Writing for the New York Times on Saturday, Harvard Law graduate Derecka Purnell derided former President Barack Obama as a race betrayer. Obama’s challenging of young black men to take more responsibility for their own better lives, Purnell says, makes “clear Mr. Obama’s chains still bind him.”
Purnell’s implication: By speaking on race outside of a priority focus on victimhood, Obama is a slave to racism.
Sorry, but it’s clear that Purnell is the only one making a racist argument here. We see this in her fallacious attempts to present Obama as a servant to white injustices.
“Black families were hit the hardest during the financial crisis,” Purnell says, while ignoring the unprecedented economic benefits they have enjoyed under the Trump administration. Purnell laments that Obama condemned protesters in Ferguson and Baltimore who were “resisting police violence with rocks, not the police officers whom the protesters were rightly defending themselves against.” Referencing one study, but ignoring other statistics which speak to the devastating effects of mass out of wedlock births in the black community, Purnell is aggravated that Obama “criticized absent fathers.” Obama is apparently even immoral when it comes to professional deportment: “Rather than encouraging them to dismantle the systems that deepen wealth inequality, Mr. Obama tells black boys to tuck their chains.”
This is a triumph of emotional, unfair analysis. Whatever one thinks of the police conduct at Baltimore and Ferguson, is there any doubt that innocents were harmed by some protesters, businesses burned, and police officers attacked? Is there seriously any doubt that too many black children don’t see their fathers enough? Is there any doubt that it’s better to wear a suit to an interview rather than chains or a backwards baseball cap? Of course there isn’t.
But Purnell doesn’t simply say it is immoral to articulate these realities; she says its racial treason. She presents Obama as a slave to the system. In doing so, Purnell does exactly that which she claims to oppose: she endorses a racist trope. She promotes the idea that challenging victimhood as the primary mechanism for social change is an act of racial treason — a choice by black Americans to “still bind” themselves to the chains.
Purnell is badly wrong. Whatever you think of Obama’s politics or presidency, he is no slave to white orthodoxy. What’s more, there is nothing “white” about personal responsibility. Purnell embraces racism when she claims as much.
