Letter from the Director

CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN. I still have my quarter-sized royal blue metal button sporting this memorable slogan from Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. As it turns out, the slogan lived on beyond the U. S. election cycle, for as Obama’s successful run was winding down, his mantra was wending its way to West Africa. There, it morphed into CHANGE WE NEED, the slogan of John Atta Mills, the opposition candidate in Ghana’s national elections. Although the Mills campaign may have tweaked Obama’s winning slogan at the back end—substituting “need” for “believe in”—it clung at the front end to CHANGE.

In the unlikely event that Ghanaian voters would miss the echoes of each slogan in the other, the Mills campaign reinforced the intended connection between the two campaigns in posters that featured head shots of Mills and Obama juxtaposed almost cheek to cheek. As Scot French notes in his essay in this third installment of our newsletter, “change, for better or for worse, is what a slim but decisive majority of Ghanaian voters endorsed,” many of them inspired by Obama’s historical and internationally celebrated victory.

If Mills and his supporters found inspiration in Obama, Obama and his supporters found inspiration everywhere—in Abraham Lincoln, in hip hop culture, but most notably, in Martin Luther King, whose relation to Obama has been popularly figured as that of past to present or, more popularly, as “dream” to “reality.” Obama’s liberal references throughout his campaign to some of King’s most memorable phrases (“the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice,” the “fierce urgency of now”) strongly encourage the popular King/Obama comparisons, but I fear that such comparisons are vastly overstated.

In the days following his election, few commentators missed the opportunity to note that Obama would be inaugurated the first African-American president of the United States on the very day after the nation celebrated Martin Luther King’s birthday. His hand on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible, Obama would take the oath of office, standing in King’s symbolic shadow, near the very hallowed ground where King delivered “I Have a Dream.” This coincidence of the calendar was, for some, long-awaited poetic justice, and for others, the veritable fulfillment of King’s legendary dream. In the two months since the inauguration, street vendors still hawk tee-shirts advertising this message: “We had a dream. Now it’s a reality.” But at this still intoxicating moment, dismal economic news notwithstanding, it is important to pause just long enough to ask: What was the dream? And how has it been realized in Obama’s election?

Champions of the King/Obama, dream/reality thesis suggest that King dreamed of a day when neither race nor creed nor color would pose an obstacle to opportunity. And thus, according to them, in achieving the highest political office in the land, Obama ascended the “mountaintop,” reached King’s prophesied “Promised Land,” and ushered in a post-racial moment,” emancipating this nation from its inglorious racial past. But this linear, genealogical, (and yes, gendered) narrative amounts not just to a poeticization of history, but also to a utopian fantasy. Dare I say, it constitutes the gossamer stuff of dreams? But more important, such triumphalist claims of post-racialism misunderstand King’s dream—profoundly—never more than when they depend for their support on appeals to King’s famous references to “character” and “color.”

In imagining a day when his “four little children [would] … live in a nation where they [would] not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” King was not dreaming of a “post-racial” society, whatever that might mean. Further, as Eric Sundquist asks pertinently in his recently-published book, King’s Dream, “[W]hat, in fact, is the content of one’s character, and in what way, if any, is it related to the color of one’s skin?” He continues, “The content of one’s character might depend in some circumstances … on the color of one’s skin.” King might have appreciated Sundquist’s pointed parsing of words read all too often (and easily) as evidence of King’s dream of a “color blind” or, to invoke the current parlance, “post-racial” society. For certain, King fully understood that such a society was decidedly unimaginable in August 1963 when he first uttered these words.

Commentators fond of highlighting King’s “dream,” as well as the many futuristic references which cropped up in his speeches, should not forget his equally frequent allusions to “the fierce urgency of now,” which phrase, you will recall, Obama also summoned throughout his campaign. It is perhaps useful to be reminded that King actually summoned the phrase in “I Have a Dream,” signaling that, while his eyes might well have been trained on a future prize—the day when race would not determine opportunity—they were trained no less keenly on the urgent socio-economic and political realities of American national life in the 1960s, which were strangling African-Americans: the “unspeakable horrors of police brutality,” the interrelated “evils” of “racism, poverty, militarism and materialism,” the deplorable state of public education, staggering rates of black male imprisonment, joblessness, and lowered life expectancy. Such intractable problems have gone on to strangle all racial minorities, not just African-Americans, and their persistence, even in the face of Obama’s election, gives the lie to any notion of a “post-racial” America.

On April 16-17, we at the Woodson Institute will be hosting our annual spring symposium, focused this year on but one of these persistent race-based problems: mass incarceration. This symposium, “The Problem of Punishment,” explores the subject from a range of perspectives: history, law, sociology, literature, political science, social work, and public policy. The scholarship emerging in these fields establishes compellingly that the criminal justice system represents a new racial cleavage in America. In stark contrast to the watershed political gains blacks made in the decades since the zenith of the civil rights movement, prison has become a normal part of life for one in three black men in their twenties. While African Americans constitute 12.4 percent of the population, they comprise more than half of all prison inmates. A mere two decades ago they comprised one-third of the inmate population. Such statistics make it plain: despite the hope for our national future that Obama’s election has inspired, much work remains to be done, particularly where race and race relations are concerned. In “A Testament of Hope,” one of King’s posthumous speeches, he advised his listeners that “A few token changes [could not] quell all the tempestuous yearnings of millions of disadvantaged black people.” To be sure, Obama’s election represents far more than a token change. Indeed, it signifies phenomenal change and, I concede, national progress, but I side with those who stop far short of viewing this election as marking the end of this nation’s racially troubled past. Even Obama voiced his worry that his candidacy might become for some a bid “to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap,” as he put the matter in “A More Perfect Union.” In that speech echoing King’s soaring rhetoric and righteous indignation, Obama also stressed that neither a “single election cycle” nor a “single candidacy” could vault this nation beyond its historic racial divisions. So as we continue to celebrate Obama’s victory his inauguration, which came on the heels of Martin Luther King’s birthday, let us neither exaggerate what this election means nor what it portends, for the fierce urgencies of now demand that we be dreamers and realists all at once.

Portions of this essay were published in the January 18, 2009 issue of the Fredericksburg Free Lance-Star.