The Weaponization of Race
Reflections on the disappointments of the Obama presidency
On February 24, 2023, CURE (Center for Urban Renewal and Education) published a report, “The Weaponization of Race Hurts America,” by Star Parker and Marty Dannenfelser. Star Parker is Founder and President of CURE, a Washington-based non-profit policy institute that seeks to restore dignity through messages of faith, freedom, and personal responsibility. Its vision is to preserve, promote, and protect Christianity, capitalism, and the Constitution of the American republic. Marty Dennenfelser is Vice President for Government Relations and Coalitions. He works to promote understanding and support for CURE’s policies with members of the legislative and executive branches of federal and state governments. He previously served on various federal government commissions and departments.
The report begins with the suggestion that the left has abandoned Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of racial equality and has substituted it with a new form of discrimination framed as “racial equity.” The report sustains that “the left has weaponized racial issues in a manner that divides Americans into separate identity groups and proclaims that blacks are inherently victims trapped in a systemically racist culture that has been instituted by white supremacists.”
The report reviews some early notable examples of the weaponization of race by the left. (1) During the Senate confirmation process of Reagan Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, Senator Ted Kennedy declared that Bork would enable restauration of racial segregation in public accommodations. Allegations of racism were a major factor in the defeat of Bork’s Supreme Court nomination.
(2) The Senate confirmation hearings with respect to the Supreme Court nomination of Clarence Thomas were converted into a controversial spectacle by allegations against Thomas of sexual harassment. But the real issues were Thomas’ positions on abortion and race. As Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1982 to 1990, Thomas challenged affirmative action policies. Parker and Dannenfelser write, “Thomas views such policies as discriminatory practices that violate the principle of equal treatment under the law. Similarly, Thomas has stated that he believes affirmative action policies are not helpful to the people they are intended to benefit and that they actually reinforce negative stereotypes about the abilities of minority individuals.”
Thomas has stated that blacks with conservative views are special targets of the liberal establishment. With respect to his controversial conformation process, Thomas declared that he had been wary his whole life of the stereotypical white racist—the bigot in the pickup truck, the Klansman, the rural sheriff—but the confirmation process revealed that the biggest problem was the modern day liberal, who has the power to caricature black conservatives.
The disappointing Obama presidency
Parker and Dannenfelser maintain that as a candidate for president, Barack Obama campaigned as a unifier. At an address at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia in March 2008, candidate Obama distanced himself from the use of “incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate the greatness and the goodness of our nation, that rightly offend black and white alike,” as quoted by Parker and Dannenfelser. Obama criticized the words of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, declaring that Wright’s remarks:
“expressed a profoundly distorted view that sees white racism as endemic and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America . . . The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static, as if no progress has been made; as if this country . . . is still irrevocably bound to its tragic past.” (Cited in Parker and Dannenfelser).
Parker and Dannenfelser continue documenting the unifying racial discourse of candidate Obama. On Father’s Day 2008, Obama spoke to a largely black congregation in Chicago, where he emphasized the importance of the role of the father as the foundation of a healthy society; fathers who are role models to the entire community, as teachers, coaches, and examples of success. But too often, Obama noted, fathers are missing; they have abandoned their responsibilities. This, he observed, is a fundamental truth in the African-American community, noting that more than half of all black children live in single-parent households. He cited statistics: children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime, nine times more likely to drop out of school, and twenty times more likely to end up in prison.
In the Father’s Day address, candidate Obama stressed the importance of the family in raising children. To be sure, there need to be more cops in the street; more money for schools, teachers, and after-school programs; and more jobs and more job training; but we also need responsible families, Obama declared. And we need to provide support to mothers that are raising kids by themselves.
Parker and Dannenfelser observe that on the night after Obama’s election in November 2008, Gallop Poll tracking found that that 71% of American voters—including 61% of John McCain voters—viewed the election of Obama as “one of the most important advances for black Americans in the past 100 years.”
