Aretha vs. Beyonce: Please Don’t Let This Be the Future of Political Discourse

Melissa Harris-Lacewell is a genius and this article is a perfect example of why. In response to Tavis Smiley’s TV special Stand (a film about a bus trip with Smiley and his “boys” exploring the black male experience–trailer above) she dissects the myopic view of identity politics, black history and social change that they explore through the film and the lens through which they determine that Obama doesn’t talk about race enough.
She writes,

Its low production value, wandering narrative, flat history and self-important egoism did little to reveal the shortcomings of the Obama phenomenon. Instead, the piece exposed and embodied the contemporary crisis of the black public intellectual in the age of Obama.
The film and its participants (two of them my senior colleagues at Princeton University) appropriated the legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. to implicitly claim that they, not Obama, are the authentic representatives of the political interests of African-Americans. They used King’s images and speeches, gathered on the balcony where King was assassinated, and explicitly asserted their desire to play King to Obama’s LBJ, and Frederick Douglass to Obama’s Lincoln.

This question of authenticity in identity is a very frequent theme in argument between different types of feminists and specifically different generations of feminism. The older “watchdogs” are disappointed with what they see is a diluted brand and less than tough stance on issues by younger generations. The reality that material conditions have changed for women, people of color and other disenfranchised communities is not explored in depth, which has allowed for different types of political identifications, different types of movements.
She continues,

African-Americans are now citizens capable of running for office, holding officials accountable through democratic elections, publicly expressing divergent political preferences and, most importantly, engaging the full spectrum of American political issues, not only narrowly racial ones. The era of racial brokerage politics, when the voices of a few men stood in for the entire race, is now over. And thank goodness it is over. Black politics is growing up.
The men of “Stand” yearned for an imagined racial past. By their accounting, this racial past had better music, more charismatic leaders and a more-involved black church.
Their romanticism ignores the cultural contributions of contemporary black youth, forgets the dangerous limitations of charismatic leadership and revises the fraught, complicated relationship of black churches to struggles for racial equality. And these men ignored the democratizing effect of new media forms, which revolutionized the 2008 election.
Black people were not duped by some slick, media-generated candidate. African-Americans were co-authors of the Obama campaign. Through social networks, YouTube videos, political blogs and new-media echo chambers, black people were equal partners in shaping the candidate and his campaign. There was no need for the entrenched pundit class to tell black voters what to think or how to behave; they figured it out for themselves.
Still, there is plenty to criticize in the young Obama administration: the refusal to prosecute those implicated in the torture memos, civilian casualties caused by drone attacks, bank bailouts and inadequate defense of gay rights to name a few. But black communities are already engaged in these critiques and many others. Black local organizers, elected officials, bloggers, pundits and columnists have taken substantive, specific positions on a broad range of issues.

Read the whole article as she lays out perfectly the tension and oversight by public intellectuals, thinkers and journalists that are resistant to new modalities of social change. It is interesting this tension between recognizing that political discourse around race has changed as have lived conditions for people of color, yet we are not in a post racial space.
As I have written about before, this tension between recognizing progress and claiming wins in the service of people of color verse the post-racial stance (most liked by moderates, where radical positions on race are ignored or made fun of) is at the heart of the tension in current racial dialogue. We are at a crossroads where we have to recognize the nuanced ways that racism (including tokenism) plays out, even in liberal politics and then the strategic and nuanced ways we are winning, at least in the conversation, if not via material conditions.
Obviously, my ideal hope is when we start to have a conversation so nuance that we see the way homophobia and sexism are tied into racism, but like I said last week in talking about Sonia Sotomayor, it is a damned if you do, damned if you don’t type of situation (aka, I love you, I can’t touch you anymore.)