Ethnocentrism and Racial Discrimination: The Case Against Barack Obama

The profound analytical and moral confusion that afflicts Western political culture concerning ethnic affairs was evident in the recent scandal over Donald Sterling, the billionaire owner of an American basketball team, the Los Angeles Clippers. In late April 2014 a furore broke over Sterling’s discriminatory remarks about African-Americans when they were released to the media by his girlfriend. The story was prominently reported in the Australian media, where it fed the debate over section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act by testifying to the rottenness of (white) American culture and the redemptive power of outraged anti-racist conscience. Sterling said:

It bothers me a lot that you want to broadcast that you’re associating with black people. Do you have to? . . . You can sleep with (black people). You can bring them in, you can do whatever you want. The little I ask you is not to promote it . . . and not to bring them to my games.

These words were repeated endlessly by the media as the smoking gun of Sterling’s racism. Punishment was swift, costly and cruel: a US$2.5 million fine and banishment for life from NBA matches. There were also demands that he sell his team. Adam Silver, the NBA Commissioner who imposed the fine and ban, condemned Sterling’s remarks as “deeply offensive and harmful” and expressed his “personal outrage”. One commentator described the remarks as “a stunning piece of bigotry” which shows how “prejudice permeates the US”[1] Former basketball star Michael Jordan called Sterling’s words “sickening and offensive views”.[2]

But was it bigotry? The first puzzle of this affair is that commentators accepted that Sterling expressed unambiguous ethnic hostility. The rejection of blacks was offensive but at no point did Sterling say that he disliked people of colour. If he did it could not have been a strong preference because his girlfriend was of Hispanic and black heritage. He did say that he had no objections to her seeing black people, bringing them home, even sleeping with them. But for some reason he did not want her photographed with them. His motivation is unexplained. Perhaps it was an 80-year-old man’s wish to avoid the public humiliation of his 31-year-old girlfriend being seen consorting with young virile basketball players. Perhaps his specifying race reflected her choice of friends. Perhaps Ronald Sterling is senile. Perhaps he does not like African-Americans – he was fined in 2006 for using race as a factor in selecting residents for his real estate developments, though that appears to have been commercially motivated.[3] Who knows? Obviously some background information is missing. Until that is revealed it cannot be said with any confidence that this was matter of anti-black bigotry.

The second puzzle concerns the public discussion of the moral response to Sterling’s bigotry, assuming it was bigotry. Where were the civil libertarians in that discussion? Sterling’s privacy was violated. He was then attacked for an opinion expressed in private. No-one that I read in the Australian press objected to the mobbing, the rush to pile-on before he could defend himself. The freedom to express preferences in private is one of the most precious liberties, more fundamental than free public speech. It is closely tied to freedom of conscience. The horror of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is repression of people’s thoughts, the government’s invasion of privacy. It seems that the First Amendment to the US Constitution only protects speech from government, not from citizens. In multicultural America private persecution can be harsh. If freedom of speech were really protected, people would not be punished as Sterling has been for inadvertently (or advertently for that matter) announcing unpopular values. As so often stated by libertarians, freedom of speech means nothing without the right to express heterodox views. The multicultural reality is that as diversity grows the pressure for conformity becomes ever more intolerant.

This sheds light on Australian affairs, where left commentator Brendan O’Neill, commenting on the debate over Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act, accuses his side of politics of largely abandoning the cause of free speech. And he observes that this is a most curious development, not at all in line with the liberalism’s strong record of anti-authoritarianism. Not only have progressives lost faith in the masses, they have turned viciously against them, O’Neill contends.[4] This is manifestly true.[5] The Left began abandoning liberty as an ideal when it became the cultural establishment from about the 1960s. Its intolerance came to be directed mainly against majority-white populations as a quid pro quo of the emerging multicultural covenant. That explains the anti-white sentiment that trickles from the cultural establishment, also common in Australia.[6]

The third puzzle concerns the double standards and racial hierarchy revealed by the scandal. Sterling was judged from the implicit standpoint of post-ethnic, colour-blind, universalist values. The standard is that ethnicity, religion and race are not legitimate grounds for discrimination. Sterling knew how he was being judged. In another secretly recorded conversation he stated: “You think I’m a racist? You think I have anything in the world but love for everybody? . . . You know I’m not a racist!”[7] That is the implied criterion by which Donald Sterling was judged, that anything less than “love for everybody” or at least colour blindness is unacceptable.

