God I love Gary Younge’s brain.
When his wife Michelle asked what he thought he could accomplish if he became president, he said: “The day I take the oath of office, the world will look at us differently. And millions of kids across this country will look at themselves differently. That alone is something.”
True, it is something. But when Thomas is safely back in the station and the moment is over, it is not very much. Because for all the white noise emanating from the Tea Party movement, it has been black Americans who have suffered most since Obama took office. Over the last 14 months the gap between my son’s life chances and his friend’s have been widening. Unemployment, which has held steady in the rest of the country, is still rising among African Americans and stands at almost twice that of white people.
The fact that the first black president is presiding over deepening racial disparities is just one of the more potent illustrations of how the relationship between identity and electoral representation has become untethered from broader social, political or economic advances and rendered purely symbolic. The corporate model of diversity, which seeks to look different and act the same, has firmly stamped its imprimatur on a kind of politics that owes more to Benetton ads than black advancement.
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