However, President Obama, Parker and Dannenfelser maintain, did not govern with respect to race in accordance with the concepts and principles put forth by Obama the candidate. The Obama administration used a form of analysis that assumed statistical disparities to be an indication of racial discrimination, not taking into account historical, social, and cultural factors to explain racial disparities. This simplistic perspective was clear in the public declarations of governmental agency officials in 2010, and it was woven into the civil rights enforcement procedures of the Obama administration.
By 2012, Obama himself was making declarations with respect to police and quasi-law enforcement officials that some have interpreted as racial agitation, as stirring America’s dangerous and turbulent racial waters. Abigail Thernstrom, then Vice Chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, considered that Obama’s remarks with respect to one high-profile case seemed to be suggesting that the judge and jury ought to find the white police officer guilty, on the basis of his race. A responsible leader would have called upon the people to wait until the facts are known through investigation and to not demand a guilty verdict based on race, without knowing all the facts. But Obama the president opted instead for the discourse of victimization and systemic racism.
As I read “The Weaponization of Race Hurts America,” I could not help but feel that black conservatives must have been profoundly disappointed in Obama the president. Although not necessarily for the same reason, such disappointment was widely shared, for his election was received by many with hope that a new kind of politics was on the horizon.
I myself did not experience the disappointment, because during the 2008 presidential elections, I did not share such an optimistic view. I considered Obama’s candidacy to be very different from Jesse Jackson’s presidential candidacies in 1984 and 1988. Jackson had put forth a platform addressing in a comprehensive form a number of issues, thus staking out a progressive agenda that would reverse the direction that the nation had taken with the election of Reagan in 1980, combining it with a social conservativism rooted in deeply cherished American values.1 In contrast to Jackson, Obama was merely putting forth a general image of change, without specific proposals. To be sure, I considered it possible that Obama would hit the ground running as president, building upon disdain for politics as usual and forging a consensus through a progressive social agenda combined respect for the genuine concerns of conservatives, consistent with the analysis in his 2006 autobiography, The Audacity of Hope. But because his presidential campaign lacked a platform of specific proposals, I did not consider it likely.
In addition, I did not find in the discourses of Obama the candidate any indication of an anti-imperialist agenda. In this regard, I found a hard-to-understand contradiction in Chapter 8 of The Audacity of Hope, “The World Beyond Our Borders.” In this chapter, Obama informs the reader that from the age of six to the age of ten (1967 to 1971), he lived in Indonesia with his American mother and Indonesian stepfather. He recalls going to local Indonesian schools and running the streets with the children of farmers, servants, tailors, and clerks.
Obama’s childhood experience in Indonesia in some respects profoundly influenced his consciousness. In his autobiography, the history and political reality of Indonesia served as the paradigm from which he viewed “the world beyond our borders.” He discerns the fundamental facts of the Indonesian story: three centuries of Dutch colonialism, Japanese occupation, and a nationalist movement led by the charismatic leader Sukarno, who became the independent nation’s first president and one of the founders, with Nehru and Nasser, of the Non-Aligned Movement. He is aware that, because of Sukarno’s nationalization of key industries and rejection of U.S. aid, the CIA provided covert support to various insurgencies in Indonesia, culminating in a U.S.-supported military dictatorship led by General Suharto, which unleashed mass slaughter and imprisonment. On the basis of U.S. economic aid, Indonesia experienced short-lived prosperity and emerged as one of the “Asian tigers,” but its prosperity was not sustainable in the long term. Meanwhile, the Suharto regime was harshly repressive, arresting and torturing dissidents and attacking and brutalizing villages, with the knowledge of the U.S. government. In 1997, the Indonesian economy collapsed, and the IMF imposed austerity measures, which led to high prices, riots, and the resignation of Suharto. The 1998 establishment of free elections did not elevate the standard of living of the people or reduce the gap between the rich and the poor. Anti-American sentiment became widespread.
For Obama, the Indonesian story makes it clear that U.S. foreign policies are misguided in certain respects and based on false assumptions. We see in Indonesia, Obama writes, the American tendency to view conflicts through the prism of the Cold War, to promote American-style capitalism and multinational corporations, and to tolerate tyranny and corruption.
