Barack Obama’s Burning Heritage

On April 4, 1968, he was on the balcony of the Motel Lorraine, Memphis, where he was assassinated by an ex-convict. And forty years later, Jesse Jackson, the untiring militant of the Black cause, is entirely positive that if Martin Luther King was still alive today he would call for the end of war with Iraq. He would demand the transfer of the 1,000 billion dollars that the conflict has cost into another war at home,a war against poverty. He would call for the application of civic and property rights. He would demand assistance from the government to protect home owners during the mortgage crisis. He would push for equality, quality education, and health care for all Americans.

This manner of extrapolating Dr. King’s message in the form of a political program is not at all unfounded. In Jesse Jackson’s eyes, the heir of the dream and the battle is none other than Barack Obama, the multiracial Democratic candidate, who defends a similar ideal himself. America has perhaps never witnessed such a return to this political figure. Martin Luther King is omnipresent in these times and in the political debate in the United States. Nobel Peace Prize winner, key figure in the struggle with segregation, Reverend King has certainly held the position as an insurmountable hero. But today, followed by millions of people and bringing together blacks and whites in the same movement, Barack Obama is positioning himself more and more explicitly as an incarnation of the same values and hopes.

However, never has the fervor that drives Americans to honor Martin Luther King through Obama appeared so ambiguous. And the end of the 60’s, it was another pastor, James Cone, who invented the concept of “black liberation theology”. Today a professor in New York, Cone also sees a direct link between Martin Luther King’s teachings and Barack Obama’s discourses. But this link, he explains, equally surpasses other heirs of the struggle against segregation that Americans “don’t want to see”. “The only option we have as blacks is to fight by every means possible,” he explained, “so that we can believe in a definition of liberty based on our own culture. We don’t need to wait for the liberty to be given to us by whites. Liberty is not a gift, but a responsibility.” The tone is strong. And for forty years, it hasn’t stopped being. Among other heirs that Professor Cone speaks about: Jeremiah Wright, the figure of the Trinity Church who was Obama’s former pastor.

Played in loops on TV, Pastor Wright’s inflaming sermons have scandalized a good part of the United States. Pastor Wright put the blame on America and its “state terrorism” first to explain the attacks of 9/11. An intolerable message. As was Martin Luther King’s message during his time in reference to another war, Vietnam, of which he was an increasingly fierce opponent of, saying: “We are criminals in this war,” he explained to his parishioners in Alabama a few months before his assassination, “we have committed more war crimes than practically any other nation in the world. But God knows how to put nations back in the place.” A curse that Pastor Wright would not have disavowed.

Traditionally it is in the churches, the only place free of segregation at that time, that the torch was passed to black Americans and where this type of discourse continued to flourish. Coming from a black father and a white mother, Obama was nourished by it for years. But his multiracial origins have helped him to avoid falling into that trap. His intelligence and his sincerity have done the rest: two weeks ago the Democratic candidate gave a fantastic speech that silenced even his most resolute political adversaries. He explained the motives of his pastor without justifying them. He made if not acceptable, at least comprehensible.

“In this Church,” he said, referring to the Trinity Church, “there is all the gentleness and all the cruelty, ardent intelligence and shocking ignorance, struggles and successes, love, and yes, bitterness and the prejudices that form the black American experience.” It was the discourse of a generation, no more and no less. The result of an America that refuses to honestly look into the mistakes of is past and on its injustices. It is the equivalent, forty years later, of the famous “I have a dream” speech of his illustrious predecessor.

The injustices remain deep. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center in Washington, the median income of black Americans only amounts to 61% of that of whites, and that figure has been on the decline for ten years. Only 20% of blacks say that they live better now than five years ago (that proportion is double among the white population). African-Americans live on average six years less than whites, and they are more plentiful in prison than in the higher education system. One situation that makes them particularly pessimistic: a majority of them think that there will be no improvement for them in the foreseeable future. At least, they say, the situation won’t be any worse than today.

Martin Luther King’s dream has therefore yet to be realized. But like many others, Jesse Jackson seems to be willing to allow himself to go along with the hope that the Democratic candidate is raising for his endorsement: “Barack Obama is on his way to winning over delegates and the popular vote. It’s a part of the promised land that one catches a glimpse of behind the summit of the mountain.”