The reality in America is that, by and large, birds of a feather flock together. The continuing pervasiveness of discrimination in the US described by Brian Roberts in a recent Quadrant Online post[8] underestimates the situation by focusing on illegitimate discriminations committed mainly by white people, for example in employment. But if one uses “discrimination” with its everyday meaning of differential treatment, it is ubiquitous and usually legitimate. Americans, like people everywhere, often prefer to marry, befriend and live among people similar to themselves.[9] Residential segregation by race is as pronounced as ever.[10] Ethnocentrism is a propensity universal to humans but strongest among minorities. It is expressed in the multicultural political system which is supported by minorities for the benefits it bestows upon them. Donald Sterling’s private ethnic preference is only noteworthy for excluding one of the ethnicities privileged by that system.

An example of the acceptance of ethnocentrism is provided by the current president of the United States, Barack Obama. Not since Theodore Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909, has a president been more closely associated with ethnic pride. It was therefore disappointing that Obama abdicated moral leadership on the issue by joining the attack on Donald Sterling. He accused Sterling of seeking to advertise his ignorance (“When ignorant folks want to advertise their ignorance”[11]), overlooking the private setting of Sterling’s remarks and the man’s long familiarity with the individuals to whom he referred. Also, given Obama’s strong racial views it was ingenuous of him to criticise Sterling for expressing a racial preference.

Sterling’s history of ethnocentrism is mild compared to that of the president. In his first memoir, Dreams from My Father (DMF) Obama revealed how important racial identity was to him, not only opposing prejudice but celebrating his African heritage and expressing a special connection to those who share it. The book details his drive to prove his blackness.[12] It is not a youthful extravagance. Originally published when Obama was 33, DMF was reissued when he was 43, just four years away from being elected president. In his preface to the second edition Obama re-affirmed the text (DMF, p. ix).

Following are some examples of Obama’s racial solidarity, all belonging in the mainstream of minority behaviour.

At age 24 Barack Obama began a two year stint as an organiser for the black community in Chicago after graduating from Columbia University. He recalls making the decision: “I’ll organize black folks.” (DMF, p. 133) That did not reflect post-ethnic, colour-blind principles. Neither did his enthusiastic reception of black preacher Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright’s anti-white sermons in 1988, a communion he maintained for twenty years, or his continuing explicit racial affiliation. In Obama’s introduction to DMF he stated that “I can embrace my black brothers and sisters, whether in this country or in Africa, and affirm a common destiny . . .” (DMF, p. xvi). This does not rule out loyalty to America as a political entity but it does put racial solidarity on a pedestal, along with commitment to a “common destiny”, a trans-national ethnic interest.

Obama recounted how he took care to choose friends on racial as well as left-ideological grounds. “I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos.” (DMF, p. 100) Unlike Sterling, Obama made this discrimination public.

He also chose to marry within his race. He rejected a girlfriend, whom he loved, because her family were Anglos steeped in old America who would have challenged his own racial identity. “I pushed her away.” (DMF, pp. 210-11). Obama has a profound sense of ethnic kinship, referring to people of African descent as brothers and sisters. When travelling overseas at age 27 he realised that visiting Europe was a mistake because it did not reflect the heritage of his own race (DMF, pp. 301-302). Continuing on to his father’s homeland of Kenya Obama relished the freedom of being in a relatively homogeneous African society where the majority looked like him, where he did not feel watched, where he could be himself without lies or betrayal (DMF, p. 311). Here Obama describes the anthropometric similarities of racial features – hair form and body shape – that he found liberating.

This is relevant to the Sterling scandal because the worst interpretation of his actions is that he was attempting to construct his social environment to suit his racial comfort zone. But if Obama and the minorities who support him are any guide, people the world over harbour the modest aspiration to their own private Kenya. This should come as no surprise to conservatives. Even John Stuart Mill, a founding thinker of modern liberalism, considered freedom of association to be a fundamental liberal value, also applicable to ethnicity.[13] That entails the freedom not to associate.

