Obama Advises Black Activists at Howard University to Trade Blowhorns for Ballots
Contrary to the President’s opinion, Black Lives Matter’s tactics are more potent than traditional politics.
President Obama has been sneak dissing the political strategy of the Black Lives Matter movement for weeks now. At a townhall meeting in April, he briefly prodded activists to shift from protest to politics telling organizers that if they want to create change they “can’t just keep yelling.” But last weekend in his commencement speech at Howard University, a historically black institution, Obama dug in and critiqued the movement’s tactics directly and at length.
“You have to go through life with more than just passion for change,” He said beginning his dissent, “you need a strategy. I’ll repeat that. I want you to have passion, but you have to have a strategy. Not just awareness, but action. Not just hashtags, but votes.”
He briefly acknowledged organizers successful protest before continuing to chide them for not translating their momentum into political compromise.
“It is thanks to the activism of young people like many of you, from Black Twitter to Black Lives Matter, that America’s eyes have been opened — white, black, Democrat, Republican — to the real problems, for example, in our criminal justice system. But to bring about structural change, lasting change, awareness is not enough. It requires changes in law, changes in custom.”
As the speech progressed, Obama continued to chastise black students for their protest of conservative speakers, their low voter turnout, and their unwillingness to compromise with policymakers. He concluded by saying that if young black activists would roll up their sleeves and dig into electoral politics, they would be well on their way to achieving the racial equality they seek.
The crowd applauded as Obama closed, but as the sound of his voice faded, the speech’s misguided logic continued to echo.
Obama’s assertion that black activists are disengaged in traditional politics is a gross misnomer. Data shows that young blacks today are as likely to vote as their white counterparts and, with forty-six members of Congress, a black president, a black attorney general, and thousands of black state and local officials, African Americans are engaged and well represented in government.
However, these electoral politics, which Obama has so heavily endorsed, have done very little to improve black lives. “As the number of black elected officials has a grown the actual living conditions, economic conditions of the vast majority of black people have either stay the same or stagnated,” says Princeton African American Studies Professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. “And that matters in response to the argument that access somehow leads to the improvement of the conditions of ordinary people… It draws scrutiny and raises questions about the political strategy of electoral politics.”
Contrasting the lackluster record of black politicians is the success of Black Lives protesters. “We can say with confidence there’s been more awareness and movement on the question of police terrorism in the last year-and-a-half because of the movement, than there has in the last several decades without a movement, and with a growing number of black elected officials getting into office,” concludes Keeanga-Yamahtta.
Hashtags, passion, uprisings — have all coalesced into a political climate where tangible gains for racial equality are possible. Protesters have achieved what black politicians have not, precisely because the activists embrace unorthodox methods, and Obama’s emphasis on shifting to traditional politics stand to taper the movement’s momentum. Ultimately, asking protesters to prioritize negotiating with police and politicians understates both the scope of racism and the movement’s ambitions to defeat it.
The friction between blacks and the criminal justice system is not rooted in a lack of diversity, sensitivity training, or body cameras as politicians would have the American people to believe; rather, the heart of the tension lies in the decades-long social crisis that has plagued the black community.
By the late 1960's, racial discrimination and exploitation in housing, education, and employment had inflated black America’s poverty and drained their economic vitality. Yet instead of reinvigorating black’s underfunded schools and abysmal job markets with broad investments in public and private goods, the state chose to finance the creation of the Prison Industrial Complex. In doing so, legislators birthed the sprawling network of racially biased jails, courts, and law enforcement agencies that 50 years later, have robbed millions of blacks of life and liberty.
The goal of the Black Lives Matter movement is to get black people free, not just from police violence, but free from the economic violence that makes a police state necessary. Achieving this liberation will require extending civic life beyond elections and narrow discussions of police reform towards a transformation in how we engage race in American society.
“If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done,” goes the saying, and hopeful Black Lives Matter protesters and their innovative and impassioned activism, can help secure something America has never had — racial equality.
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