[A-List] Review – Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race

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http://amsjournal.wordpress.com/2012/05/08/book-review-not-even-past-barack-obama-and-the-burden-of-race/

Review – Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race
Posted by amsjeditor ⋅ May 8, 2012 ⋅

NOT EVEN PAST: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race. By Thomas J.
Sugrue. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2010.

For some observers, the meteoric rise of Barack Obama to the U.S.
presidency has confirmed the emergence of a postracial hybridity,
rendering obsolete the politics of racial grievance and identity. In
the more conservative iterations of this viewpoint, his election
vindicates laissez-faire color blindness, refuting the need for
race-specific remedies to historic discrimination. For others,
however, the racially coded and explicit denunciations of Obama since
his candidacy prove the structurally persistent power of race and
racism in the United States, particularly for people of African
descent. In his brief but compelling collection of thematic essays,
Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race, Thomas J. Sugrue
argues that understanding the conflicting perspectives on the Obama
phenomenon necessitates a critical reading of the past several decades
of U.S. social, cultural, intellectual and political history.
Specifically, this requires engaging the ongoing debates around “civil
rights, black power, race consciousness, and inequality” in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that shaped Obama’s
personal and intellectual identity, and his public persona as a
politician and policymaker (6).

Although the forty-fourth president often has been “coy and indirect”
on the subject of race, the author contends that it is “a topic that
has animated Obama’s entire adult life, from his explorations of black
power in college, to his work as a community organizer in Chicago, to
his career as a politician representing a mostly black district in the
Illinois State Senate” (3). Schooled by his encounters with the
“culture wars” at Harvard Law School, his sojourn through the
rough-and-tumble of Chicago politics and community organizing, and the
exigencies of appealing to grassroots constituents, middle-class
professionals and wealthy downtown developers, Obama developed an
adherence to interracial coalition building. He did this, moreover,
while pragmatically connecting his long-term ambitions to centrist,
pro-growth Democratic policies. Gravitating toward a sanitized history
of the Civil Rights Movement that reduced it to a southern-oriented
narrative of national redemption, unity, and American exceptionalism,
Obama also disingenuously “positioned himself as the heir to [Martin
Luther] King [Jr.], but also as part of a vanguard of black
politicians who jettisoned” racial appeals (15). From this standpoint,
Obama is a potent illustration of how “[t]he past can be used—and
reinterpreted—for purposes of image creation, political mobilization,
coalition building, and policymaking (54).

Along these lines, Obama’s formative experiences in Chicago also “laid
the groundwork for a racial and economic politics that fused community
empowerment, Chicago School sociology, Clintonite social policy, and a
religiously inflected ideal of racial uplift” (59). This foundation
enabled him to speak simultaneously to “the Democratic Party’s
intellectual Left; a bipartisan center that was completely overhauling
welfare policy; and a rising black middle class” whose members
regarded the black poor through the lens of respectability,
paternalism and “tough love” (59). This bundle of ideas had its most
eloquent expression in Obama’s pivotal “A More Perfect Union” speech.
Addressed in response to the controversy surrounding Obama’s pastor,
the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the future president’s comments not only
saved his campaign but also offered “the fullest glimpse into Obama’s
framework for thinking about the paradox of race in our time” (118).
While boldly acknowledging discrimination against African Americans,
he framed racism mainly in the past tense and gave moral equivalence
to white Americans’ resentment of black racial grievances. In a
similarly paradoxical manner, Obama’s speech celebrated hybridity
while also countenancing the salience of racial difference. What these
contradictory sets of beliefs augur for his presidential legacy
remains largely open-ended, Sugrue concludes; yet, meaningful policy
changes directed toward racial and economic inequality will depend on
a creative “synergy between grassroots activism and political
leadership” (136). For grassroots activists, this synergy includes
assailing the idea of inevitable change—a quality that Obama has
self-consciously sought to embody.

Skillfully argued and engagingly written, Not Even Past does a careful
job of neither romanticizing its subject nor painting the president as
a callow opportunist. The author’s writing style, coupled with his
synthesis of a broad array of scholarship, make the book suitable for
survey-level African American Studies and American Studies courses,
and general audiences. Sugrue, who has written on post-World War II
black freedom struggles in the North, is clearly sympathetic to the
demands for “Black Power” articulated in the late 1960s and early
1970s. Still, at times he conflates the stridency of Black Power
advocates with a lack of political patience, skill, or ability to
build complex coalitions and mobilize diverse onstituencies. The text
might have benefited from a greater unpacking of Black Power, whose
simultaneous strength and weakness were the multiple voices of its
proponents. And while the author is mindful of the demographic and
social transformations produced by post-1965 immigration, he has
surprisingly little to say about the growing impact of African and
Caribbean immigrants on the evolving character of “black” identity in
the United States in the early twenty-first century. This intra-racial
reality is as much a part of Obama’s enigmatic appeal as is his
personification of the destabilization of categories among racial
groups. Nonetheless, Sugrue has contributed a timely rumination on
history for contemporary readers, and an important rough draft of the
history yet to be written.

Clarence Lang, University of Kansas