Barack Obama, Tiger Woods and the Lynching Wars

By Imani Perry
Guest Contributor

Recently Kelly Tilghman, an anchor on The Golf Channel, was suspended for two weeks for saying that young golfers who want to challenge Tiger Woods should "lynch him in a back alley." Tiger Woods response was essentially a non-response, saying he didn't believe there was any "ill intent" behind the statement.

With respect to whether there was an injury to Tiger Woods, I'll take his word that he wasn't offended or wounded by the comment. But there are many others besides Woods for whom the imagery of lynching cannot be divorced from a history of racial violence as evidenced by the activism that followed the case of the Jena 6.

In the late 19th century Ida B. Wells, the courageous anti-lynching activist, revealed in her book "A Red Record" that lynching was often a punishment for African Americans who aspired to excellence or economic prosperity. It was a warning to African Americans to stay in their place. So to this listener, a joke about "taking down" Tiger Woods as one of the greatest golfers in recent history by lynching, really isn't funny.

And there's something very instructive about the fact that this episode comes in the middle of a presidential campaign in which the two democratic front-runners, a biracial African American man and a former first lady to a man sometimes referred to (tongue in cheek) as America's first black president, are engaged in a nervous yet aggressive back and forth over the politics of race and the race of politics.

After the Iowa caucuses media pundits lauded the nation and Obama by repeatedly stating some version of "See, Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and the like will be put out of business now, the country will vote for a black candidate, we're beyond race" and "Isn't it wonderful that Obama doesn't talk about race?"

The fact that Obama doesn't talk about race in his stump speeches hardly means that it isn't a major theme in the campaign and in the United States, just as the fact that Tiger wasn't offended by the lynching reference doesn't mean that it isn't offensive to many people of many races. Perhaps Obama's multiracial, multicultural, multinational experience has made him more optimistic about the prospect of "getting beyond" race than the majority of black Americans, and perhaps those experiences have made him more willing to collaborate with people of color than the majority of white Americans. But his experience is unusual.

Recently the Clinton's have brought out their civil rights generation power-brokering black friends, for example Bob Johnson the founder of BET, as public figures to fight with the Obama camp. In the popular media, affluent, successful black people are at odds over who should be the democratic presidential nominee and, more importantly, what is offensive and racist and what is not.

This shouldn't be surprising. Diversity of political and social thought amongst all classes of Black people have been present throughout U.S. history despite the way pundits and the constricting forces of the two party system and corporate media have made us seem. The danger in this moment is that these figures: Sharpton, Jackson, Woods, Obama, Johnson (disturbingly all men) are not imagined as appropriately diverse voices from a diverse community. Instead they are locked in competitions over who gets to be "the voice" of how Black people are or should be.

The answer isn't for us to all act like Tiger Woods or Barack Obama and then racism would disappear. It's a far more complicated problem than that and besides we shouldn't be required to be clean cut Harvard grads, world class golfers or multiracial citizens in order to be incorporated into the American dream. But it also isn't the case that Bob Johnson (who is responsible for the proliferation of some of the most oppressive images of Black women in the 20th century) or Al Sharpton should be assumed to speak for the majority. They too have exceptional and privileged experiences vis a vis the majority of black people and it should not be assumed they "know" what black people think" especially given that we think a lot of different things. If we take, for example, the politically progressive Chicago minister Jeremiah Wright and the socially conservative prosperity gospel Dallas based minister T.D. Jakes, who each have thousands of parishioners, we can see actual constituencies in black America with very different schools of thought.

In sum, however, I hope that we (and here I mean all of the residents of the United States) aren't duped by the cult of personality and the operations of celebrity when we evaluate race in the U.S. Instead let's look at imprisonment, educational inequality, history, residential segregation, wealth gaps, employment gaps, health disparities, and evidence of a lot of unconscious or unstated racial animus that is being found in psychology research. With that perspective, it is hard to argue that notwithstanding the greatest golfer and the prospect of the first black president, that race doesn't matter. It clearly does.

Imani Perry is a professor of law at Rutgers School of Law-Camden, and a visiting professor at Princeton's Center for African American Studies.

Comments

[frish]

Obama will win because voters will think he's Tiger...whom they think they know and like...

That's the 2008 estimation of the Sophistication of the American Voting Public...

[Barbara D. Eggerson]

Could not have said it better! Thanks

[Wil Ford]

Ida B. Wells, Barack Obama, Tiger Woods represent the latter-day reality which many bigotted whites and other racial group must learn to get over.

Your Weblog entry is not only inspirational but also informative.