November 9, 2008
Drum Major for Justice or Drum Major for Empire?
by Rev. Colin Bossen
The title of my sermon this morning is "Drum Major for Justice or Drum Major for Empire?"* This, after his historical election to the Presidency of the United States, is the central question before Barack Obama. Will he be a drum major for justice and, like Martin Luther King, work to build a better world for the oppressed and marginalized? Or will he be a drum major for empire and assume the default position of any American President? The default position promotes policies that support corporations and the wealthy at the expense of working people and the historically disenfranchised. It advocates for militarism, the military-industrial complex and the use of force in solving international disputes.
There is great hope that President-elect Obama will be a drum major for justice. As the rapper Jay-Z has put it, "Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run. Obama's running so we all can fly." Did Obama really run so that we all could fly? Will an Obama Presidency allow us to fly?
There is no doubt an Obama Presidency will represent a seismic shift in the American political and racial landscapes. King ally and Congressman John Lewis said after the election:
I never imagined, I never even had any idea I would live to see an African-American president of the United States. We have witnessed tonight in America a revolution of values, a revolution of ideals. There's been a transformation of America, and it will have unbelievable influence on the world.
Obama's electoral victory represents a major defeat for white supremacists. The United States is a country whose constitution was written by slave holders. The White House was built with slave labor. And now a black man married to a woman descended from black slaves will occupy the Presidential residency. It is a political and cultural moment that has been 400 years in the making. Over the course a generation it will change much about the meaning race and the relationship between the races in this country.
This country has long been a deeply racist one. For much of its history the United States has been governed by either open or closet white supremacists. I believe that an Obama Presidency will mean that twenty-five years from now a politician like former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott will not longer be possible. Lott has close ties to the Conservative Citizen Councils, the modern heir to the segregationist White Citizen Councils of the South, and is an admirer of Strom Thurmond. He even alleged a few years back that the state of Mississippi did the right thing in voting for Thurmond's segregationist Dixiecrat party in the 1948 Presidential election. He said of his state, "When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either."
The coming obsolescence of national politicians like Lott is something to celebrate. That celebration is out-shined by the certainty that the children of this country will grow up sure in the knowledge that "they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Martin Luther King's dream is becoming a reality. I hope that children of all races will now know that anything is possible.
It is clear that Obama's election is the realization of the portion of King's dream that spoke to racial justice. No longer in our country will individuals be limited because of their race or ethnicity. The deep structural racism that exists in this country, and can be witnessed throughout the Cleveland area, will not disappear overnight. A large part of King's dream remains unrealized. He wanted a world in which no child went hungry; where all people had access to quality education; where war and militarism where not the creed and calling of his native land; where everybody had meaningful work and where nobody was disinherited from the bounty of the earth. King was a preacher and dreamer who called for the kingdom of God on earth and he wanted to be a drum major for justice.
So the question is, is Obama the heir of that part of King? Does he too want to be a drum major for justice? Or will he be a drum major for empire? In one of his last sermons King issued a challenge to this country. He said:
God didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world now. God didn't call America to engage in a senseless unjust war... And we are criminals in that war. We have committed more war crimes than almost any nation in the world...
But God has a way of even putting nations in their place. The God that I worship has a way of saying, 'Don't play with me.' He has a way of saying, as the God of the Old Testament used to say to the Hebrews, 'Don't play with me Israel. Don't play with me, Babylon. Be still and know that I'm God. And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power.'
Will a President Obama work to stop this country's reckless course? Will he halt a course that has brought war in Afghanistan and Iraq; a course that has created the widest disparity in wealth in any industrialized country; a course that is despoiling the environment and making it more likely with every passing minute that the world I pass on to my children will be a dying one; a course that means that 50 million Americans do not have health insurance; a course that sees labor rights and unions at the greatest ebb in a hundred years; a course that sees America a disgrace for its human rights record of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, and spying on her own citizen's? Will Obama work to stop that course? Will he be a drum major for justice? Or will he be a drum major for empire?
Martin Luther King, Jr. was an anti-militarist and, according to many scholars, a democratic socialist. Barack Obama is neither of those things. Obama is at his best a center-left politician. While he probably owes his election to his early opposition to the Iraq war he has not maintained a consistently anti-war position. His objection to the American invasion of Iraq is that it was a tactical error in the so-called war on terror. He has not questioned the basic strategy of the war on terror--using the United State's military might rather than international law--or challenged the Washington consensus on the role of the United States military as the world police force.
