Obama, Race, and Youth
by Alex Thurston
http://www.theseminal.com/

The blogosphere will be working over the dynamics of the youth vote, as well as issues of race, with a fine tooth comb today. But the older generation doesn’t necessarily understand all the factors at work here. We the American youth have fundamentally different attitudes toward race, and African-Americans in particular, than older generations.

Meteor Blades of Daily Kos, whose writing I generally respect, invokes a completely standard version of African-American political history as background to Obama. Pointing out that Shirley Chisholm and Jesse Jackson preceded Obama is important. But he and others forget that American youth have interacted with hip-hop culture on a massive scale since the early 90s. They forget that several black comedians have become cultural icons in our time. They forget the prominent black actors and actresses, as well as athletes, who act as role models for millions of young Americans of all races. These processes have, for many of us, definitively shaped our ideas about race in America. I would even argue that the imprint of African-Americans on popular culture in America played a greater role in opening the door for Barack Obama’s candidacy than did Jesse Jackson.

So while CNN commentators continue to be impressed by how “articulate” Obama is, America’s youth see nothing remarkable in the fact of an intelligent black man taking center stage. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders paved the way for Obama, certainly: but so did KRS-ONE, Dr. Dre, Chuck D, Nas, Jay-Z, Mos Def, Common, Talib Kweli, and Kanye West. So did Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle. So did Michael Jordan and Dennis Rodman. So did Denzel Washington, Spike Lee, Wesley Snipes, and thousands of other major figures in our culture.

I do not often care to generalize, and racism remains a potent force in this country, but on the whole young white Americans are more comfortable with racial pluralism than earlier generations were. And that doesn’t just include the mass hip-hop culture that MTV beamed into our living rooms since we were children. That also includes attending schools and colleges where racial diversity is an entrenched value, traveling at high rates to foreign countries, and growing up in an atmosphere of frank discussion about race in America, from the Rodney King beating to the OJ trial to a slew of TV shows and movies that deal with race in complex ways. Just watch the show Boondocks if you don’t believe me: times have changed.

So for a lot of youth, Obama is not “the black candidate.” He is a candidate who is also black. And while pundits and even bloggers may be surprised by how Obama has transcended the Sharpton/Jesse Jackson model, the youth are not surprised: we’ve seen hundreds of black people, from rappers to actors to comedians to athletes, shatter the box of racial stereotypes and caricatures. We can see Obama as an individual with strengths and weaknesses, good ideas and bad ones. That’s why I’d never choose a word like “articulate” to describe Obama, as though it were a miracle that a black man can speak. “Eloquent” is the word because it indicates true praise for the speaker, and it is a quality that some of the other presidential candidates lack. They are all “articulate.” But not all of them can command the language like Obama does. Maybe more analysts would see less novelty in Obama if they could grasp that he is an individual, and that America’s youth are judging him on that basis. We are able to do so because for us, the definition of what an African-American man can be in America is an open and evolving one, a composite image made up of the contributions of thousands of people whom we hold in the highest respect.

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