The elephant in the room

posted by: Nick | on: Tuesday, 21 October 2008, 09:51

The Elephant in the room

“Barack Obama has been described as ‘post racial’. What on earth is ‘post racial’ meant to mean?”

My good friend and trip host Leonard Zeskind is shaking his head in bewilderment. For him, race is everywhere. No-one might want to talk about it but it is the elephant in the room.

We arrived in Washington DC yesterday afternoon. By ‘we’, I mean the 11 of us who came across from the UK – a mixture of trade unionists, faith group organisers and community activists. We hooked up with Leonard and another old friend Devin Burghardt, who are kindly taking us around for the next few days. In the evening we met up with another Brit and tomorrow we will be joined by two more. Organising such a trip for so many people seemed a good idea at the time….

Last night we went to the home of veteran immigrant rights’ activist Rick Schwartz and his wife Jeanette, who back in the early 1980s fled the political terror in El Salvador. With some wonderful food and the odd beer we were given a whirlwind introduction to the role of race in the United States and the state of the anti-immigration movement.

With 30 years experience, Rick spoke of the failure of the comprehensive immigration reform and the challenges ahead. He said that one of the biggest failures of the immigrant rights movement was a reluctance to accept that they were far weaker and less organised than the anti-immigrant movement. Many of the issues he raised struck a resonance with the debate back in the UK.

Interestingly, Rick spoke about the inroads by the anti-immigrant movement into the African-American community, a group traditionally at the bottom of the economic heap and so most fearful of newcomers. Jeanette spoke of her experience, as a Latin American, of racial identity. She said that many Latinos wanted to identify with whites as they saw African Americans at the bottom of the pile and that was not where they wanted to go. Leonard mused that perhaps American society would once again refigure around the fundamental issue of race – white v black – but this time with a chunk of the Latino/Hispanic population, just like the Jews before them, being incorporated into white America.

Leonard grew up during the civil rights era and so for him, and others like him, the Obama election has huge significance. Little over 40 years ago civil rights activists were dying trying to obtain the vote but now the country was on the brink of having a black President. However, he cautioned against believing that this was a sign that America had overcome its past – it was just that there were two competing Americas. On one side there was an alliance of progressive, generally younger people from different racial backgrounds who wanted to build a multiracial society, on the other was another group was deeply entrenched in the racist past. Even if Obama won, the battle over race and American identity would not be over. Leonard says that the racist Right is currently all over the place, partly because it has been unsure how to deal with the Obama phenomenon but also because the economic crisis now dominates the political agenda, so causing people who might still be deeply racist to vote for change. He believes that the Right is likely to re-organise and perhaps come back even stronger next Spring, probably over the issue of immigration controls and for the soul of a defeated Republican Party.

All this kickstarted a fascinating discussion about race, immigration and migrant workers, especially as the world teeters on the brink of recession.

I really think that race plays a far more seminal role in US society than it does over in the UK. I’m not trying to downplay our racial inequalities or tensions but simply that race does not form the very fabric of our society like it does over here. However, that makes the potential Presidency of Barack Obama even more amazing …if, in the confines of the ballot box, ‘race’ does not return to deliver a shock.