She's an outspoken radical icon who was once branded a "terrorist" by Richard Nixon, but now prison abolitionist Angela Davis is being accused of having "lost her mind." Why? Because she refuses to engage in bashing President Barack Obama. In an era where it's no longer surprising that Tavis Smiley is a featured guest on Hannity, Davis told the Guardian that those who focus their ire on Obama are misguided. And it's not the first time Davis has challenged the anti-Obama consensus in leftist and black academic circles.
From Davis' interview with Stuart Jeffries:
If structural racism and state violence against African-Americans, aided and abetted by global capitalism, are as rampant as Davis says, isn’t she disappointed in the failure of the US’s first African-American president to speak out when a case comes up that seems to dramatise what she is indicting? Davis smiles and recalls a conversation she had with [cultural theorist Stuart] Hall two months before his death. “We talked about the fact that people like to point to Obama as an individual and hold him responsible for the madness that has happened. Of course there are things that Obama as an individual might have done better – he might have insisted more on the closing of Guantánamo – but people who invested their hopes in him were approaching the issue of political futures in the wrong way to begin with. This was something Stuart Hall always insisted on – it’s always a collective process to change the world.”
Davis shows that one can disagree with President Obama without resorting to the ugly personal attacks that are gradually discrediting former luminaries like Dr. Cornel West. West, feeling snubbed when he
couldn't get tickets to the President's inauguration, has called Obama "a Republican in blackface" and described him as a "black puppet" of financial oligarchs. Davis instead responds to her issues with the President with a call to action,
as when he was reelected:
Our passionate support for President Barack Obama—and it’s wonderful that we can say for the second time, "President Barack Obama," and we support him, and we are passionate about that support, but that support should also be expressed in our determination to raise issues that have been largely ignored or not appropriately addressed by the administration.
She understands and respects the importance of the Obama presidency to the coalition that elected him and especially black Americans:
Many of the assumptions regarding the significance of Obama’s election are entirely wrong, especially those that depict a black man in the US presidency as symbolizing the fall of the last barrier of racism. But I do think that the election itself was important, especially since most people—including most black people—did not initially believe that it was possible to elect a black person to the presidency. Young people effectively created a movement—or one should qualify this by saying that it was a cyber-movement—that achieved what was supposed to be impossible.
The problem was that people who associated themselves with that movement did not continue to wield that collective power as pressure that might have compelled Obama to move in more progressive directions (e.g., against a military surge in Afghanistan, toward a swift dismantling of Guantanamo, toward a stronger healthcare plan.) Even as we are critical of Obama, I think it is important to emphasize that we would not have been better off with Romney in the White House. What we have lacked over these last five years is not the right president, but rather well-organized mass movements.
I agree with Davis. We now have just two more years with Barack Obama in office, and winning the changes we seek will require mass movements, both online and in the 'real' world, such as we have seen around the police killings of Mike Brown and Eric Garner.