infantile raciality

Barack Obama has delivered the great race speech of 2008. One pundit (Sally Quinn) declared on MSNBC that Obama's speech was the most important contribution to racial dialogue since M. L. King Jr.'s "I have a dream" speech of 1963. Obama, as usual, did weave together personal narrative with political and social dilemmas, and sounded the community organizer's call for Oneness in the face of a more powerful Other: corporations, lobbyists, terrorists, and the disembodied threat of ecological catastrophe. The most striking element, however, was his effort to work through the psychological issue of anger on both sides of the racial divide. More Oprah than Dr. Phil, Obama situates himself as a vessel of, and agent for, racial healing; as an exemplary person for extraordinary times. The religious (in the Durkheimian sense) dimension of Obama's candidacy is no less palpable than the materialist (in the Marxist sense) opposition that arises from the Clinton campaign. The choice is clear: the mission of national renewal versus the fight for redistributive policies within a recessionary capitalist market.

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The boldest implication of Obama's speech is that his candidacy offers the possibility of mass psychoanalysis, a therapeutic treatment for America's infantile raciality. The ressentiment of the dispossessed, referencing concrete hurts and frustrations, seeks out -- in an animistic style of thought -- invisible forces in the social world which are perceived to be the source of dispossession. Race is just such a force, a malevolent god or spirit that works to thwart (or facilitate) the pleasure of specific groups, that is, the satisfaction of needs that are both physical and emotional: material wealth and social recognition (i.e., status honour). To race is attributed an amazing capacity of creation of groups, motives and consequences of action; success and failure is legitimated or disqualified by this idea. This is no less a miracle than the transubstantiation accomplished during the Catholic communion: blessed wine and wafers become the blood and body of Christ; different degrees of melanin function as a cosmological explanation of reality, the invisible yet visible hand shaping individual fate. What Obama suggests is no less radical than the Copernican turn in Western science: geocentrism and raciocentrism can be replaced through a shift in perspective. However, like ressentiment for the Father's disposession of the son's unmediated access to the Mother, it is not easy to give up racial anger; hence, sexual development and social development is "arrested" or, more properly stated, fixated in an anal stage, an infantile stage. Pain and anger become substitutes for the lost Mother or forestalled social achievements, they become the object-cathexis of the resentful child and the resentful adult. It is as if the child-adult or adult-child says you've taken away what I should have by right, so this is all I have left, my anger, my suffering, and I won't let that be taken away. This anger is mine and you can't have it! 

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Whether a public official can facilitate this working through of past pain is uncertain (Mandela comes to mind as one such person whose success in this area -- in South Africa -- remains uncertain). The cause remains noble even if a tragic mode of emplotment seems the likely outcome of the story. This is the risky path Obama has chosen, however: to stand for a missionary purpose while needing to engage in mundane worldly activities. Obama's candidacy stands as a sort of test of Durkheim and Weber: are the sacred and profane radically opposed (Durkheim) or can an affinity exist between other-worldly (in the sense of transcendent) goals and this-worldly intensive activity. 

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art object credit: The Great Chain of Being from Rhetorica Christiana by Didacus Valades, 1579