Redefining Black Power in the Age of Obama, Part 1

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1. <v Speaker A>A brighter day will come. A brighter day will come.
2. <v Speaker B>November 4th, 2008. America elected its first African American president.
3. <v Speaker A>This was inevitable. He was chosen the moment he threw his hat in the ring. He was the chosen one.
4. <v Speaker C>We're here tonight because grandmother said that one day There would be a day just like this.
5. <v Speaker A>If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
6. <v Speaker B>Did the election of a black president set set into motion the process to create a post-racial America. I'm Joanne Griffith, and with the help of the Pacifica Radio Archives, we're going to look back on the people and the events that have come to represent the African American struggle for equal and civil rights in the United States of America.
7. <v Speaker C>But America is in a unique position.
8. <v Speaker D>She's the only country in history in a position actually to become involved in a bloodless revolution.
9. <v Speaker A>I believe that the revolution will be a revolution of dispossessed people in this country.
10. <v Speaker E>I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen, even in Montgomery, Alabama.
11. <v Speaker B>Back in 1995, The Pacifica Radio Archives took a step towards collating some of the voices of the civil rights movement in a special series called Defining Black Power. It includes Rosa Parks, James Baldwin, as he was known then, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, and many others. But as the story of Black America starts another chapter, the Pacifica Radio Archives has embarked on a new project in conjunction with City Lights Books to bring together the voices of the past with the minds of the present to discuss and debate a vision of the future.
12. <v Speaker C>Our fathers, our brothers, our friends who fought for freedom, our sisters, our mothers who died for us to be in this moment.
13. <v Speaker A>Stop and cherish this moment. Stop and cherish this time.
14. <v Speaker B>We'll listen in on roundtable discussions recorded across the Pacifica Radio Network in recent months tackling these very questions. Does a Black president change the political, the social, and the economic landscape for African Americans? What will happen to the years of anger and hurt? Will affirmative action still be necessary? And how can the election of President Obama bring an end to the violence that pervades communities of color across the United States? From KPFA in Berkeley, KPFK in Los Angeles, and WPFW in Washington, D.C., will hear how ministers and academics, activists and artists are redefining Black Power in the age of Obama.
15. <v Speaker C>My vote to you, if you can pull the country through, you're the man.
16. <v Speaker A>The time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit, to choose our better history, to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea passed on from generation to generation, the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.
17. <v Speaker B>President Barack Obama giving his inaugural speech on freezing cold day in January 2009, but for some, those words were the first painful stitches in the closing of a great wound, not just financial and economic, but in the very racial and cultural fabric of America. With a white mother and African father, Barack Obama didn't run on a race ticket, but the colour of his skin and the content of his character were dissected and inspected by all. But how did the presidential race and election impact on African Americans? The roundtables opened up with reflections on the presidential campaign.
18. <v Speaker F>Hello, my name is Margaret Prescott, host of Sojourner Truth on KPFK in Los Angeles, and for this very special roundtable on redefining Black power in the age of Obama, I'm joined by Frank Wilderson.
19. <v Speaker D>I'm on the faculty of the University of California, Irvine. I teach in African American Studies and the Drama PhD program, and the author of Incognigro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid.
20. <v Speaker A>Kehrumet James, community organizer with the Community Coalition, as well as the Coalition for Justice Against Police Murder.
21. <v Speaker F>Nana Gyamfi, director of human rights advocacy, activist, and community attorney working on cases which deal with civil and human rights. I tell people all the time that the campaign to me really was where you saw the underbelly of America, the things that America doesn't like to show the world in terms of race relations. And you got to see it looking at how people responded to Obama in the beginning. He was cute. It was a cute little idea. Isn't that adorable? Look at the black man. He went to Harvard. He thinks he can run for something. And, you know, no one really paid it a lot of attention. And I think that when it got to the point where it's they could see that no, this is something really real, all of the hoods came off. And folks really went after him with respect to issues of race in a way that they obviously didn't go after other people. It's almost as if, you know, the typical things that they require of you, repute Farrakhan, that's like the first thing that you've got to do. And then the other types of reflections people had on things that he said, his mannerisms, he was arrogant suddenly, he was too conceited. There were words that he used that, you know, black men aren't supposed to use in public because that indicates that they're angry, when in fact he would just be strident on a point. And the reaction, I think, came not just from white men but also from white women in response to this, to Hillary Clinton. Professor Wilderson, I mean, it really wasn't until then-candidate Obama won the Iowa caucus that Black folks got on board because before that, the majority of Black people were actually backing Hillary Clinton.
