Obama’s racial rhetoric recycled conservative narratives blaming black people for their condition

Evidence

Legitimate grievances against police brutality tipped into excuse-making for criminal behavior. Racial politics could cut both ways as the transformative message of unity and brotherhood was drowned out by the language of recrimination. And what had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all Americans to work hard and get ahead, was too often framed as a mere desire for government support, as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself. … Nothing about this formulation rings historically true. The language of recrimination, I suppose, stands as a description of the rhetoric of the Black Power movement. But the other stuff is just the nasty rhetoric of the Reagan era that has sadly become familiar. Obama invokes the idea of black criminality, of black people looking for government handouts instead of working hard, of black parents failing to raise their children properly, and of false cries of racism as the excuse for troubles that are of our own making. This is the refrain of the neoconservatives who worked tirelessly in the 1980s and 1990s to undo the gains of the black freedom struggle. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 251

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s analysis of the Democratic Party ‘trap’ — Obama’s coded rebuttal of black grievance as assimilation to white comfort, which Glaude develops later into the ‘blank-out ballot’ proposal.