Obama’s insights into the Indonesian situation were rooted in his childhood experiences. However, this experience did not lead him to a lifelong attention that could have become the foundation for an alternative worldview. He writes that, after returning to Hawaii at the age of ten, “my life and attention gradually turned elsewhere.”
In the final analysis, Obama the U.S. senator from Illinois would propose that the world-system be built on America’s image. The American approach, he maintains, of free trade, open markets, the unfettered flow of information, and democratic elections is the formula for the alleviation of misery in poorer countries. He is aware that some will reject his premises and will follow the lead of “left-leaning populists” like Hugo Chávez or traditional principles of social organization, such as those found in Islamic law. But he believes that such critics are wrong in thinking that the world’s poor would benefit from rejection of the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy.2
In opting for an American ethnocentric interpretation of the world, Obama leaves to the side a fundamental epistemological truth. Namely, that human understanding is initially formulated on the basis of experience in a particular social location, but if it is to approach correct understanding, it must proceed on a basis of personal encounter with persons of different social locations, listening to them and taking seriously their insights. In seeking to understand the modern world-system, this implies taking seriously the insights of the exceptional leaders that have forged the anti-systemic movements of the colonized peoples, permitting their insight to be the basis for a reformulation of one’s own understanding.
It appears that Obama, on the basis his childhood experiences, had an inkling of this epistemological truth. But having spent his formative years in an American context, the potential possibilities were not brought to fruition.
Post Obama: The weaponization of race continues
Parker and Dannenfelser report that in the 2020 elections, candidate Joe Biden invoked the “systemic racism” narrative, which may have helped him win the presidential elections of 2020. During the campaign, Biden used the occasion of the sixth anniversary of the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri to defend the need for struggle against “systemic racism.” The previous year, the fifth anniversary of the death of Brown had been commemorated on Twitter by two democratic presidential candidates, Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.
Parker and Dannenfelser note that charges were never brought against the police officer involved in the 2014 death of Michael Brown, and there were good reasons, which were brought to light by several investigations, including that of the Obama Justice Department. Brown did not have his hands up, as widely believed. According to witnesses, after robbing a store, Brown was moving toward Officer Darren Wilson when he was shot; he was not shot in the back while running away. “Several witnesses stated that Brown appeared to pose a physical threat to Wilson as he moved toward Wilson.” The later discredited “hands up, don’t shoot” mantra went viral, as activists advanced the argument that Michael Brown had been murdered by a policer officer.
As President, Biden has continued with the “systemic racism” line, according to Parker and Dannenfelser, in spite of it being a frame that distorts the American racial reality in the aftermath of the civil rights reforms of 1964 to 1968. President Biden has declared white supremacy to be the greatest threat to America. “Systemic racism” is a central focus of the Biden administration, permeating all policy areas.
Parker and Dannenfelser report that in April 2021, black Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) delivered the Republican response to President Biden’s first State of the Union address. Scott declared that, although racism exists and is a problem that he has personally encountered, America is “not a racist country.” He subsequently was attacked for being subservient to whites in power, with the hashtag #UncleTim quickly trending on Twitter. Parker and Dannenfelser write that “the application of the ‘Uncle Tim’ moniker to Sen. Scott’s comments was a very open attempt to degrade the Senator based on his race by suggesting that he is a sellout to the black community. The slur is rarely applied to white people regardless of political orientation and is exclusively used to reinforce racial stereotypes and police political thought within the black community.”
Parker and Dannenfelser cite articles by columnist Larry Elder, who has pushed back against the racial narrative. Elder notes that, apart from the fact that it is rare for cops to kill anybody, police killed more unarmed whites than blacks from 2016 to 2021. Elder further writes that “African Americans between the ages of 10 and 34 die from homicide at 13 times the rate of white Americans,” and the murderer is “almost always” a young black male. This is the reason, Elder writes, for the “disproportionate” police interaction with blacks.
Elder cites a 2021 paper by Zac Kriegman, who argues that police, fearful of false accusation against them, have refused to engage in proactive policing, leading to an increase in homicides involving mostly black victims. Kreigman was fired by Thompson Reuters when he refused to retract his findings.
