Charles Johnson: on the meaning of Obama

There are lingering problems, and I’m sure Obama is acutely aware of all of them. And he can’t solve them. What he has to do is solve the economic problem, first and foremost, which affects everybody. If people don’t have jobs, you have a serious problem. If you lose your job, then you’re going to lose your home because you can’t make payments. There have to be jobs so people can pay their bills.

But there are deeper problems that affect the black community right now. I talked about women who are black who are doing better professionally than males. Seventy percent of professional black women are single. A black woman professional who reaches the age of 40 has five times the likelihood of remaining single than her white counterpart. A female professional doesn’t want a man who doesn’t have an education or a job. They look at the Obamas with tremendous admiration. They’d like to have a Barack in their lives just like Michelle does as a professional black woman.

But you do not solve that problem until you solve the problem of 70 percent of black children being born out of wedlock and 50 percent of them being raised in fatherless homes. You do not solve these problems until you solve the problem of the black family and its dissolution, and because the families dissolve the communities dissolve. It’s a problem of young black male culture. I know what it is. August Wilson knew what it was, and we had to figure out how we were going to deal with it, so we didn’t wind up dead at 20 years old or in prison or with a criminal record. It’s a matter of the choices you make. As you have people in your life that you admire, like my dad, my mom, then you have a different direction you might take.

Obama gave that talk on Fathers’ Day last year at a church in Chicago about better parenting and black responsibility. He was basically taking a page from the playbook of Bill Cosby, and Jesse Jackson was furious with him and got caught on the air saying he wanted to cut [Obama’s] nuts off for talking down to Ns, and he used the N word. So we [need] more honesty and not illusions.

One of the things that has to be addressed seriously is the dysteleological behavior in black male culture. At a community college in the South three young black women asked me “Mr. Johnson, what’s wrong with these young black men?” I said, “I know what you’re talking about, but I don’t know what the solution is.” They were so frustrated.

RL: What were these young women seeing in young black men?

CJ: They were seeing guys who just want to get over and get laid. They were seeing guys who do drugs or sell drugs. They were seeing guys who didn’t have their values, like valuing an education. They wanted guys they could feel good about, but they didn’t have that, which is sad.

I have talked about that in many essays, and people don’t want you to talk about it. King would talk about it, and people would say, “You’re airing dirty laundry. Don’t talk about that. Talk about what the white man is doing to us. Talk about the external problem, not this internal problem.” King said, “You have to have a battle waged on two fronts. One is the external battle to get rid of the things that keep black people down, segregation and [those issues], and one is the internal battle to raise our own standards.” He said, “You don’t win this war unless you have the battle on these two fronts because one supports the other.”

You look at Obama and have to ask, if you don’t want this guy as the first black president, who do you want? The guy’s a Harvard graduate, the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. And he’s excellent. And that’s King’s point. We have to be excellent. We cannot afford to be mediocre. And if that’s the case, you beat down any argument a racist can come at you with [because] it’s obviously a lie in the case of Obama or Michelle or any of the people he’s drawn to his orbit.

RL: Both King and Obama stressed the interrelatedness of all people. King spoke of an “inescapable network of mutuality," a view that lifts everyone.

CJ: Yes, and I think [Obama] is very conscious of that because it’s so deeply written into his own biography. With a white mother, a black father, an Indonesian stepfather and Indonesian half-sister and relatives in Kenya, this is a guy who is biologically sensitive to our diversity. He’s a perfect person to lead us into the twenty-first century if those are our ideals, and I think they are.