This article about ethnic issues caught my eye, and I'd like to discuss it with other folks who are interested in such things:
Black Americans react to the Obamas’ success story
The traditional family – mom, dad and 2.3 kids – is becoming a dated notion in an America with more single parents, unwed mothers and blended families.The trends are magnified for African Americans, according to the latest U.S. Census data.
More than two-thirds of African American babies are born to unwed mothers compared to more than a third for all races. Twice as many black women – almost 4 in 10 – have never been married compared with white women.
Enter President-elect Barack Obama and his perfect nuclear family. Two Ivy League-educated adults, supportive of each other and their two children. Some African Americans say the Obamas are an unrealistic ideal, a midcentury throwback, a false standard.
Others say they are an inspirational example of what the African American family can be – even a post-racial example of the new 21st-century American family.
I'm firmly of the "inspirational example" opinion, and I don't limit that to black folks. I think Barack Obama is a conspicuously decent person with a conspicuously healthy family -- not perfect, but about as good as it's going to get in real-world conditions -- whose accomplishments should inspire
everyone. I'm bothered by the continuing fragmentation of families; I don't think a nation can be cohesive if its families and communities are not, any more than a body can hold together with its organs falling apart.
But what really bugs me about the "unrealistic ideal" is that I recognize the pattern. It's a low-class survival technique, and it's not wholly without grounds, but it comes at a terrible price. In a group with little power, there's a tendency to drag down anyone whose performance rises above a certain minimal level. Not an average level -- it's below that, it has to be below so that everyone can meet it. The reasoning is that a) such performance benefits the overlords more than the oppressed, and b) it puts the rest of the oppressed in danger of being driven harder for no extra recompense. This is often expressed in sayings like "the tallest daisy gets cut."
The drawback to this is that it punishes and destroys talent. It's like a mental form of foot-binding, crippling the intellect and the imagination and the expectation. Once you've learned it, you go on hurting yourself and others that way indefinitely; the overlords no longer have to exert the effort of lopping off every tall daisy, because the short daisies will do it for them. If the black community
accepts that the baseline is poor single mothers and men in prison, that's all they'll ever get. And those were the people who stayed on the plantations until someone told them about Emancipation.
The people in the first camp were the ones, black and white, who built the Underground Railroad and risked their lives for the dream of freedom. Some of them died for it. They believed it was
worth dying for. Some even took small children on that perilous, precious trail north because they would rather see those children die than live as slaves. This is the camp that said, "Rosa sat so Martin could march; Martin marched so Barack could run; Barack is running so our children can fly."
Of course, it's not that simple; real life is messy and there are always many reasons to do anything, many paradigms in play. I find the tall-daisy argument especially troublesome because it stifles potential and adaptation. If you believe that your crummy lot in life is all you deserve, and that hoping for more is "unrealistic," then things will never get better. If you believe that you deserve better, and that your misfortune is circumstantial, then things might get better. Can you get killed for sticking your head up? Sure. But you can also get killed with your head down, shot through a wall because of someone else's fool argument. It's up to each individual to weigh the risks and benefits for themselves; statistically speaking, the majority tend to choose the head-down approach until things get so bad that explosive revolution results, as history has demonstrated many times.
This loops back to some earlier discussions about tokenism vs. representation (if there's only one with no real influence, that's tokenism; if there's one with power who opens the way for more, that's representation) and internal oppression. I'm also recalling an old essay about how to indoctrinate slaves so they'd tame each other, but I couldn't find the darn thing to reference it here. Furthermore, this reminds me of the bad advice women used to get about rape, that you shouldn't fight because you'll just get hurt worse.
The core of oppression is this: it works because a majority of people
let it work. When the overall response shifts, the whole situation shifts, and what was once acceptable becomes unacceptable. As an individual, you may not be able to stop oppression -- but you can by gods make the jerks
work for it instead of giving it to them for free.
That's a key reason why I admire Barack Obama: he
believes in potential, everyone's potential, and he's demonstrated the skill to manifest that potential into reality. People may call him a house nigger, but look what House he's headed for now!
So, which of the two approaches -- "Obama's family is an inspiration" or "Obama's family is an unrealistic ideal" -- do you favor? Or do you see some other totally different model in play here? What makes you think that way?
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