Seizing Difference or Having Difference Thrust Upon Him: President Obama and Democratic Strategy

For SC and NEP

I'm not an Obama hater, but this from Krugman was so startlingly true it made me laugh: "It looks from here as if the president’s idea of how to bargain is to start by negotiating with himself, making pre-emptive concessions, then pursue a second round of negotiation with the G.O.P., leading to further concessions."

Since the early 1990s (at least), the Democratic leadership has had some success in stealing Republican initiatives and making them their own. For President Clinton, it was welfare reform. Currently, President Obama seems to be trying to take deficit reduction and spending cuts from the Tea Party. There's no doubting the political advantage to stealing an issue that has galvanized your opposition. However, snatching the rug out from under your opponents and making it your cape is not the only strategy. In fact, I would say it is best as a short-term strategy and what the Dems lack is a long-term one. Hence, they lost their majority in the blink of an eye. (Let's not forget, the Democrats--fractured though they were by region--controlled the Congress from the 1950s to the Gingrich-led revolution of 1992. Why do Congressional majorities shift so frequently now?)

Think back to 2004. Remember all the excitement around Howard Dean before the infamous post-primary press conference where he somehow mixed "Yeah," "Yee-haw," and "Ow" in an over-inflated show of optimism? The excitement Dean generated came from the clear alternative he offered to the sitting President--one who, we should remember, won the office by the narrowest of margins (and that's a generous interpretation). As the Democrats struggled to find a military candidate to steal President Bush's war mantle, they eventually settled on John Kerry. Most of us recall him--with some help from late-night television--as a dry and boring senator. However, what I would say was most boring about him was not his demeanor but his political unoriginality. 

I remember watching one of the debates and hearing Kerry say, repeatedly "President Bush is right..." or "I agree with the President..." My question, at that point, was simple: Then why should I vote for you to replace him? It's difficult enough to unseat an incumbent; drawing only faint contrasts can't improve the odds. (Kindly correct me if a candidate has ever taken an office by vowing to do the same things as an opponent who is still living).

Kerry's copycat strategy had appeared before in 2000 when candidate Gore said that he supports the death penalty despite the fact that its application is notoriously  in thrall to racist fear, the capacity to buy an excellent defense team, and judicial caprice.  Krugman's point above helps us to see the unnecessary "pre-emptive concessions" made by politicians who seem to have taken themselves hostage. It makes me laugh, but then it makes me want to tear my hair out.

notes on black homophobia II

Part II: Cutting it Down to Size, or Waking up From an Imperialist Hangover


After one more week of  hedge-clearing, I think I will be able to talk about black homophobia as I have experienced it from within black spaces rather than as it has been portrayed from the outside.

This week, I go into what appear to be the assumptions that allow whites and Westerners to find the mote of homophobia in black and brown communities while ignoring the plank in their own. After all, majority white states and municipalities have blocked gay marriage and adoption and refused to grant human rights protections. And the slender recognition and protection for queers in the US has come (as did racial integration before it) by judicial intervention rather than by groundswell of voters. Nevertheless, on this very unstable foundation of enlightenment on the question of sexuality, has been erected a tower from which to espy minority homophobia. 

On this one matter, I am tentatively aligned with the "dirty laundry" police--those minoritized people who don't want certain topics discussed in front of white folks. It does appear to me that we need to have a serious internal conversation about the damage that homophobia does to all its targets. In cases when the perpetrators and targets are primarily within racially oppressed communities, we need not have that conversation publicly and confirm pernicious stories that Africans, Latin Americans, Muslims, and the black and brown underclasses of the West are the backward folks responsible for holding back gay rights on a national or global scale. 


After looking through some evidence of premature self-congratulation on the part of those straight white liberals who wish to isolate homophobia in black and brown spaces, I end by arguing that there is nothing inherently homophobic about nonwhite communities or religious faith. The task in this case, as in all social struggle, is to reshape relationships. The most effective appeals, as legal scholar Patricia Williams once wrote, tend to be to already-existing ideals. That is, you convince someone that they were already for what seems to be a frightening change. You appeal, that is, to a conservative desire for precedent, continuity, and stability. There is more than enough room within both Christian and black nationalist ideology to argue in favor of equality, compassion, respect, and mutuality among all persons. It's not that such claims would not be opposed; it's that one need not dismiss these cultural starting points as irredeemably corrupted. 


What follows is looooooong, so I've just encapsulated the full argument above. Next week, I plan a post called "Black Homophobia, or Class Warfare by Other Means." There I'll be thinking about the strange way that homophobia has been positioned as a working-class phenomenon and homosexuality as the playground of luxurious decadents. I think this will take us away from religion as a single variable and toward nationalism, which always has reproduction of a race at its core. It may also tell us a bit more about why white gay organizations don't see race as a "gay" issue and it remains a hard sell getting gayness seen as a "black" issue, like economics, health care, or police brutality.
In the meantime, one final attempt to clear some ground and get some things committed to e-paper.