for some time for a black leader who has credibility within the black community and yet can offer whites racial absolution. This should not be taken too cynically. Many whites genuinely espouse an idealism that seeks to move beyond race, and they recognize that it’s going to take a black spokesman to make this case on a national level and help to get us there. Steele notes bluntly that this idealism cannot be divorced from a powerful sense of white racial guilt. We have to get beyond race because America’s past racial history has become such an embarrassment.
Now the black leader that whites are looking for does not actually have to issue indulgences in the manner of the medieval papacy; rather, by his words and deeds, he can signal to white America that whites are no longer on the hook for past racism. In Steele’s view, whites have been eagerly, hungrily awaiting the black leader who would give them a chance, through their support of his leadership, not merely to say to others but to feel, in their innermost being, “Whew, I am not a racist.” Steele speculated that whites may be willing to pay heavily both in money and in political support if such a candidate appeared on the horizon. He would truly be the anointed one.
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Obama’s ingenuity was to recognize that this unique opportunity required a black man of a kind not seen in American politics before. Such a man would have to look black but act white. His general demeanor would resemble that of Colin Powell far more than that of Al Sharpton. Ideally such a man would have close-cropped hair, a Midwestern accent, and dress in preppie fashion. He would speak in a measured tone—no angry black man routines—and project mainstream interests and mainstream values. Ideally he would locate himself in the middle of the political spectrum, equidistant from extremes, a kind of unifier and healer. Yes, this was the formula. Obama realized that he might be able to reach the political heights by being the first black man in American politics who really knows how to play the white man.
Call it the triumph of lactification. Finally Obama had hit upon a technique to achieve the kind of persuasive success that as a 10-year-old boy he had witnessed his father demonstrate in his classroom. The appeal of Obama senior was the appeal of the strange, wise African who was embroiled in some of the most exciting anti-colonial struggles of the day. The son, however, could not use the same self-presentation; he was operating in a very different milieu and would have to market himself in a different manner. He needed a different sales pitch and now he had found one. He would become Black America’s great historical representative, perhaps even the first black president of the United States. Paradoxically he would achieve that status by lactification, by social and cultural whitening, by becoming White America’s All-Time Favorite Black Man.
Obama’s lactification strategy had two elements. The first is to avoid as much as possible the race issue, to project a nonracial image. Obama has in general been very good at this. The only time he slipped was about six months into his presidency, when he intervened in the arrest of the Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates. The police were responding to reports of a break-in. As it turned out, Gates was trying to get into his own house, but rather than cooperate with the authorities, he became abusive and told the arresting officer, “This is what happens to black men in America,” and “you don’t know who you’re messing with.” Asked about the incident, Obama commented publicly that “the Cambridge police acted stupidly.” Boldly, the police department fired back at Obama, demanding that he familiarize himself with the facts. Recognizing that public support was mobilizing behind the cops, Obama quickly backtracked, taking back his criticism of the police department and inviting both Gates and the officer to the White House for an amicable reconciliation.
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