So it was entirely seemly for Obama to consider race when choosing his most intimate relationships. Minorities are more prone than the white majority to be candid about their wish for endogamy, as is their right. As Tiya Miles, Chair of the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University Michigan, expresses it, she feels a “sharp tug of disappointment . . . every time I see a black man with a white woman on his arm. Try as I might to suppress the reaction, I experience black men’s choice of white women as a personal rejection of the group in which I am a part, of African American women as a whole . . . ”[14]

Obama’s anthropological racialism highlights the contradictions of Left ideology. The doctrine underpinning multiculturalism and replacement-level immigration in the West holds white racial preference – caring about differences in such characteristics as hair form and skin colour – to be psychologically unbalanced, extreme rightwing, repellent, a “narcissism of minor difference”.[15] Yet Obama is not described in those terms by the same media that condemn Sterling for milder and private discriminations. Commentators treat Obama respectfully, as they should, as have European leaders whose civilisation he disowned on racial grounds. A recent Australian prime minister, Julia Gillard, who claimed to be a post-ethnic progressive, welcomed Obama uncritically when he visited Australia in 2011. No doubt she is horrified by Donald Sterling. Her double standard is not new. The Gillard government appointed an ethnically biased commission to advise on how indigenous Australians might be recognised in the Constitution. In an “Expert Panel” packed with ethnic activists, no one was chosen to represent Anglo Australia, the majority ethnicity. This collapse of principle is typical of the contemporary establishment Left, championing minorities’ right to ethnic association and expression while opposing any hint of the same among Western peoples.

Can Obama’s racial loyalty be interpreted as universalism? That is difficult because he does not show sympathy for everyone aspiring to ethnic association. Neither in his memoir nor as president has he shown concern for the ethnic sensibilities of poor whites trapped in minority-dominated neighbourhoods and schools, victimised by racist gangs, overlooked by affirmative action and special education programs, unrepresented by ethnic organisations and stigmatised if they attempt to start their own. To Obama whites rich and poor are the “other”, tolerable when deracinated but relegated to the “guns and bibles” bin when not.

As if to emphasise the depth of his ethnocentrism, in his book Obama mocks light-skinned tourists visiting Kenya (and Hawaii) and calls them an “encroachment” because of their overconfident parochialism, which he thinks was inculcated by imperialism (DMF, pp. 312-13). He found them “vaguely insulting”. This episode of racial rejection did not mean that Obama personally disliked white people but that their presence was irksome when intruding on his ethnic space. Perhaps that also explains Donald Sterling’s attitude to his girlfriend being photographed with black men.

As US president, Obama retained the racial nepotism evident in his Kenyan experience. In the Trayvon Martin controversy he stated that Martin resembled the son Obama might have had. During his 2013 trip to Israel he empathised with Jewish citizens for wanting their own country: “[T]he dream of true freedom . . . to be a free people in your homeland.”[16]

In multicultural America Obama was not rejected at the polls or by the Southern Poverty Law Center for a history of explicit discriminations any of which would have ended a white political career or attracted epithets such as “hater”. On the contrary, he was generally applauded by minorities and “civil rights” agencies. The effective goal of the American multicultural industry is not to marginalise ethnicity; it is to marginalise white people.

Obama’s ethnic nepotism should not be seen as aberrant. Obama’s deep concern for his people around the world is a positive attitude. Considering that ethnic groups, including races, are large pools of genetic kinship, Obama’s ethnocentrism is probably adaptive in the biological sense.[17] He is a “dad”, not a “cad”, to his nuclear and ethnic kin. But it seems not to have occurred to Obama that white people might also like the freedom to choose their family and friends endogamously; that like him some might feel special sympathy for their racial brothers and sisters. As president he is responsible for the welfare of all Americans, and should have thought through the implications of a truly democratic multiculturalism in which all are encouraged to pursue their ethnic interests within the law. In judging Donald Sterling, Obama and many other critics withheld empathy to apply a double standard.

A principled criticism of Sterling’s behaviour must encompass all those who discriminate on ethnic or racial grounds in their private lives – the great majority of Americans who unconsciously flock together and the multicultural establishment whose ethnic discrimination is conscious and methodical. That establishment includes well funded and well connected agencies dealing with (selective) civil rights, lobbying, education and welfare, the Congressional Black Caucus, both major parties in their coded messages, extensive ethnic media, community organisers, ethnic trading networks, race-specific churches, and the affirmative action bureaucracy, government and corporate. The alternative would be to accept private discrimination as normal, in the way that a range of sexual preferences are tolerated. That would not make Sterling look nice but would militate against the draconian penalties levied against him.

Ethnic identity in Western societies will inevitably intensify if large scale immigration continues to push up diversity. This has already begun in Europe, with the rise of populist-right parties. The multicultural alliance might remain successful in denying majorities the right to ethnic self-expression. But if those majorities continue to shrink they are liable to become anxious minorities yearning for the good old days when they were free to be themselves, like Barack Obama in Kenya. That alliance and the double standard it entails help answer the final puzzle, why the proponents of diversity are not more tolerant of the ethnocentrism they promote.