Obama's appearance on the O'Reilly Show during the Republican convention offered substantive hints about the foreign policy he will pursue. Bill O'Reilly begins the interview by asking Obama: "Do you believe we are in the middle of a War on Terror?" Obama responds in the affirmative, "Absolutely." O'Reilly asks as a follow-up, "Who's the enemy?" Obama replies: "Al-Qada, the Taliban, a whole host of networks..." The interview continues with Obama affirming the basic strategy of the war on terror--invading and occupying sovereign nations in pursuit of the terrorists they are supposedly harboring--while suggesting that the United States should be shifting its troops from Iraq to Afghanistan, the country he believes is the central front of the war on terror.
This exchange reminded me of a creedal test. A creed is a specific set of beliefs that members of a particular community affirm. A creedal test is a test given to someone to confirm whether or not they believe what members of the community are supposed to believe. In this case O'Reilly was administering Obama a creedal test to confirm that he would, in a large part, continue the interventionist foreign policies of the last many years. O'Reilly wanted to make sure that Obama would not deviate from the militarist mainstream of American foreign policy. Such consistency in the past between Democratic and Republican Presidents assured that President Clinton continued his predecessor's murderous policies towards Iraqi civilians--it is estimated that half a million Iraqi children died during the Clinton years due to American policy in the Middle East. By replying to O'Reilly in the way expected of him Obama appeared to be offering assurance that he will be much like Clinton and only offer cosmetic changes to Bush's foreign policy. If Obama truly holds such sentiments they would show him to be a drum major for empire. To quote Obama himself speaking of John McCain, "that's not change, that's more of the same."
Just as Obama's foreign policy may very well bring only a variation on the policy's of the Bush and Clinton administrations, the same may be true of his economic policies. It is likely that his economic policies will have a decidedly corporatist tint to them, favoring corporate interests at the expense of most working people. According to press reports one of the people he is considering for Secretary of the Treasury is Lawrence Summers. Summers was President Clinton's last Secretary of Treasury. He is a devotee of the free market policies that caused the current financial crisis. Under Clinton he advocated deregulation, free trade and very limited spending on social programs. In the present economic situation the application of these principles could very well turn a President Obama into Herbert Hoover like figure. Hoover followed economic orthodoxy in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash and, in doing so, turned a severe economic downturn into the Great Depression. What got the country of out the Great Depression was regulation of the market economy, expansion of social services and an increase in government spending--first through the New Deal and later through the military build-up of World War II. At such a time policies of limited government spending, careful attention to the deficit and loose rules for the financial sector are precisely the wrong ones to pursue. They may benefit a segment of the economic elite but they certainly will not benefit the vast majority of the populace.
There is side to Barack Obama that suggests he may yet become a drum major for justice. He may be a center-right politician but he is still a historic politician. Like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt before him, an Obama Presidency will contain within it the possibility for progressive reform. Both Lincoln and Roosevelt were elected to office during times of national crisis.
Both largely owed their election to forces significantly to the left them. In Lincoln's case it was the abolitionists and anti-slavery forces who helped him to win the election of 1860. He was not an abolitionist but he was somewhat sympathetic to the abolitionist cause. Roosevelt, likewise, was brought to office by a coalition that included labor unions and progressive activists. A proud member of the elite, Roosevelt's sense of noblesse oblige made him sensitive to such groups' demands.
Events after their elections and mass social movements forced both Lincoln and Roosevelt to move to left. The advent of the civil war caused Lincoln to free the slaves in an effort to gain more troops for the Union cause and undermine the Confederacy's economy. The Depression brought about a nation wide strike wave. Labor's militancy coupled with the ongoing banking crisis and the increasing popularity of left-wing organizations like the Communist Party and the Socialist Workers Party led Roosevelt to develop the New Deal.
An Obama Presidency contains within it the same sort of possibility of a Roosevelt or Lincoln Presidency. Obama is not a man of the left but he is familiar with left-wing movements. He worked in civil rights law and as a community organizer on the South side of Chicago. He has demonstrated his past concern for the plight of the urban poor and working class.
