Under the rule of this neoliberal pseudo-color-blind racism/classism, “human misery is largely defined as a function of personal choices” and “all problems are private rather than social in nature.” Government efforts to meaningfully address societal disparities of race and class are deemed futile, counterproductive, and inappropriate.iv Government’s functions are progressively concentrated, in Adolph Reed, Jr.’s words, on “making war,” “enhancing opportunities for the investor class,” “suppressing wages for everyone else,”v repressing dissent, and incarcerating people, particularly poor folks of color. And the more they weaken the left, social hand of the state the more they call into being and strengthen the right, authoritarian hand of the state, which offers its false solutions (i.e., racially disparate mass incarceration) to problems like poverty that only deepen with the evisceration of social protections and regulation. All of this is richly bipartisan and continues whichever political party is in nominal power and regardless of the president’s technical racial or gender identity.
I find it hard to believe that professor Harris seriously believes that Obama’s pronounced tendency to “privilege the logic of market institutions and private enterprise over the ability of government to solve social problems” (p. 105) is rooted primarily in his “the politics of respectability”– or in the prosperity gospel. After years of close observation of the Obama phenomenon, I can assure him that tendency is based mainly in the neoliberal world view Obama soaked up from his business class, academic, and foundation world sponsors over years of immersion in elite, corporate-funded, corporation-serving, and predominantly white institutions like Columbia University, Harvard Law, the University of Chicago, the Hamilton Project, the Joyce Foundation, and a Democratic Party that has been moving far and ever further to the “market”- (and corporate- and Wall Street-) friendly right since the 1970s. Obama took to that ideology early on, well before his emergence on the national stage. This is how Reed described the 30-something Obama in early 1996, soon after the future president first won election to the Illinois state legislature:
“In Chicago, for instance, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices: one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program – the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle class reform in favoring form over substances. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here, as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway. ”vi