Black Feminists Leslie and Nasya continue the discussion on Barack Obama’s presidency. This is the third in a series of posts that chart the discussion on our thread ( part 1 , part 2 ).
Leslie:
Can I remind you that Bradley Manning broke several laws? He deserves to be prosecuted and it’s being done by the military. I don’t like the treatment he’s received, but again, that’s being meted out by the military. I’d be outraged if he was allowed to be freed or not stand trial for what he did. I thought Cheney should’ve gone to jail for outing Valerie Plame.
President Obama has had to work in the nastiest most obstructionist Congresses I’ve seen ever seen. How exactly can you govern effectively when you.have a person that says their sole mission, when the country is facing tremendous problems, is to make the president a one term president? When you have a member of Congress call the president a liar as he makes his State of The Union Address?
These aren’t excuses; this is reality. As for transformative presidents- have you not heard of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson? Teddy Roosevelt? I can only hope that this second term will be different because he is legacy building now. I’m from the US and my family still lives there. Domestic policy is more of a concern to me. There is no free healthcare there but Obamacare helps a bit. It was comforting to know that my father’s cancer treatment was taken care of.
Nasya:
I absolutely agree that both domestic and international issues should be of concern. Of course I can’t actually speak for Obama, but I’ll go out on a limb and say I don’t think he only cares about ‘the West’ and not ‘the rest’. However, as he’s the president of the United States of America a significant part of how his constituency will assess him is based on how his politics impact lives there. Thus his primary focus seems to be the quality of lives of those within that state and those who identify as American living abroad. The concerns you highlight are all important and I’m glad you raised them as other factors to consider (seriously though, when will Guantanamo be closed?). But I have to also disagree on the Bradley Manning issue. I don’t agree w/ how he’s being treated, I’m resistant to how incarceration is ‘performed’ on the mind and ‘inscribed’ on the body. But I think he was 100% aware of the potential consequences, thus it shouldn’t be a surprise that he’s now facing them. Kali, I’d love to hear more about your take on this though.
My knee jerk reaction, was to the idea that he doesn’t have the right to blackness, politically or otherwise. This is largely informed by the fact that I think everyone (ourselves included) criticize / assess Obama’s politics in relation to his blackness. I think the reason why so many of us expect(ed) more of him is nuanced by the fact that he is ‘black’. We want and need him to better identify w/ ‘third world’ struggles. We expect him to remember where he came from, to identify w/ his roots and routes. This is a realty of the ‘black experience’, we can’t escape that history of pain, struggle, and resistance no mater how much we achieve, or how much closer we get to the ‘dream’. The very reason black feminists carve out a space to address our specific subject formations is because our lived experiences are nuanced by gender, race, and class. And of course we work to include sexuality, ability, and other subject formations in our theory and politics. But we all know that doing so has been a struggle for black feminists since the the second wave. It always strikes me how far we’ve come and yet how far we have to grow.
I don’t see how we can think of intersectionality in a vacuum in regards to our concerns and not to how that relates to how Obama is depicted, disrespected, and discredited. I think we should be mindful that blackness isn’t an honorary title, we can give when we’re proud and inspired and then take away when we’re demoralized or frustrated. Even when we feel that his actions aren’t ‘black enough’ (what does that even mean though?) We have to remember that his daily life as the first black president, a black father to two black girls, married to a black woman, is inextricably linked to the ‘black experience’ (single quotes because I hope to still infer the multiplicity of that experience).
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