Malcolm X to Obama: Race and Politics in Black America

Introduction

The issue of race in the United States is a deeply complex morass of political, economic, psychological, and cultural impressions all tangled together by a history of deep hatred and oppression. Thus, the election of an African American man to the presidency in 2008 is a critically important moment in American history and one that appears as a sudden departure from centuries of inequality. However, it is more accurate to contend that this moment came about neither suddenly nor with the totality of impact often suggested.

Instead, the texts of Gwen Ifill (2009) and Alex Haley (1964) both proceed from the perspective that the struggle for racial equality in the United States is one which continues today and which is founded on the evolving political identity of African Americans. From the black separatist movement which Malcolm X used to deliver pride and unity to African Americans, to the political permeation of all races and cultures achieved by President Barack Obama, a great deal of political shifting and social adjustment predicated this marked advance. Ifill's text, entitled The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama, remarks upon the political history and various political identities preceding Obama's own rapid emergence on the political and cultural landscape. Haley's text, entitled The Autobiography of Malcolm X, chronicles the life experiences and philosophical orientation of the bold Muslim revolutionary who helped drive forward the cause of African Americans, even while staking out a reputation that Obama would later work to transcend. Together, the two texts show that a relationship of both inspiration and reversal exists between Malcolm X and Barack Obama — a relationship that helps tell the narrative history of African Americans in electoral politics.

Summary of Gwen Ifill's The Breakthrough

The day of Barack Obama's election was a watershed moment in American history. A nation where African Americans were for hundreds of years enslaved, segregated, and socially isolated would go from the repeal of Jim Crow to the election of its first African American chief executive in less than fifty years. For many on both sides of an American racial divide — one that pits progressive social ideology against the eroding power of racialist institutionalism — this event signaled momentous change on the cultural horizon. As Gwen Ifill (2009) argues, it was nothing short of a sea change in both politics and race relations, opening the door for an all-encompassing new reality in America.

This idea is expressed early in the Ifill text, which reports that "Obama is the leading edge of this change, but his success is merely the ripple in a pond that grows deeper every day. 'When people do something that they've never done before, I think that makes it easier to do it a second time,' David Axelrod, the Obama campaign's chief strategist told me just days after Obama won. 'So when people vote for an African American candidate, I think it makes it easier for the next African American candidate.'" (Ifill, p. 1). This is a central premise of the text, which argues that the Obama election should be viewed both as the realization of an already advancing pattern in American race relations and as a harbinger of yet more exponential change to come.

Ifill discusses this idea within the context of African American electoral history in order to demonstrate the general social and cultural thrust toward a political scheme in which African Americans could enjoy a leveling of the playing field. This remains a difficult ambition to realize, but it presents a visible thrust toward the dismantling of old assumptions about race and electoral behavior. Particular focus is paid, for instance, to the emotionally charged 1984 candidacy of civil rights activist and spiritual leader Jesse Jackson, and to the more professionally approached 1988 candidacy of the same man. The distinction Ifill notes lies in the level of access to white voters that Jackson achieved across that four-year interim. The combination of his rising political cachet and a continually narrowing psychological gap — whereby white voters began translating modest racial enlightenment into outright political support — changed the electoral front for figures such as Jackson. Ifill presents this as part of a pattern which ultimately delivered Obama to the right moment in history.

The author also contends that other moments in the short but rapid history of African American electoral visibility have demonstrated a clear trend of improvement. This improvement has not come without growing pains, such as the much-discussed Bradley Effect, named "after the former Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley, an African American who lost the 1982 race for California governor to a white man, George Deukmejian, even though the polls had shown him winning by as much as twenty-two points." (Ifill, p. 10). The explanation offered by analysts was that white voters who had claimed the intention of voting for Bradley were betrayed by secretly racist impulses in the voting booth, pulling the lever for his white opponent instead. This produced a recurrent invocation of the so-called Bradley Effect in subsequent years, with elections involving candidates such as Jackson and Obama prompting pollsters and analysts to examine apparent voter behavior accordingly.

This dynamic created a complex forecasting scenario in which racist overtones in American political culture were, in some sense, explicitly acknowledged. Though pundits couched this acknowledgment in analyses of geographical, ideological, and social factors, there is little doubt that a polling theory hinging on the independent variable of a candidate's race was a direct recognition that racism continued to play a part in the electoral fortunes of African American candidates in ways that might contrast apparent political logic as measured by polling.

To Ifill's perspective, and supported by available facts regarding the Obama election, the current president would help dismantle the viability of this theory. One may argue — and to an extent, Ifill does — that the Bradley Effect may never have been a fully accurate way of characterizing African American electoral realities. There is also the equally compelling argument that the Bradley Effect was indicative of a phase which has since passed. In the 2008 Democratic primaries, where Obama faced his stiffest competition within a party likely to win a national election given the poor performance of the seated Bush Administration, he also faced the specter of the Bradley Effect. A valid concern existed that conservative elements of the Democratic constituency would force the party to nominate a safer candidate. However, Obama, Ifill argues, had stepped into an evolving trend whereby African American candidates were deconstructing conventional electoral race logic. In the hard-fought primaries, "Obama continued that trend. Exit polls showed not only that he outperformed 2004 nominee John Kerry among white voters but also that those who made up their minds within the last days — theoretically the secret, lying racists of the Bradley Effect — voted for him as well. RIP, the Bradley Effect." (Ifill, p. 11). Such moments in the text capture the author's basic approach: cheering the Obama election as a triumphant moment for America as a whole, prefiguring a reflection of Obama's racially neutral ambition and identity.

Alex Haley's rendering of The Autobiography of Malcolm X speaks to the importance of having a retrospective window into the minds of those whose aggressive participation in American racial history made them emotionally or personally elusive in their own time. With Malcolm X — whose militant racial posturing, religiously intensified rhetoric, and eventual philosophical alignment with figures such as Martin Luther King made him a challenging figure to fully comprehend — the opportunity to engage with his perspective through the benefit of hindsight is both compelling and humanizing.

Conclusion

The presidency of Obama is an important moment in the political and cultural history of the United States. The primary purpose of the Ifill text is to contextualize this moment in terms of the history of African Americans. In doing so, Ifill shows Obama's emergence to be another step on a path that has been walked since the days of Malcolm X and before. Ironically, it is only when held up against the Haley text — written some forty years prior — that the Ifill text begins to reveal its premonitions for the future. It hints at the idea that Obama's presidency is only another step in eroding the entrenched mores of inequality, and that it is not the endpoint of African American struggles.