22. <v Speaker D>Yes, I come at this from a bit of an outsider's perspective because I must— I want to confess, I don't vote. Okay. Yeah, and I take the stance that encapsulated in what Malcolm X said when he said, "I'm not a Democrat or a Republican nor an American and have sense enough to know it." I was very disturbed by— I was saddened by the whole thing, by the notion that this multicultural form of unity that was steamrolling over Black critical political thought was gaining momentum. And I was actually— that's not to say that I was happy when Black people were supporting Hillary Clinton. I wouldn't support anyone in the Democratic Party. But what I'm suggesting is that what really turned me off and made me despondent was the way in which our enthusiasm got ahead of our capacity to actually think critically and think politically. And Obama showed me that he was willing to demobilize Black political organizing and to push to the side the radical critique of this country as a state that Black people had cultivated over the years in order to get to become president. And that's what he brought. And I was not— I was happy that we were enthused about politics. I was not happy that we were enthused about this.
23. <v Speaker F>Kurume, your reaction to Obama's candidacy, to the election campaign?
24. <v Speaker A>I think for me, I really was surprised to see that Obama made it as far as he did. Because looking at history, when you have a Black— a country that operates on such a virulent Black-white binary and that dichotomy, particularly between the Black man and the white woman, and if there's a position of power to be at stake, never have I really seen a black man win out over the white woman. That's, I can't really remember when that's possibly happened. I think the Klan might have had a big role to play in that historically. And so to see that a number of people were able to take home the idea that a black man could be in a leadership position over white people, I think was really surprising. However, what's also interesting is the level of distance that Obama had to put between who he was as a presidential candidate and who he was as a black man. If that was divorcing himself from close familial relations, uh, from his spiritual father, uh, if that was distancing himself from any kind of an issue that related to the masses of black people, there was a number of things that he wasn't a black presidential candidate. He was a candidate running for president who happened to be black, partly, possibly, maybe, but raised by his white grandparents in Hawaii. It was, it was, he represented almost the antithesis of what the model of a black elected official was from Jesse Jackson to Harold Washington to even Al Sharpton before him. And how, how much separate he had to be in order to barely be accepted. And then it took the economic downfall basically of the world economy for people to really think that Yeah, I think we can let him do it.
25. <v Speaker B>Here's KPFA host Amy Allison, first with Minister Christopher Muhammad.
26. <v Speaker G>Share with us how you felt on the day that Barack Obama became president. Did it mean a real difference in how you looked at yourself as an African American, how you thought of black people in this country?
27. <v Speaker H>Well, the thought, it was a mixed emotion, quite frankly. It was one of joy of seeing a black man, a young black man aspire and attain the large— the highest office in the land. But of course, the part that was a little saddening was to know the danger that Brother President Obama would face as a Black man in that kind of position, knowing that he would become a target and knowing that the element that is within this country that has historically been opposed to that kind of Black achievement achievement would rise up and begin to make him a point or a target of those who would seek to take his life. And so knowing the history of black people in America and knowing the kind of struggles that we've undergone, he becomes a Jackie Robinson, if you will, but Jackie Robinson is celebrated today, but he had to go through quite a bit and take quite a bit. And so my concern was looking at his family his little girls, his wife, and hoping that he was able to survive what was probably going to be something he would face as a result of being president.
28. <v Speaker G>And Dorieka Blackmon, I remember the reports of white supremacists who'd— were caught plotting against the life of Barack Obama. Was that the overriding emotion on Inauguration Day for you, fear for his safety?
29. <v Speaker I>No, I actually went to D.C. for the inauguration with my entire family, and in fact, we bought our tickets to go to the inauguration before he was elected, and everyone thought that we were crazy for doing so. But I will say that the candidacy and the election of Barack Obama, for me personally, represented sort of this melting away of a layer of cynicism that I've always carried about America. And not to say that I'm not absolutely righteously skeptical about America and its policies and its practices. Any student of history would have to be. But there was this sense of just certain things being impossible, given the racial dynamics of this country, that really was eroded and in a sense melted away for me by the election of Barack Obama. There really was, you know, clichés aside, a sense of hopefulness that I experienced that I had never experienced before. I will say, I'm sure we'll talk later more about this, that there's an absolute difference between the achievement of an individual and the achievement of a community. And there's nothing that changed because Barack Obama was elected for poor people in America. There's nothing that changed for Black people en masse in America just because this one Black man was elected. And I think the great divide between the civil rights generation and the hip-hop generation is this difference between the perception of success by individual achievement and the collective realization of the hip-hop generation that just because individuals achieve doesn't mean it changes what happens in our community.
