08 From Rodney King to Barack Obama

America Confronts Another Racial Moment

 KoreAm Magazine (April 2008)

Could even a Hollywood writer have imagined Los Angeles - indeed the United States - 16 years after the Rodney King beating?

As the last embers settled and martial law was lifted, L.A. had devolved from multicultural mecca to racial powder keg. The 1992 police brutality verdict ended the 1960s truce on race born out of the previous fires, from Detroit to Watts, and ushered in a period of uncertainty about the future of racial reconciliation.

Enter into this vacuum the seductive power of colorblindness and gender neutrality.

It is 2008, and Los Angeles boasts a Chicano from East L.A. as its mayor. The California State Assembly has named a black woman as its Speaker. The Democratic Party is poised to forward an African American or a woman as its presidential nominee.

Yet, racial progress and social equality have a peculiar familiarity in this "year of change." As with the Reconstruction period after the Civil War and the post-Civil Rights era, the elusive character of U.S. equality is once again exposed in this presidential election year by the nationalist demands for wartime patriotism and racial loyalty.

After all, the U.S. War on Terror - now occupying five of the 16 years since Rodney King - frames today's racial landscape and socio-political moment. Take Barack Obama's masterful deployment of his bi-racial background to simultaneously stake a claim as "First Black President" and first "post-racial" politician. This David Copperfield act of American politics has come so close to belying the prophecy of rapper Tupac Shakur, whose music practically foreshadowed the civil unrest.

He wrote:

"It takes skill to be real, time to heal each other
And although it seems heaven sent
We ain't ready, to see a black President ..."

However, Obama's success at overcoming prevailing views of black inferiority is insufficient to overcome his "Muslim problem." The demand that Obama distance himself from Islam reflects a decided shift in America's racial common sense. In the American racial hierarchy of 2008, South Asians, Arabs, Middle Easterners and Muslims are racial "others" (read: potential terrorists).

The distinct irony in the uproar over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's remarks can only be appreciated if we examine the current wars in the Middle East against another devastating racial moment in the same 16-year period: Hurricane Katrina. As of 2008, the U.S. has spent $600 billion in Iraq alone. In the Gulf Coast, $35 billion is allocated for long-term rebuilding, including $100 million to demolish public housing, where rents have increased
200 percent.

Comparing the billions of dollars, dead dark bodies (civilian and military), government contracts, and variations of "rule of law" deployed in the reconstructions of Iraq and the Gulf Coast reveals just how complicated it is to measure the distance we have traveled from the War on Poverty of the 1960s to the War on Terror in 2008.

The contrasts also help clarify the national impulse on racial differences in this post-Rodney King era. Americans simultaneously project an aspiration for colorblindness and neutrality onto Obama, while openly demanding his disassociation from all things Muslim.  In navigating this national schizophrenia, Obama delivered the heartfelt "race speech." He refused to disown the pastor who introduced him to Christianity and baptized his children,
or the black community, or "the black perspective" on our national history.

However, he did denounce the radical race-conscious critique of American history as expressed by the pastor, while embracing the nationalism underlying our discourses of War and Race. The presidential candidate who would emerge out of the colorblind era astutely chose to begin with the lines from the U.S. Constitution that millions of legally disenfranchised Americans have used to confront the nation with its contradictions, "We
the People, in order to form a more perfect union ..."

Obama stands as a powerful symbol that simultaneously lays bare the exclusion of specific groups from positions of power in the United States, while reinforcing Americans' desire to believe that they live in the only country in history and in the world where race and gender colorblindness could ever triumph. Whatever his prospects for the presidency, Obama's candidacy, like the 1992 civil unrest, provides us another racial moment. It is one that
requires communities of all colors to give meaning to what could otherwise be mere words on paper.

Saul Sarabia is the administrative director of the Critical Race Studies Program at UCLA School of Law, where he is also a lecturer.