June 12, 2009
oakland: why not?
Martin Luther King, Jr. noted about the Watts riots: “This was not a race riot. It was a class riot.”
The clarity of this assertion is certainly a sort of exaggeration in response to the media insistence on the concept of the "race riot." To the extent that it is a corrective, it means to counter the willingness to delink race and class, to render the antagonism as at once essentialized and contentless, in so far as there is no immediate remedy for the fact that people are of different races.
As such a corrective, King's claim doesn't mean to swap one kind of riot for the other, but to restore the linkage — reassert the inseparability of the two. And surely it is hard to argue that, in some cases, race has been the axis along which the most blatant and brutal forms of dispossession have been conducted, and along which corresponding antagonisms have expressed themselves.
This perhaps provides some systemic-historical sense to the election of Barack Obama. Certainly the explicit political claims of the election (on the military, the economy, health care, torture and remaining substantive issues) are nowhere now believed by serious people, if they ever were. The unequal devolution of economic misery stemming from the depression continues apace, and is likely to reach the kinds of levels where open conflict is to be expected — and one might reasonably expect this to express itself again along racial faultlines, given the core constituencies of the unwanted reserves of the ever-smaller industrial army. One might almost forecast, without any satisfaction, a Long Hot Summer of 2010.
And yet Oakland, one of the historic foci of such conflagrations, seems uneasily pacified — charged by a legitimately joyous sense of overcoming and a sense of obligation, but still with the full recognition that at a non-symbolic level the government is not serving the interests of the city's main population. As a result, that population seems magnetized into a kind of static ambiguity by the election of the first president of color, and, one suspects, neutralized as a site of open struggle. This peculiar situation is the specificity of the moment, and part of its core uncertainty — it is in this sense that the election is indeed historically unique.
Posted by jane at June 12, 2009 12:06 PM | TrackBack