Ep. 25 – The Contradictions of Barak Obama’s Presidency: A Conversation with Dr. Ricky Jones

[0:00:07 Peniel] Welcome to race and democracy. A podcast on the intersection between race, democracy, public policy, social justice and citizenship. Welcome to race in democracy. We have an extra special guest today, my friend and brother, Dr Ricky Jones, who is professor and chair department of Pan African Studies at the University of Louisville and who is a political scientist. Black studies scholar, author of many books, including What’s Wrong with Obama Mania, Black America, Black Leadership and the Death of Political Imagination. Uh, Dr Jones, Welcome to race and democracy.

[0:00:49 Ricky] Thanks, man. It’s always good to hang out with Jubran Me Always good to hang out with you. I’ve gotta admit,

[0:00:54 Peniel] you know, Ricky was one of the prescient scholars and people about the contradictions of Barack Obama in the 7 4008 period, including both with this book, What’s wrong with Obama mania about in his presentations? You know, radio interviews in public lectures where it’s not that he castigated Barack Obama, but he was very, very, uh, critically conscious of what kind of contradictions and limits a black president might have because of structures of neo liberalism that went beyond Barack Obama and that went beyond sort of the moral hopes and moral imagination and dreams of black people. I want to say that from outset.

[0:01:42 Ricky] Oh, that’s nice. Your man. And I love you too much. I love you too much to tell you I told you so. But yet there were structural analyses there. But also for me it was a look at what type of brother Barack Waas and is. And, you know, we were in that moment, 7 4000 where you know there was there was almost worship of Barack. And there is a difference that I have to say this again. I’ve been saying that, you know, for the last 10 11 years there’s a difference between Barack Obama and Obama mania. You know, I remember when this book first came out and we were together. I’ll never forget it. We were in Birmingham together, and ah, woman came up during the book signing and she picked the book up and says to me, What’s wrong with what’s wrong with Obama mania? And I say, Yes, ma’am. And she said, Well, I can tell you what’s wrong with Obama mania, and I was like, What’s that and she said absolutely nothing Through the book down, you know, you could have any reasonable conversation with people on that. But if you look, if you looked at the development of Iraq, you know from Puma how you know, to Occidental Columbia toe Harvin in early in his political career, you knew he was a hard working, really, really smart politician. But he wasn’t a savior. I don’t think that’s something that he aspired to be. He’s a pragmatist. He wants to see if something is workable. And, you know, I’m really interested right now. Looking at ill handle Maher, who is what we thought for rock would be, You know there’s a Brock, your must know, not Muslim. She actually it’s of a Brock. Your radical Omar actually is. So that’s that. That’s the next thing that I’m really, really interested in seeing how it develops, and that’s what I

[0:03:22 Peniel] want to talk to you. But I want to talk to about 19 4020 reparations. The Democratic presidential primaries. These candidates certainly the way in which Iran and AOC Alexandria Ocasio has really, um, transformed a debate talking about green New deal, but also when we think about issues of black lives matter how they’ve transformed Democratic discourse. The gubernatorial runs by Stacey Abrams in Georgia. Andrew Gillum in Florida in defeat. How they have transformed it. Certainly in Stacey Abrams case. An election that was pretty much stolen, Um, by by the secretary of state and Brian Kemp, the now governor, Um, and really the shadow of Barack Hussein Obama. I want to talk about that as well, because I’ve had a chance to meet Michelle Obama. She’s been on the book tour, becoming I’ve been I’ve read that. I think Michelle Obama’s fabulous Valerie Jarrett has a memoir finding my voice. But Barack Obama, um, has been very vocal of late, saying he doesn’t want the Democratic primary process to be, ah, case of self inflicted wounds on the party, where, like he often says, the enemy perfect, this quest for perfect should never be the enemy of the good right And that that these folks who are on the progressive side of the Democratic Ah, primary debates when we’re thinking about Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, um, Alexandria Ocasio quartets, just these folks, Ilan, um, will sort of, he said, a circular fire squad of semi circular fires, and we just sort of eat each other, cannibalize each other’s ideas and then lose in the 2020 against Trump’s. I want to talk about all of that. And where are we at right now?

