The reason many of us have been critical of former United States President Barack Obama’s outrageous $400,000 (Dh1.47 million) speaking fee is that it robs us of a fantasy: That sooner or later, the first black president of the US was going to use his considerable powers, in or out of office, to help the economic ravages of the poor, who are disproportionately black.
That Obama’s project was or ever would be racial and economic justice was always a dream — and the sooner we let go of this and recognise Obama for who he is and what he does, the better we’ll all be.
Some people who disagree with me believe I am racist for not lauding Obama’s right to cash in on the presidency the same way the Clinton and Bush dynasties have. I will never deny the representational and psychological value of having had Obama in the Oval Office and his beautiful black family living in the White House. I always liked the guy immensely, even as I’ve criticised the politician.
But when it comes to the economics of systemic racism, I don’t think anyone should earn $400,000 an hour, and I certainly don’t worry about black people also earning that obscene sum. I’m much more concerned with factors of economic racism such as why white people have 12 times the wealth of black people; why black families would need to work 228 years to build the wealth of white families; why the median wealth of single black women is $5 and how the economic crash of 2008 was an apocalyptic theft of wealth from black homeowners to Wall Street, which was never prosecuted.
Enter president Obama. As Robert Jones, Jr, the writer and creator behind Son of Baldwin, noted, it’s significant that Obama’s first big talk was to a Wall Street gathering, considering it’s “the same Wall Street that he used our money to bail out and, in return, instead of lowering our credit interest rates and raising our savings interest rates, that same Wall Street raised our credit interest rates and lowered our saving interest rates for what was the definition of ungrateful”.
Like so many people, when I campaigned for Obama before I was a journalist in 2008, I wanted him to take on the specific and persistent racial inequalities generated by American capitalism. I had read Dreams of My Father and hoped, once in office, this thoughtful writer about race would directly address economic racism. But the 2009 bailout, and Obama’s subsequent failure to pursue any significant prosecutions related to it, should have taught us all that racial economic justice just wasn’t Obama’s main priority.
We hoped, maybe in a second term, he’d come out swinging on systemic racism. But when Mike Brown’s killing in Ferguson ignited a rebellion, Obama looked very uncomfortable when he had to pause his Martha’s Vineyard vacation to address the ugly truths of American policing, as he did again when Brown’s killer was not even indicted. He never visited St Louis after that.
Still, some of the Americans so desired their first black president to lead a Martin Luther King-like charge against the “giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism” that they hoped maybe, perhaps, after he left office, he’d really speak his mind. It was naive of me, but after I saw Obama speak in person about his My Brother’s Keeper initiative in New York, I fantasised that he’d spend his days out of office working with young black people in a similar way that Jimmy Carter builds houses for Habitat for Humanity.
Instead, it seems like Obama will spend his post-presidency hauling in money as the Clintons have. I don’t believe even under the guise of philanthropy that speaking to banks helps ameliorate economic racism; it certainly doesn’t help the Democrats electorally .
Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe in his heart, Obama’s project was racial and economic justice, even if the evidence suggests otherwise. However, that was indisputably never the project of the people he hired.
Rahm Emanuel left the Obama White House to become Mayor of Chicago, where he’s tried hard to bust the teacher’s unions and has presided over one of the most overtly racist police departments in the country. David Plouffe left for Uber, which is attacking the labour rights of taxi drivers the world over, while Robert Gibbs went to McDonald’s, which lobbies against an increase in the minimum wage. All of these things hurt the working poor, who are disproportionately non-white.
However, the most egregious post-Obama job may have gone to Eric Holder, who returned to the very same law firm he worked at before he became Attorney General. That firm represents several banks that stole black wealth via subprime loans that then crashed the market in 2008 — none of which were prosecuted by Holder or Obama.
There isn’t a day I don’t look at US President No 45 and wish 44 was still with us. Sometimes I think back to how my sister Sharron came home from Occidental College in the early 1980s. She was politicised about divesting from South Africa, because she’d heard one of her classmates, a young man with an Afro named “Barry”, give a rousing speech about it. My sister is now long passed, and “Barry” left the presidency just over a 100 days ago. But when left the Oval Office for the final time — leaving it in the tiny hands of the very racist who had demanded his birth certificate — I fantasised that he’d join us on the front lines of marches, battle for the salvation of Obamacare in ingenious ways, and maybe turn up at a Black Lives Matter event.
However, this was all a fantasy. The high-paid speeches were a sign that Obama’s post-presidency will, like his presidency was, be Democratic business as usual. And that means not radically altering the racial injustices of American economics.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
Steven W. Thrasher is writer-at-large for Guardian US.