More importantly, he was elected by an multi-racial and multi-class movement many of whose members believed that he embodied real change. They thought they were voting for a drum major for justice, not a drum major for empire. They thought that they were voting for someone who would fix America's broken health care system and mend it's battered economy. They thought they were voting for someone concerned with the average American.
The coalition that elected Obama was a reconstitution of Roosevelt's New Deal Coalition. It represented a wide variety of segments of American society including a majority of blacks, asians, hispanics and other people of color. While the majority of whites voted for McCain enough white people voted for Obama that their vote combined with people of color was able to push Obama to substantive victory.
There are some stories of whites who overcame their own racism to support Obama. They thought he would best represent their economic interests. I read a powerful story from the journalist Sean Quinn about an interchange he witnessed in Pennsylvania. He writes,
So a canvasser goes to a woman's door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she's planning to vote for. She isn't sure, has to ask her husband who she's voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, 'We're votin' for the n***er!'
Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: 'We're voting for the n***er.'
Quinn's story is not the only one of this type from the election. There was even a pollster who speculated that Obama might draw substantive support from a demographic he called white racists. If there is more to these stories than hyperbole then there were at least some white people who wanted change so badly that they were willing to move past their own racial prejudice. Their economic concerns trumped what some sociologists call the wages of whiteness. Those are the benefits that members of the white working class have historically received for allying themselves with economic elites and helping oppress people of color.
The emergence of a political figure capable of causing the personal transformation necessary for someone to look past their racial prejudices in a Presidential election is something to celebrate. Everyone's perception of race in this country will be shifted in the next few years simply because a black man and his black family occupies the White House.
Obama himself suggested something of what that shift might look like in his victory speech on Tuesday. In his speech he shifted the rhetorical symbol for the average American from Joe the Plumber, a representative of the white working class who I could argue clearly revels in the wages of whiteness, to a 106 year old black woman named Ann Nixon Cooper, the daughter of a slave. Cooper is the living link between a country held in the thrall of the institution of slavery and a country where a black man can be elected President. Obama's reference to her rather than to a figure like Joe the Plumber suggests that he may yet seek to be an advocate for all people. There is a chance that he will become a drum major for justice.
Whether he reaches that potential really depends upon us. In his sermon "The Drum Major Instinct" King argued that "deep down within all of us, [is] an instinct. It's a kind of drum major instinct--a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first." Throughout the rest of sermon King discusses how most people try to satisfy this instinct by achieving material wealth. That's not the way King thought the thirst the instinct brings should be quenched. He thought it could satiated by service. He wrote, "everybody can be great. Because everybody can serve."
The possibility that Obama could become a drum major for justice depends not on him but on all of us. If we march in the streets, organize, write letters, demand an end to war and injustice then perhaps Obama may reach that potential. Obama has hinted that he himself knows this and that he might be open to such pressure. During one of the Clinton, Edwards and Obama debates Wolf Blitzer asked the Democratic contenders: "If Dr. Martin Luther King were alive today....why...[would] he endorse you?"
Clinton and Edwards both presented their cases for why Martin Luther King would support them. Obama, on the other hand, had the integrity to state: "Well, I don't think Dr. King would endorse any of us. I think what he would call upon the American people to do is to hold us accountable..." He continues his answer essentially by arguing that King would lead a movement to force whomever is in office to pay attention to the poor and marginalized.
Will President-elect Obama be a drum major justice and work to build a new America and a new world? One in which an oil dependent economy is transformed to an ecologically sustainable one? One in which both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are ended? One in which every child has the opportunity to reach his or her full human potential? Will he confront America's racist and unsustainable urban policy? Or will he be a drum major for empire and fail to end the wars? Renege on his pledge to reform health care? Continue the economic policies of Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton and Bush that have transferred the wealth of this country from the working and middle classes to the elite? The answer may ultimately lie with us and depend upon whether or not we are willing to take-up the challenge and demand progressive change. If we choose the default politics of apathy and demobilization then, I believe, it is almost certain that a President Obama will choose the default position of being a drum major for empire. Would that we choose otherwise. Amen.
*The strophe for this sermon was inspired by a comment that Robin D. G. Kelley made at a recent lecture here in Cleveland.