Elder maintains that the common thread in fateful encounters with police is resisting arrests. Elder suggests, therefore, that black leaders, rather than stoking racial antagonisms, should emphasize this fact and encourage black suspects to not resist arrest. Parker and Dannenfelser report on the maintenance of calm following two racial incidents in South Carolina, as a result of responsible conduct by community and government leaders, including then Gov. Nikki Haley, as well as by the family members of victims.
The overreach of the Federal Government
One of the themes of “The Weaponization of Race Hurts America” is that the left has “vastly expanded the size and reach of the Federal Government.” Parker and Dannenfelser note that the Great Society programs of the mid-1960s expanded the role of the federal government and to some degree supplanted the responsibilities of families, fathers, churches, and local communities, which are central to overcoming poverty. Subsequently, the welfare reforms of the Clinton administration sought to rebalance responsibilities and elevate recognition of the dignity of work, which led to a reduction in poverty. Parker and Dannenfelser further point out that black American real median income grew by 7.9% in 2019, the third year of the Trump Administration, a record one-year increase. In that year, black poverty fell by 2% to a record low, and black unemployment was at its lowest ever. Black and Hispanic economic progress was disrupted by the pandemic, which has prompted the Biden Administration to erroneously seek to increase the role of the federal government.
I have pointed out in previous commentaries the view of black conservative scholars that the big government approach to poverty continues, in spite of its limited effectiveness in alleviating poverty, because it provides employment to black professionals. (See “Conservative black intellectuals speak: We are responsible for our own community development,” August 5, 2022). For a review of black conservative scholarship, see “Free Black Thought,” May 11, 2021.
In a previous commentary reflecting on the Libertarian Party platform, I have maintained that big government is a flawed economic approach, because social programs that directly benefit the people often increase the market demand without increasing the supply of goods, thus giving rise to inflation and nullifying the intended gain. In contrast to the big government model, socialist governments in China, Korea, Vietnam, and Cuba direct their economies in ways that are designed to stimulate economic productivity. See “Is the Libertarian Party racist? Mutually respectful reasoned discourse is the way,” February 24, 2023.
Where do we go from here?
The CURE Report, “The Weaponization of Race Hurts America,” concludes by quoting Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. The report reminded us of King’s call to black Americans to remember the common destiny of whites and blacks, which many whites have come to recognize, as is evidenced by their presence in the historic 1963 march. King called upon the people at the 1963 March on Washington to work for positive change in their states, churches, and local communities, in the South and in the slums and ghettoes of our Northern cities.
The CURE Report observes that the American people will have to decide in the coming years between two visions, one of division and government manipulation, and another of unity and equal opportunity.
I like what Star Parker says and stands for. I wish I had the influence and the capacity to persuade her to synthesize her insights with a global anti-imperialist perspective. If I could, I would tell her that real socialism today is not opposed to the kind of capitalism that she embraces, a capitalism integrated with personal responsibility, a form a capitalism that played an important role in the achievements of the black middle class in the times of slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow; a form of capitalism advocated by Booker T. Washington and Malcolm X. Indeed, this kind of capitalism is actively encouraged in real socialism today, as an economic activity that contributes to the economic productivity of the nation, and therefore the wellbeing of the people.
And if I could, I would say to Star Parker that Dr. King, especially in 1967, arrived to understand the duty of those who struggle for democracy in America to support the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles of the world. On February 4, 1967, at the Riverside Baptist Church in New York City, Dr. King expressed lament that Western capitalists make profits from their investments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, but are indifferent to the betterment of these countries. He criticized the U.S. alliance with the Latin American landed gentry. He maintained that the United States is on “the wrong side of a world revolution.” Dr. King declared:
These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.
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McKelvey, Charles, The African-American Movement: From Pan-Africanism to the Rainbow Coalition (Dix Hills, NY: General Hall, 1995), Pp. 270-96.
Obama, Barack, The Audacity of Hope (New York: Three Rivers Press, Random House, 2006), P. 315.