Serenity… refocus – seek joy – thrive

I’ll tell ya, I truly hate some of the language used by White “progressives” in relation to Obama.

I was going to write about something else this morning but then I made the mistake of reading the comments on a post by Tasha Fierce, on feministe. I am not actually going to link to the comment because the comment itself has little or no relation to Tasha’s post – about the “coming race war” rhetoric, which I want to write about later, and will link then – and I don’t want to derail the conversation because of an automatic trackback. Also, I am just using him as an example – this sort of language is all over the primarily White “progressive” blogosphere.

Anyway, the commenter says:

Obama hasn’t been a great president; he’s been disappointing in a lot of ways and indistinguishable from Bush on some very important issues. We still detain people without trial, we still torture, we’re still neck deep in two expensive wars with fuzzy mission parameters and increasing irrelevance, the economy is still weak, his handling of the BP situation was laughable, he’s broken every major campaign promise he made with regards to transparency and accountability, he promised health care reform and instead delivered watered down regulation and a huge corporate welfare system.

These are mostly legitimate, though arguable, points. Many people have  been disappointed with various actions (or inactions) of the Obama administration and that is only natural. I am possibly less disappointed than some because I was not so expectant – it was obvious from the beginning that, for all his soaring rhetoric, Obama was not, and likely will never be, some sort of radical leftist firebrand. I decided that I could live with a moderately left pragmatist as president because it was highly unlikely that we could elect anything but, at the moment, and that was that.

But anyway, more of the comment - he says something about how a reasoned challenge could be politically disastrous for Obama (I guess he means a challenge from reasonable Republicans? Not sure they exist, but that’s neither here nor there), and then writes:

Unfortunately, people like Beck, Brietbart, the Tea Party, and Palin manage to make even as poor a president as Obama look…well…really desirable. On the left you have a subpar president on the right you have a conversation that sounds like its moderated by David Duke and Charles Manson.

A subpar president. I wanted to make sure I understood that term so I looked it up – “Not measuring up to traditional standards of performance, value, or production.” So.

Of  course my mind winged its way back over the presidents we’ve had in just my lifetime (I was born in 1958) and I did a very quick comparison with Obama. The first president I was aware of was Kennedy, only because he was assassinated I think (I was four,) but then there was Johnson (“Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?”); Nixon – who, you see, was not a crook; Ford… well, you know the list. Land wars, covert wars, CIA scandals, funding anti-Communist groups, supporting vile governments, etc., etc.

Even given that all the commenters complaints were true in and of themselves, with no nuance, would that not make Obama at least on par with the “traditional standards of performance, value, or production” of past presidents? Why is his malfeasance, if that is what one believes it is, below the standard? Or why are his accomplishments, some historic by many measures if not by the measure of their adherence to an all-or-nothing political view, thought to not measure up to the standards of production or value or performance of past presidents who also may have compromised to get what they wanted – or were unable to get even a half of a loaf at all?

I came across another feminist site a couple of weeks ago, following a link from feministe. The blogger wrote a post about Obama and government, her disappointment with Obama and all that… but the first few paragraphs of the post are about South Africa, the disappointment that the ANC turned out to be, so on and so forth, and she uses this as a segue into her issues with Obama. I left a comment something to the effect that there was little difference between the set up of the blog post and the people carrying signs with Obama as a witch doctor. My comment remained unpublished, but the point still stands.

Words matter. Dog whistles matter. And make no mistake, these ARE dog whistles. Conscious and deliberate? I don’t know. Attacking minorities, including women, on what are their perceived (by mainstream or White society) weaknesses or stereotypes is so embedded in our culture that we often just do it instinctively. When you want to attack a Black person you imply (or state right out) that they are below the standard, not capable of governing or leading, easily led, weak (primarily targeted toward Black men), and all the rest. Just like you attack a woman by implying she is hysterical or weak (except that non-white woman are attacked as being strong, but in the wrong way) and all the other nonsense. It doesn’t really matter if it is deliberate, because if an unintentionally sent dog whistle reaches an even unintentionally receptive ear, the result is the same regardless of intent.

Should it be let go because it is happening on the left instead  of - or in addition to - the right? I don’t think so. I am a pessimistic optimist, so I fully believe that not too long from now (as the arc of history goes, that is) we’ll have a woman president. A gay or lesbian president. Any one of the other non-white, non-male, non-gender normative, non-Christian categories of U.S. Americans will be striding in to “Hail to the Chief” one day. Perhaps we should use this time of the “first” to practice how to react to someone “different” even when we disagree or dislike them intensely, in a ways that do not perpetuate stereotypes, do not replicate right-wing tropes, or the inequities of the past.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 24th, 2010 at 9:23 am and is filed under Barack Obama, culture and such, feminism, politics, stuff, womanism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.