From Sarah Churchwell:
Everywhere Obama is praised for "telling the truth about race" -- but the success of his "race speech" is incessantly measured along class lines, because Obama actually charted a course through the crisscrossing lines of race and class, a complex social web that he described with great delicacy, but never named.
What was most remarkable about this speech to my mind was not that Obama confronted race "head-on," but that he repeatedly, and correctly, called race "a distraction," on both sides of the color line, from class issues. Just as black anger often proved counter-productive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle-class squeeze -- a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans also widens the racial divide.
In one sense, Obama's point couldn't be clearer: Race is a distraction from class-based inequities. And if we dismiss working-class resentment as camouflaged racism, we will be distracted by the specter of race. So why has no one noticed that the much vaunted "race speech" is also a class speech?
The answer to that is very complicated, but its roots can be traced in large part to what Obama referred to as the nation's "original sin" of slavery. In order to tell the truth about race in the U.S., we must tell the truth about slavery: which is that slavery was not racially motivated; it was economically motivated, and justified by means of race.
Race was invented in order to rationalize slavery: If black people are inferior, they deserve enslavement (or so went the logic). Racism is an effect of slavery, not the other way around. Once slavery was abolished, not only did racism not disappear, neither did the economic system it upheld. Slavery was simply replaced by a new feudal system known as sharecropping. The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty -- and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.
It's harder to talk about class in America than it is to talk about race. It's not surprising that Churchwell writes for a paper in the UK. It's simply not a subject that an American journalist would touch if he wants to have a career in the mainstream media.
We think about class in cultural categories rather than in economic categories, and all the confusion follows from that. We don't see George Bush as a member of the power elite because he's a fundamentalist Christian and talks like a redneck. Many Americans deluded themselves into thinking that he was a regular guy that they could sit down and have a beer with: "He's alright. Not like that Al Gore fella, or Kerry."
Americans think that they have a classless society, but they are profoundly committed to class, even if they are not aware of it. Instead they call it the American Dream. This dream stipulates that any American or one of his children can become royalty, you know, like Donald Trump. So we can't critique class arrangements in America because to do so would require a critique of the American Dream. America isn't America if it doesn't give everybody the "opportunity" to become a millionaire, or now with inflation, a billionaire.
It's part of our dysfunctional mythology, a mythology that surreptitiously measures human worth primarily in economic terms and comes up with all kinds of excuses to justify it, just like the southerners justified slavery and Jim Crow. Most Americans would probably insist, good Christians that they are, that they don't measure human worth materialistically, but they still subscribe to the validity of the underlying economic-worth mythology. The contradictions are not something these Americans are prone to think about too much. It's just part of the cruder level of the Calvinist narrative they unconsciously absorbed in childhood.
Nevertheless, this is the big contradiction that shorts out the brain and makes it impossible to think clearly about our economic arrangements. It's a contradiction that makes cogent analysis seem un-American rather than just plain common sense. And this in turn structurally reinforces the elements in the American system that insure over time that the rich to get richer and those in the middle and at the bottom get poorer.
That this is happening since the so-called Reagan Revolution is obvious, and the evidence for it is powerful (start with the hardly radical Kevin Philipps if you need to be eased into it), but still we refuse to talk about it. It's too hard to think about; it requires understanding something about big picture. And even though it's the common experience so many Americans who are feeling the squeeze, It's not common sense to talk about it because it has been branded as leftist class warfare talk. That's what those leftists in the universities talk about, and Main Street does not see them as part of their tribe.
The Materialist American Dream is a mythology that structurally reinforces the power elite's strategy to divide and conquer, and so we all lose by default. And so the power elite during the Reagan/Bush period, most intensively since the Robber Baron era, have gradually imposed its agenda without a whimper of resistance from the Main Street citizenry who pay the price for it. And people with any sense wonder why the media gets all caught up in whether Obama is wearing his flag pin or whether his pastor or wife hates America? The power elite smile that Cheshire cat smile. It's just too easy to keep Americans distracted.
Churchwell ends her piece with these two paragraphs:
I am not saying that race per se doesn't exist, or isn't a problem in the U.S. On the contrary. But we will never solve the problem of race in America until we do exactly what Obama suggests: See it for the distraction it is. It was invented to deflect attention away from economic, legal and political inequalities. And the longer the Democrats ponder the complexities of identity politics, the more distracted they will become from the issues that are actually driving voters -- including their utter disillusionment with the current administration and its catastrophic policies.
The irony is that Obama's speech urging us not to be distracted by race has so far had quite the opposite effect. Obama now needs to confront with equal candor the lesson we were taught by that "first black president": It's the economy, stupid.
At some point, let us hope, Americans are going to learn how to separate out the cultural from the economic issues in the political sphere. Until they do so, things will remain hopelessly muddled.