30. <v Speaker B>You're listening to part 1 of a special program from the Pacifica Radio Archives called Redefining Black Power in the Age of Obama. I'm Joanne Griffith. Discussions about elections invariably lead to debates about voting and voting rights. Now, back in June, the United States Supreme Court left intact one of the central pillars of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Section 5 of the act allows federal oversight of election law changes in some places predominantly in the South. Writing for the majority in the 8-1 ruling, Chief Justice Roberts said, "We are now a very different nation. Whether conditions continue to justify such legislation is a difficult constitutional question we do not answer today." The provision is slated to remain in place for many years to come, but in the meantime, the specter of race and voting rights remains on the table. —even if the U.S. Supreme Court isn't willing or able to address it right now. WPFW's Gloria Minott looked into this with her guests Karen Spellman from the African Diaspora Heritage Trail Conference. Karen is also a former worker with the Students' Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. She also spoke with Janetta Rose Barris, author and columnist for the Washington Examiner.
31. <v Speaker J>And the first Negro beat me. He beat me until he was exalted. And after he beat, the state highway patrolman ordered the second Negro to take the blackjack. And in the time he was beating, I began to work my feet because that was a horrible experience. And the state highway patrolman ordered the first Negro that had beat to sit on my feet. While the second one beat, and I just began to scream where I couldn't control it. And then the white man got up and began to beat me in the head. I have a blood clot now in the artery to the left eye and a permanent kidney injury on the right side from that beating. These are the things that we go through in the state of Mississippi just trying to be treated like a human being. But still, this is called a part of America.
32. <v Speaker K>That was the voice of Fannie Lou Hamer. So Fannie Lou Hamer paid dearly for her involvement in her struggles against racism and getting the right to vote. So therefore, if the Voting Rights Act as we know it is altered, we have something to worry about, a lot to worry about, don't we?
33. <v Speaker G>I agree with that. And just as an aside, Fannie Lou Hamer is my absolute greatest model from the civil rights era. She is the woman I really admire so much. That said, I would add this though, that I think that when you contextualize the issue about the Voting Rights Act within the context only of the southern, southern civil rights movement and therefore a black thing, then we— what happens is that people don't understand the whole ramification of the potential impact. And the Voting Rights Act is not something just for black people, although when you look at the last 8 years during— from 2000 with the election of Bush and all the way in terms of contemporary time, you see the the certain disenfranchisement of Black people within the context. This is a political discussion. I don't see it, however, as just a racial discussion, okay? And I think this might have been something that Karen alluded to. This is about the way that this thing is being played out. It's about Republican politics and Democratic politics and how various methods have been used, mostly by Republicans, conservatives, to disenfranchise voters in general, especially those who are not likely to vote Republican. And so I think that what we have to look at is not just the impact on African Americans, but the impact on the entire American democracy. And when you have discrimination, you've got to be able to have ways of testing the potential impact of that discrimination. When do you get to a place where the law is not— is no longer relevant to the current times, and you've got to design a different remedy. And I think that's what Kennedy was trying to get to. Do we need a different remedy and not the remedy as described within the Voting Rights Act? The answer to that is yes.
34. <v Speaker K>Well, if we need a new remedy, okay, I asked the question and answered it. I'm going to come to Karen, but looking Looking at whatever the remedy might be, for example, affirmative action as we hear about so often and its erosion. I come from a country where affirmative action to me was a new thing because we all looked alike for the most part in Jamaica and we really didn't need the kind of remedies that were needed in this country. But once I came and learned that you had to have something in place to level the playing field for the others who necessarily— who are not necessarily within the confines of getting these opportunities. You have to have something. So I say affirmative action, yes, but it shouldn't be the end-all be-all or the answer to everything, but it has to be there. So going back to your question, if you remove this element of the Voting Rights Act, What do you put in its place and when? Because the somebody is going to be the unsuccessful— the unsuspecting pawn in this diabolical chess game. So what do we put in place and when? Do we dismantle this as we know it now and wait for something to come later?
35. <v Speaker E>What do we do? Yeah, I think the framers of the Voting Rights Act understood clearly when they wrote it in '65 that there had to be tests tests that were applied that would tell you, indicate just the very question that you asked, you know, when do you consider yourself having succeeded? When will no longer there be discrimination based on either literacy tests, which is in a lot of ways an educational filter that is illegal, or whether or not someone like Fannie Lou Hamer and people in the South are being so frightened by the power structure there that they can't vote and are are suffering just immense amount of violence and retribution if they do try to exercise their constitutional rights. So the Voting Rights Act has a lot of provisions in it. I'm not a lawyer and I haven't read it recently, but I know that things such as gerrymandering districts is something that they clearly are in looking out for, so that, you know, that in a large urban area that the district lines aren't aren't drawn so that Black people or people of color are constantly in the minority and unable to elect their own representatives. And at this point, I'm sorry to say that this still is the case in our post-racial society, but a lot of times people of color can only look to other people of color for the most part— and it's not always true— but for other peoples of color to represent their interests in the political process. So when you see that there is a certain number of elected officials that comes out of a pool where people, you know, people of color in the majority or at least equal, you know, position with others, that if there isn't a recognizable representation of those folks within the political power structure, then you know that something is still wrong.
