Angst of black Americans

It was the kind of insular, issue-driven, black-on-black debate that ordinarily doesn't attract the media spotlight, even on the slowest news day. But thanks to the unprecedented profile of US President Barack Obama, the most famous black person in modern history, this one got hot.

Last month, in an interview with Chris Hedges on Truthdig.com, Princeton professor Cornel West gave a scathing assessment of Obama's presidential performance so far. West let it rip with a kind of racially tinged dissatisfaction with Obama that's been brewing for months.

Specifically, he called the black president out for what he sees as his complicity with the agenda of white, moneyed elite. He called Obama a "black mascot" for Wall Street, and at one point accused him of not acting like a "free black man".

The outburst prompted a swift and contemptuous rebuttal from West's fellow Princeton scholar and Nation columnist Melissa Harris-Perry, who described West's complaints as chiefly personal, not political, sparked by such things as Obama not returning West's phone calls promptly or giving him choice tickets to the inauguration.

The real divide is not between West and Obama or West and Harris-Perry, it's between two age-old, unresolved strategies black leaders have adopted throughout history to ensure black survival in America: nationalism and assimilation.

Assimilation holds that blacks must claim their place in the mainstream to be successful; nationalism maintains that black success starts — and perhaps ends — with building and sustaining group unity.

West is correct about Obama's lack of urgency about black issues. Perry is correct about the depth of resistance to Obama himself. But the combination of these two truths is hard to grasp: Obama is both the man in charge and the black politician stymied by the system he oversees.

West and Harris-Perry are forcing into public consciousness a complex racial reality. After the collapse of the Black Panthers and black power in the 1970s, assimilation became the black success strategy by default.

Inequality

The result was that assimilation — more precisely, financial and educational success — has happened for some blacks, but is beyond the reach of a vast number of others.

Obama is a product of institutions. He is a fortunate middle-class son of the post-1960s, pro-integration era whose own success was due less to black empowerment than adherence to mainstream mores and values.

Black nationalism or any clear support of black unity or racial justice is an anathema to those values; it certainly would have doomed Obama politically.

The real problem with the assimilation-versus-nationalism battle is that it isn't really a battle anymore because black leaders, whatever philosophy they espouse these days, rarely put black interests first.

Harold Cruse warned about this in his classic 1967 book The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual. In Cruse's view, the crisis then was a direct result of the black intelligentsia repeatedly abdicating its responsibility to assess black social conditions and craft action agendas entirely unique to America's racial history.

As long as it deferred to integrationist approaches that didn't primarily have blacks' interests in mind, Cruse said, black people would always be reduced to reacting and protesting crises in the future. West's broadside of Obama is such a protest, though in it is a hope that a black man who is in a historic position to address the latest crisis will find it in his conscience to do so.

But putting aside the question of whether Obama is in a position to do much of anything, can principles of assimilation and black unity coexist at the top? Can they coexist at all?

The big unstated fear among many blacks, including West, is that Obama will turn out to be yet another disappointing black politician, one who readily articulates the needs of those at the bottom but doesn't ultimately address them. That's a crisis of another colour.

— Los Angeles Times

Erin Aubry Kaplan is a contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times opinion pages. Her collected essays will be published in October.