Barack the Black Quarterback

The characterization of Barack Obama as an “eloquent speaker” rings some old bells.

First, it reminds me of the classic and long-running debate: blacks can’t quarterback. They’re great at running the ball, and doing all the work in the trenches, and they may even be able to throw passes accurately. But when it comes to leading the team as quarterback or head coach, they just don’t have it. Fortunately in the past few years we’ve seen that myth well and truly exploded.

But there’s an even more disturbing hint of something insidious in the pigeon-holing of Barack Obama. It is the silent but clear assumption that he can talk but he can’t actually fight. He’s too young, too inexperienced, too marginal, too foreign, too culturally alien, to get the job done. As one very progressive website put it – in strikingly reactionary language – he doesn’t seem to have the aggressiveness to throw the jabs and punches needed to win the nomination and the presidency.

There is so much food for thought here that I have to put a new leaf or two in the table. But let me first say that the following comments, and anything else talked about here in the Redwood Forest, are offered in a spirit of love, fellowship, and constructive inquiry. If it sounds like harsh criticism, that is not what is intended. I'm just trying to look at our wounds a little more closely, and get some ideas about what we can do to heal ourselves.

America's political culture is in some ways rooted in traditions of conquest, the "terrible swift sword," the "bombs bursting in air," "from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli." Blacks are by definition lacking the violent power to conquer. They and the Native Americans are the quintessential conquered.

Typically, blacks are most acceptable to whites when they (the blacks) are manifestly disarmed, peaceful, impotent. Barack Obama seems attractive to some whites only so long as he has no teeth. But teeth are what the whites want in their president, nice long sharp fangs to deal with our enemies abroad and at home. But a black with fangs? That’s not the might of a conqueror but a nightmare. And a Catch-22.

Voters in the white community don’t want a leader to demonstrate a unifying ability, but a destructive ability. We want our leaders to have long, sharp fangs and claws, and powerful muscles. This resonates with the ancient traditions and glorification of European conquest, and with what Riane Eisler called the culture of the blade. The opposite, what Eisler calls the culture of the chalice, is focused on bringing life, unity in diversity, harmony with nature, partnership between women and men.

So there are two kinds of leadership, one based on the threat of violence with the resources to back it up; and another based on building unity, across racial, class, gender, political and national borders. Some candidates might seek to represent a vision of security in a world threatened by an ongoing cold war and terrorism, and some a vision of security in a world undergoing globalization and unification. Neither vision is necessarily opposed to the other; it’s just that each candidate has chosen to emphasize their differences by means of this distinction, and to criticize each other through them. And consequently the visions sometimes become exaggerated and distorted.