[0:05:18 Ricky] How long do we have today? Wear

[0:05:22 Peniel] reparations to the fact that I think it’s extraordinary that people are talking about saying they either support reparations or support the bill. By John Conyers HR 42 to study reparations. Congressional

[0:05:34 Ricky] E Okay, let’s see what we started. Let’s start with ideas like reparations. Let’s start with realities like voter suppression all of these things when you look at what went on with with Stacey Abrams. But these are older ideas that are now being popularised because off one public debate but also public conflict. You know, George’s my home State? I’m in Atlanta. Native Stacey Abrams went to Spelman. Of course, I graduated Will not, of course, but I’m a Morehouse graduate. She’s the LBJ Masters degree graduate. I didn’t know she went to school. YouTube. That’s cool. Um, but what we saw in that race has been happening to black people since 18 70 you know, since the passage of the 15th Amendment that they gave black men in a Does Your Away the right to vote. We’ve always had voter suppression going on in black communities, and it is still going on. So what was not interesting, which was what was understandable because black people are suffering so much and not able to pay attention to a lot of these things in ways that scholars often do. They just saw a stark example of a person in the person of Brian Kemp who is running an office where his office is literally counting the votes in an election of which he is a part of. And he is making decisions on that vote tally and how things are administered. I mean, it was it was stark. It was just blatant, so people had to talk about it, but that was already there. Ideas about reparations. When you talk about studying, we all need to study more, right? I think How do we take these issues that that that scholars like you and I are looking at is a part of our life world, but transfer those make those digest a ble for everyday people and I think the problem that we quite often have in the academy. We get so full of ourselves with convoluted language and ego stroking that, you know, we will write stuff and kick speeches out that, like 10 other people can even understand, let alone be interested in. But how can we translate that where everyday people are interested in and they can digest it and try to change? And I think that’s happened with reparation. And that’s what started toe happen, right? So reparations. And I want to be quick so we can move to other other points. The very elementary engagement of reparations is this idea that, you know, black people are gonna be given checks. You know, you’re gonna get your reparation like it’s some episode of the Dave Chappelle Show. But you know, there so many different ways to approach this. If you talk about reparations, like for me, one idea, just one, not certainly not the totality of things that can happen if education is the bet. Rock off, you know, achievement of you moving to a different status in our society. What if what if for 75 years, for 75 years, if you can prove that you you got some black in you. You go to college for free. What do we do that that to me, that’s a form of reparations. That’s not just giving somebody a check, but it’s giving him some opportunity. And we have a whole lot more people claiming that they’re black. I’m sure, you know, rowing, crew and playing lacrosse and all kinds of things that Harvard,

[0:08:50 Peniel] Yale, Stanford, USC. So the reparations discourse is very interesting for me, especially away from just a specific check but trying to transform inequality, especially economic inequality, trying to transform segregated spaces to not just racially integrated spaces but the healthy spaces way See gentrification in Washington, D. C. We see gentrification in downtown Brooklyn, New York, where you bring white wealth and white bodies into a space. But the black people have been previously in this segregated space when it was under resourced, are pushed out so they don’t get to enjoy the spoils of sort of neo liberalism in that sense. So when I think about reparations and the presidential election forthcoming in 2020 I think about this idea of citizenship and even this idea of 16 19 to 2019 400 years in terms of racial slavery in North America. Citizenship. How? How can we talk about black citizenship and inject that into this contemporary debate over whether you’re talking about mass incarceration or employment or healthcare or reparations? I definitely see what some of the newer members of Congress like I on a Presley. These air women aoc, Ilan, Muslim Latina, black. They’re really pushing this idea of both black and sort of third World multiracial, multicultural citizenship.

[0:10:20 Ricky] And, you know, I think what is what is encouraging about them, what is beautiful about them, And this is where I will take issue with President Obama. Those sisters are swinging for the fences. I mean, they’re swinging for the fences. They have no limits on their sociopolitical imaginations. They’re not willing to step in a system that they know was not designed for them and rules that were constructed to not only not benefit them, but to tax them and follow those rules and continue to re if I that system. So their political approach is different. You know, they are trying to disrupt that system in any way that they can because they understand that system only benefits a few that moves us from questions, not just questions of citizenship, but also to questions of humanity. Right. So when you talk about reparations, certainly something needs to be repaired. When you look at black communities from L. A. To Atlanta to New York, the question becomes, Why is this repair needed? Right. So is there something that has happened to black people in this country structurally, that has broken their backs for hundreds of years? Or are they just individual bad actors? And when you really look at the numbers, either something structural has been going on that has been very deliberate, very inhumane and very vicious, or were the worst people that God has ever put on the face of the earth. Now I chose the first option. I think something structural has gone on. So when you talk about their repair there, how do you go about it? Do you play by the rules that have always been put in place by people who have not had your best interests at heart? Or do you try to change that game? So I don’t necessarily think that progressive thinkers aligning themselves up in a circular firing squad and blowing each other out of the water. I think they’re doing what we do in the academy. We’re open to debate. You bring your ideas out there, you put him out there in the marketplace of ideas and you open them up for torture. Everybody’s going back and forth, right? And I think that can make a stronger if