36. <v Speaker B>While Fannie Lou Hamer and others fought for voting rights, younger voters used other methods to secure President Obama's success at the ballot box. Here's Karume James speaking to Margaret Prescod at KPFK in Los Angeles.
37. <v Speaker A>A lot of the young— the younger folks that I had a chance to interact with, a lot of folks that I know that are still in college or in high school were actively organizing around Obama's election. There were a number of, like for instance, at my old campus UCLA, There was the Bruins for Obama, and folks were just universally excited about getting folks out to vote and things like that. And I think for— there's a lot of particular aspects about his campaign that I think appeal to young people. First, the use of technology. I think this is probably the most technologically savvy generation in the history of human history. And so this was a candidate who masterfully utilized email, text messages, and a number of other communication mechanisms that most young people are very, very familiar and comfortable with and access on a regular basis. And so for him to be able to tap into that was honestly brilliant. And I think that that helped a lot of young people feel that they had a really serious access and connection to his campaign and were actually invested in it as well. I think also the level of the youth, the honestly the youthful energy that he as a person represented, I think was a stark contrast. Over the last 30 or so years, you've had, it's been old white men essentially that have dominated the political landscape. And so, for someone on that level to be, let's see, not 90, and not white, and not gray-haired, I think also had a level of something to do with that same kind of energy that young people have also. One thing I think that was just generally interesting about this whole process was how educational I think it was. That it gave an opportunity for a lot of people who had access to information, an ability to feel that they really understood and could take part in this process. And I think that's another thing about his skills as an organizer, was to be able to make such a participation available for folks, whether or not you could actually vote. So even if you couldn't vote, you could have— I remember during the Super Bowl, I went to a friend of mine's house, and a bunch of other younger folks that were there in their mid to late 20s, We finished watching the Super Bowl, he turns the TV off, and it says, well, we had our Super Bowl today, the Super Bowl was today, but our Super Bowl's on Super Tuesday in a couple of days, let's have a discussion about the presidential election that's coming up. And I'm amazed, I'm like, I've never seen anything like this happen where we finished watching the Super Bowl, you wanna have a political conversation, which I was fine with, but I was just really surprised because these aren't the folks that were radical revolutionaries, some of them were, but, him in particular.
38. <v Speaker B>To vote or not to vote is a very personal decision, but how do leaders within the Black community rise to the top? What compromises have they had to make? We'll hear the thoughts of the panelists from WPFW, KPFA in Berkeley, and KPFA K in Los Angeles on race and African American leadership in Part 2 of Redefining Black Power in the Age of Obama.
39. <v Speaker C>Brother, we can't quit until we get our shit up. Say it loud! I'm talking 'bout proud! Say it loud! I'm talking 'bout proud! One more time! Say it loud! I'm talking 'bout proud! I've worked on jobs with my feet and my hands. You know, all the work I did was for the other man. But now we demands a chance to do things for ourselves. We're tired of beating our head against the wall and working for someone else. Say it loud! I'm back in town! Say it loud! I'm back in town! Say it loud! I'm back in town! Fat Loud! I'm Black and proud! Say it loud! I'm Black and proud! Now, we demands a chance to do things for ourselves. We're tired of beating our heads against the wall and working for someone else. Look here, there's one more thing I got to say right here. Now, now, we're people, we're like the birds and the bees. We'd rather die on our feet Keep living on our knees. Say it loud! I'm talking about proud! Say it loud! I'm talking about proud! Say it loud! I'm talking about proud! Say it loud! I'm talking about proud! All right now! You know we can do the boogie. Now we can sing, we do the funky bottom. Now we do. Sometimes we dance, we sing and we talk. You know I jump back and do the camel walk. All right now. All right. All right now. Say it loud! I'm talking about proud! Say it loud! I'm talking about proud! Give me an "aye!" Say it loud! I'm talking about proud! Say it loud! I'm talking about proud! Now we demands a chance to do things for ourselves. We're tired of beating our heads against the wall and working for someone else. You know, we are people too. We're like the birds and the bees, but we'd rather die on our feet than keep living on our knees. Say it loud! I'm having a pow!
40. <v Speaker J>Say it loud!
41. <v Speaker C>I'm having a pow! Let me hear you! Say it loud! I'm having a pow! Say it loud! I'm having a pow! Oui, you're killing me. All right, all right, all right. Oui, ah no, oui, you're killing me. Oui, oui.