Liberals simply don't take racism seriously enough.
No, I DON'T upbraid them for failing to attack the overt Neanderthal racism of
the wingnut right; here liberals are always ready--and rightly so--to jump into
the breach. What I mean is the subtle but highly sinister effects a long
history of racism can have in a nation--and not just on the target race, but on
the lives of that nation's citizens, of any race whatever.
Before addressing my central topic--our picking the
worst possible moment to experiment with a first black president--I need to
illustrate my point about racism's sinister effects with an example. Liberals
lack something in their basic makeup, perhaps best described as a "sense of
original sin" or a "tragic sense of history," that cripples their imaginations
for truly appreciating the subtle harm--I mean primarily the psychological harm--racism
does. While some individuals show incredible, heroic resilience and emerge as
solid citizens from the worst mistreatment, the simple fact is that being
mistreated does most people lasting psychological harm. Just ask any victims of
bullying. More pertinent here is the perfectly realistic cynicism afflicting
large numbers of blacks even today--a cynicism that, however rightly grounded in
historical (and continuing) injustice, is itself a cancer eating away at work
ethic, political participation, and individual aspiration. And a cancer eating
away at society as a whole, for any worthwhile society depends on widespread
(and interracial) trust.
Yet many liberals will shriek "racism" at the mere
suggestion black communities carry lasting psychological scars from their
tragic history. And many conservatives, even more reprehensibly, readily see
the crippling scars and simply blame the victims for having them. Only a tragic
sense of human community--a sense that we're ALL to blame and need to reform--can
move us beyond our racism-induced paralysis.
Lacking a tragic, psychologically astute sense of
history, liberals were too ready to embrace the election of Barack Obama, our
first black president, as a cloudless feel-good story and Obama himself as the
stuff hagiographies are made of. But while politics is certainly hardball, it
sure as hell ain't baseball, and perhaps too many liberals applied Jackie
Robinson's stunning, courageous success in smashing the pro sports color
barrier as likely model for Obama's presidency. Wrongo!--and a greater degree of
wrongo is hard to imagine.
Of course, the almost incalculable stake the whole
world has in just and sagacious policy-making by a U.S. president is the
CRUCIAL difference. Had Jackie Robinson proved a Bush-league flop (couldn't resist
the big-B pun!), the just cause of black athletes and the quality of
professional sports would have been set back a few years, and overall racism
perhaps mildly reinforced, but society would have remained substantially
unchanged. While a hideously low Obama batting average--what we're in fact
seeing--has grievous (and worldwide) consequences.
Although the Jackie Robinson baseball analogy has clear
limits, based on the gravity of what's at stake, I think it can, if properly
reworked, offer us some striking insight. Instead of imagining Jackie Robinson
as the first black player, imagine him instead as the first black commissioner.
And imagine this at a time when pro-baseball officialdom is totally controlled
by whites, and when baseball has just been rocked by a scandal--let's say, the
1919 Black Sox game-fixing scandal on steroids--that threatens the very survival
of pro baseball as a sport.
For those who didn't share my boyhood fetish for baseball
history (my playing skill never transcended a nasty Whiffle ball sinker), the
Black Sox scandal involved at least eight players on the American League
champion Chicago White Sox who conspired with professional gamblers to lose the
1919 World Series, partly for money and partly for revenge on their reputed
skinflint team owner. But let's now imagine an update of this scandal, where games
"fixed" for gambling purposes don't occur just in the World Series but are a
staple of regular-season play. And when I say the 1919 scandal is "on steroids,"
let's also imagine that certain favored players are selectively allowed by
baseball officials to indulge in steroid use, while others are rigorously
fined, suspended, or banned; let's imagine also that the shady betting and
game-fixing involves not just a few American mobsters, but international crime
rings ultimately connected to top oligarchs in Russia, India, China, and Japan.
Finally, let's imagine that more than a whiff of this scandal has reached the
American baseball public, and that many ardent fans, pining for the lost
integrity of their beloved American pastime, are themselves bordering on "roid
rage."
If we're allowed to play fast-and-loose with
historical timing, it's easy to imagine the role Jackie Robinson, as first
black commissioner of baseball, might face in such a scandal. If the scandal
had been associated with exclusively white commissioners, it's easy to imagine
fans, for the sake both of uprooting historical racism and bringing a fresh,
uncorrupt, trusted face to baseball's top echelons, clamoring for Jackie
Robinson as commissioner. And of course, Robinson's heroic, groundbreaking role
as a player would have made him the perfect symbolic choice. And baseball
management's top echelon, in the throes of their sport-shaking scandal, "grok"
the value of Robinson's symbolic stature--AND his executive inexperience. So
they're willing to rubber-stamp fan-dom's popular pick--on certain terms.
If Robinson triumphantly withstood daunting
pressures as a color-barrier-bursting player, he would have faced utterly
withering ones, in such circumstances, as neophyte black commissioner. For,
unlike the sharp baseball skills, finely honed, he brought to his role as
player, he would have little in his personal skill-set quite relevant to the
commissioner's role. Moreover, while it had long since been understood blacks
could hold their own and then some with whites as athletes, their inferiority
to whites in the CEREBRAL skills needed for executive roles had long endured as
a racist meme. Robinson would have felt potent pressure to seek advice from the
corrupt but experienced white execs around him, and they also--whatever his
allegiance to baseball fans--would have been the judges daily surrounding him to
whom he would have felt obliged to prove his intellectual competence. It's
pretty safe to say not real reform, but success at providing the APPEARANCE of
reform, is the competence test they would have applied. And lastly, for successfully
providing this mere appearance, they would have whispered to Robinson of riches
far exceeding what his days as a player--or commissioner--could provide.
In short, all the powerful pressures of a deeply corrupt
white baseball executive world would have prevailed on Robinson as commissioner
to become what he had NEVER been as a player: professional baseball's Uncle
Tom. One can only speculate on whether even HIS character would have survived
the test. Perhaps that character would have manifested itself in simply
declining the commissioner's role.
If we take the immense pressures facing Jackie
Robinson as imaginary first black commissioner of a deeply corrupt
white-dominated baseball world--and put those pressures on serious steroids--we can
begin to imagine the inexorable buzzsaw inexperienced Illinois senator Barack Obama
must have faced as our first black president. A world of corrupt white power in
deep disrepute due to Bush but just as deeply entrenched--with FAR higher stakes
than our imagined game-fixing baseball profiteers. An omnipresent, circumambient
white world--a world with corrupt standards of competence--to which Obama felt
pressured to prove himself daily. And a world eager to richly reward "competence."
Perhaps Jackie Robinson--perhaps even Martin Luther King--would have caved under
the overwhelming pressure. And Obama had never yet endured the public character-forming
ordeals of either. With the eye of retrospect, it seems deeply imprudent for
Barack Obama--and for us as voters--to have tried the experiment when we did.
Uncle Tom's White House was the all but inevitable result.