[0:12:34 Peniel] it’s done properly. And now I want you to talk about those debates. I want you to talk about everything from immigration right to health care to all these big Medicare for all reparations, ending mass incarceration, but really transforming the entire criminal justice system. Which the BLM policy agenda? Because so much of what I’m excited about the Democratic debate is focused on is policy, cause you’re my policy guru. You’ve always talked about this. You’re a political scientist, but that when we think about these freedom struggles were saying, How can we change these policies, whether it’s money, bail, whether we see the DOJ report about Ferguson and what happened in Ferguson and I have that right here in my office, what’s so exciting is thes policy debates and transformations, but we need to get those policy debates. We need toe win elections. And you always talked about this winning elections statewide and locally and not just getting obsessed with the federal. You always talked about that. That’s under Obama. Democrats had more losses in an eight year period than then ever through the 20th century, and that some of that starting to be built up we saw in the midterms is the midterm with the midterms results that we saw with Democrats getting the House of Representatives. Is that a progressive BlueWave? What is it can that be? This was the biggest turnout since 1970 in a midterm election, and Democrats came out in even larger numbers than Republicans by millions of votes. Where do we go from here? Not just 2020 federal, but I mean granular early, taking back state houses, local city councils, winning judgeships in places where judges are elected like Texas. Where do we go from here? See it

[0:14:20 Ricky] now. That’s where you’re digging into the weeds. That very important weeks, when you talk about Republicans controlling the majority of the governorships controlling the majority of the state houses, you’re seeing them be ableto key times control the Federal House so they can deal with it with redistrict, redistricting and reapportionment. They can handle all of these things. They can stack the courts. That’s driving everything I think, to try to distill a very complex question that you asked. I think it’s really important that we make policy personal. How can you translate? You talk about health care, right? My oldest friend, Carrie Normal, who grew up with in south southwest Atlanta, has sickle cell. So he’s had to deal with the health care system all his life. When he was born, doctors didn’t think he lived past 16. Thank God. You know, he will hit 52 this year. But he deals with the health care system, so he understands it. We need to talk to people and say, Look, if you’ve got a loved one, what is your brother, your sister? Your father, your mother, you close friend, cousin or child? And you’re dealing with this. How does this impact you? In this case, right when you’re talking about incarceration, look black. Me and 45% of population make up almost half the jail in prison. Population. This country that’s touching a whole lot of people stuck in a whole lot of people you talk about, um, law enforcement, how black people are dealing with agents of the state, and you can open your case That always hits me. Is the case of Tamir Rice, include, I mean, that a 12 year old child who is executed within seconds of the police arrive and then the city of Cleveland, saying he was largely responsible for his own death. There is a racial element to that as we see black men, women and Children killed all over this country, and usually quite often nobody pays a price for it. So the question for me is, Are we really free? If we’re not able to impact those situations and turned that tide, are we really in Ah country that that that that functions along lines of justice if those things are happening disproportionately to black people and other people of color? And what can we do to turn that? And so I don’t think we can just be policy wonks because that’s inaccessible to people, but we can certainly talk. If we could just talk about law enforcement, that might not resonate. But we could certainly talk to black parents. How can we keep your Children safe? Right? We can’t just talk about policy with health care, but we can talk to people about their family and friends. How can we keep these people alive? Those are very important things.

[0:17:04 Peniel] I want to talk to you about black voters in the Democratic Party, black women and the Democrats. We would go black men in the Democratic Party and the fact that we have activists like Shaun King who really pushed people like not just Bernie Sanders, but those newly elected in Congress to diversify their chiefs of staff. We have the most diverse chiefs of staffs in the history right now of the U. S. Senate because of work that activists are doing saying that you can’t just take the votes of predominately black women and black men. But black women are the single best Democratic voter on the planet Earth right now, right? You can’t just take their votes and not have even if you’re a white candidate, not have a staff that looks like the people are voting for you, right? And so I want to ask you about that and the fact that. It seems to me the level of black activism right now is just getting increasingly more sophisticated and more potent and effective in a way that, quite honestly, me as a student of politics in history. I have learned so much from seeing it at this granular level in ways that I hadn’t thought about before as a historian, an activist that I think is quite remarkable, and it’s gonna be very, very effective as we move forward. But when we think about the Democratic Party right now, the only two African Americans running for president, um, well, there’s three running for president because, ah, uh, Nina, who’s the um State former state senator out of Ohio is also what Nina Turner is running for president. So is Nina Turner. She’s not been getting a lot of publicity. Kamila Harris, who has been getting a lot of publicity senator out of California, and Cory Booker said it out of New Jersey. So we have three. But what do you say in terms of with A with a Democratic party that needs black votes as much as they do? Should an African American being on the ticket? If an African American is not on the ticket. What does the party? Oh, black people? Because we know if the party is elected in 2020 black people are gonna be a huge part, just like we see Doug Jones. Black women voted for Doug Jones in a special election in Alabama at a 98% clip. 98%. So what are we owed? If if we do, wake up January 20th 2021 there’s not only a Democratic president but a Democratic president who can pass laws. Senate, House of Representatives, What’s the black agenda have to look like?

