Diversity Games: Barack Obama and the Rise of "Multiculturalism Incorporated"

Racism is an instinctive tool to capture resources and deny them to competitor "species." This is why Obama is backed by the Wall Street bankers. To them, he is a tool to safeguard their fortunes against the rising tide of public resentment. They are excellent psychologists, and psychic abusers of the popular Black mind.

They know, through their experts in PR (advertising and the management of the public mind), how the popular Black mind pines for symbols of "hope," for action heros on basketball courts and on the big screen — Will Smith saving the fantasy worlds Hollywood conjures with smoke and mirrors. Any hero in any arena can be produced to distract and quell the masses, so long as it is not an actual hero in any arena of actual power...

Obama may have some decent intentions beyond his blatant careerism, but clearly the careerism is primary, and for that he must reassure his sponsors that he can quell the public. The job he is applying for is to keep public affairs calm enough so the same select businesses and the same select gamesters can continue to make the same government-backed mega-profits.

In business circles, this is called "maintaining a stable business environment." Obama says "change" but his sponsors know this to mean "stability." "Change" is what we’ll get from the billions we are forced to pay into taxes and inflated prices that profit all too few.

Populations that have histories of being oppressed are easily duped, because they are so desperate for "relief," for "salvation."

In one of our conversations earlier this week, Cnu offered up a link to a great essay at Counterpunch which worked through the relationship between President Obama, the overclass, and a symbolic politics of racial grievance which does little to challenge deleterious, systemic, institutional, macrolevel changes in American political economy.

While I most certainly believe in the power of aggrieved and subordinate groups to resist power and hegemony, and of course to force elite actors to respond to their justice claims, we must also concede how those at the top are adept at managing conflict as a means of serving their own narrow interests.

The election of Barack Obama is central to this story. It is clear that the colorline has been renegotiated in America since the time of the founding. However, it still remains. The Civil Rights Movement was successful as much because of peoples' activism and resistance, as for how elite actors realized that Jim and Jane Crow white supremacy was a national embarrassment in the context of the Cold War.


More broadly, the Racial State evolved over time because the type of personal, intimate, and directly violent exploitation of the plantation (with its old fashioned "dominative" racism) was not suited for a growing industrialism, or many years later, an economy that would evolve into a global, service based, information age set of international markets and actors. As Wendy Somerson notes, in this model "structural racism and sexism are thus denied through visual inclusion within corporate culture."

White supremacy in the United States (and Europe) had to "evolve" from the personal to the structural and institutional if it was to remain effective at allocating resources, and the gains of the in-group and its elites were to be preserved. By comparison, South Africa's herrenvolk society failed to adapt and was subsequently torn down. The genius of American racism is how it adapted in order to survive--all the while maintaining many of the same core inequalities and hierarchies of years and decades past.

The election of Barack Obama was the culmination of this transition. Multiculturalism incorporated won out. Diversity, even a type that is driven less by "justice" and more by profit maximization and the exploitation of human capital, is taken as a given. However, there is nothing at all radical about it. Ironically, I would suggest that the election of the country's first black President is the death knell for justice claims about racial equality and redistribution.

In a time when whiteness is perceived to be under siege, and the State has been drowned in the bathtub by the Right, the narrow and tenuous coalition of white Americans who were somewhat sympathetic to the idea that racial inequality ought to be addressed through robust policy interventions are now disinterested, and in many cases, hostile to such appeals.

Part of this dynamic is a function of crude self-interest and anxieties about scarce resources in the Great Recession. A second component is a cultivated type of white racial resentment and backlash against black and brown progress (seen in the 1960s and early 1970s with the anti-busing movement; in the 1980s with the "small government," "silent majority," and "California tax revolt;" and with the angry white men culture warriors of the late 1980s and early 1990s) which the Tea Part GOP White Nationalists have grown and nurtured in the Age of Obama.

To many Americans, the symbolism of a black man as President of the United States is an epitaph for racism's death--despite all of the available evidence which demonstrates how race impacts life chances in the present. In all, many across the colorline confuse an increasingly diversified class of (token black and brown) political elites, and a myth of an inclusively diverse America cooked up by the dream merchants on Madison Avenue, with a progressive vision and politics that actually empowers people of color by addressing hard questions about the maldistribution of resources in this country--inequalities that track very closely to the dividing lines of racial hierarchy and privilege.

As I often do, what follows is a particularly timely and telling passage from the great new book The Twilight of Equality. Here, Lisa Duggan is working through the rise of neoliberalism, the Culture Wars, and the power of conservative multiculturalism as a type of commonsense for "post racial" post civil rights America.

Could it be that the election of Barack Obama was the final act in the Black and Brown Freedom Struggle, as the Right can create a narrative that racism is dead--all the while mining white racial resentment and victimhood for electoral gains? Piling on, how has this moment been perverted by white racial resentment and faux Right populism into one where a corporatist center right Democrat is skewered as a "Socialist" for not being even more slavish to the financier class? Or more broadly, that the State and the social safety net must be destroyed in the name of "efficiency" and "small government" because it serves and protects minorities, the poor, women, "liberals," gays and queers, all to the disadvantage of "real Americans?"

From the Clinton Administrations's serious efforts to recruit racial minorities and women into high-level government service, and to reduce the range of exclusions of sexual minorities, to the G. W. Bush administration's more clearly token gestures of inclusion, the rhetoric of "official" neoliberal politics shifted during the 1990s from "culture wars" alliances, to a superficial "multiculturalism" compatible with the global aspirations of U.S. business interests.

"Culture Wars" attacks and alliances did not disappear, but they receded from the national political stage in favor of an emergent rhetorical commitment to diversity, and to a narrow, formal, nonredistributive form of "equality" politics for the new millennium.

...Some proponents of "equality politics" moved away from civil rights lobbies and identity politics organizations to advocate for the abandonment of progressive-left affiliations, and the adoption of a neoliberal brand of identity/equality politics. These organizations, activists, and writers promote "color-blind" and anti-affirmative action racial politics, conservative-libertarian "equality feminism," and gay "normality"...Such a realignment would rival the 1970's "Southern Strategy" that moved phalanxes of former Democratic voters out of the New Deal coalition and into the Republican columns, largely through "culture wars" racism.