[0:19:35 Ricky] Right. OK, there a few things here, and these are important conversations like you talk about the Democratic turnout in the recent midterms, an argument could be made that the Republican Party at this juncture has overplayed its hand. I mean, when you see what’s coming out of the White House, it is very difficult. Toe argue that the ideas emanating from a person like Stephen Miller and others who have been in this White House when when you talk about immigration and race that these people are leaning towards preferring a white ethno state, it is difficult to get away from that reality now. But a question for me is not just about Donald Trump in the people in his orbit. But what does this say about America? Because you have a good percentage of people who are supporting him and they’re supporting that agenda. They went out and voted for him in 2016 and in a reasonable world, there is no way this man will be re elected in two in 2020. But in America as we know it, he just might now moving beyond so So it’s difficult to avoid what these people are, and that has motivated a lot of folk. I think to say, Wait a minute. We got to do something about this so focal going out and participating out to the Democrats. This is a conversation that many of us have been pushing for for quite some time because since 1960 black people have been the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituency. Okay, so we don’t just have to talk about race. We need to talk about Let’s talk about pragmatic politics there. If we are the people who unfailingly vote in the 90th percentile for the Democratic Party, and they’re not getting that from others. Then you dog on right. Something is owed to the black community. You dog on right. The Democratic Party needs to talk about, Ah, disproportionate incarceration. They need to talk about underemployment and unemployment among black people. They need to talk about educational failures where black communities are concerned. They need to talk about police brutality where black communities are concerned. They need to talk about higher rates of infant mortality and shorter life spans. So from the cradle to the grave, were being impacted by the world in which we live in the Democratic Party. Need to talk about that? I had a conversation a few years ago when Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, and a white sister says, You know, Dr Jones. She was almost in tears. She’s like, what happened? Why did women abandon Hillary? And I’m like, That’s a bad question. Black women voted well over 90% 4. Hillary Justus. They do in most elections where the Democratic Party puts ah candidate out there, do we think is halfway decent. Over half of white women 53 54% voted for Donald Trump, so The question is, why did white women abandon Hillary Clinton? And so I think again to not be too long about it. Democratic politicians. Every 246 years they got the black community has to stop allowing them to treat us like shameful mistresses that they come visit at two oclock in the morning, right? They run into our black churches during election season. Get those black votes from black women and black men, and then once they get into office, they pay very little attention to what’s going on with us. And I include Obama. That’s another conversation. But it can certainly be argued that well, you look, you ask black people. Did Obama do what they thought he was going to do? Did he pay attention to the black community in ways that people thought he wouldn’t? I’m not saying that Barack Obama was a bad president. I’m simply saying that the ills the black community was were suffering got very little attention paid to now people who are still, you know, beating that Obama Trump will say, Well, he couldn’t do this and he couldn’t do this. He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t do that well okay while you hold in. Donald Trump’s so responsible for things that are going on. You know you can’t have that both ways, right? You can’t have that both ways. So surely they’re black politicians that do not pay attention to black communities.

[0:23:52 Peniel] Final question. 2020. Where do you see? How do you see that race shaping up in 2020 especially when it comes to black issues on and race in 2020?

[0:24:05 Ricky] You know, this one isn’t clear to me as it was in the past, even even when you look a, we’re not seeing black politicians who are ness who necessarily subscribe to black health and well being. You know, there’s some serious questions that need to be asked of off sister Camilla Harris about her time as a prosecutor in California. You know, there’s some questions that need to be asked of brother Cory Booker right about his interaction with folk in in in Jersey, and certainly we have to ask questions of every white politician as well. So for me, I’ll close with this if if you got a white politician that is more down with the needs of the African American community than a black politician who may be behaving like a Clarence Thomas, and I’m not saying that book prayers because they’re not. But those are the extremes. I’m gonna take the white politician. Why would not?

[0:25:04 Peniel] We will end it there. Dr. Ricky Jones, who is professor and chair of the department of Pan African Studies at the University of Louisville and the author of several books, including What’s now classic. What’s Wrong with Obama Mania. Black America. Black Leadership in the Death of Political Imagination. Ricky, Thank you for being Here

[0:25:25 Ricky] Always Good to Hang With you, man. Much Love to You

[0:25:28 Peniel] Thanks for listening to this episode and you can check out related content on Twitter at Peniel Joseph. That’s P-e-n-i-e-l  J-o-s-e-p-h and our Web site, CSRD.LBJ.utexas.edu and the Center for Study of Race and Democracy is on Facebook as well. This podcast was recorded at the Liberal Arts Development Studio at the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Texas at Austin. Thank you.