The Nation

President Obama speaks at Morehouse College commencement in Atlanta. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

First lady Michelle Obama and President Barack Obama were the respective featured commencement speakers this year at Bowie State University and Morehouse College—two historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) founded nearly 150 years ago. While the Obamas could have taken the opportunity to inspire black graduates entering an uncertain future, both chose, instead, to pepper their remarks with problematic and unobliging stereotypes about black youth. While doing so, both also conveniently neglected to call attention to the policy changes that President Obama could have enacted to help alleviate the insurmountable odds that young people of color—and blacks in particular—face in the United States.

When the first lady addressed Bowie graduates last Friday, she summoned the likes of Dr. King, Thurgood Marshall and Fredrick Douglass to help weave a brief history of the school—founded in Maryland just as the Civil War was coming to an end. And yet, as she talked about a long tradition of black students’ hunger for education, she added that about 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and more than fifty years after Brown v. Board, “too many of young people just can’t be bothered” to pursue an education. Michelle Obama said that rather than walk miles to school everyday, black students sit “on couches for hours playing video games, watching TV.” And the stereotypes didn’t stop there. “Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader,” proclaimed the first lady, “they’re fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper.”

Michelle Obama’s banal descriptions come at a time when many of us are waiting with bated breath for the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, which could reverse the positive—and still developing—results of Brown v. Board. Although the first lady pointed out that one in three black students drops out of high school, and that only one in five between the ages of 25 and 29 have a college degree, her remarks appear to put the onus not on a system designed to ensure black failure but on lazy individuals.

Forget that Chicago Mayor and former White House Chief of Staff under Obama, Rahm Emanuel, is backing the closing more than fifty schools, which will disproportionately affect black students—as violence rages on and is literally killing black and Latino youth. Forget the ways in which Obama has made “painful cuts” to Pell Grants—benefits available to students whose families cannot otherwise afford to pay for college (read: black, brown and Native families who have fared worse under Obama, and can never seem to catch up to the wealth that white families have secured after centuries of inequities). Michelle Obama’s remarks reserve blame not for an entire structure that betrays black students at multiple levels, but on black students themselves whom she condemns for wasting time in front of television sets. The first lady’s remarks about black youth fantasizing about “being a baller or a rapper” might cut extraordinarily deep for those youth who essentially learn literary criticism by close readings of rap lyrics. Those youth are grasping rhyme, metaphor and syntax before the concepts are even introduced in their public school. And there is innately nothing wrong with—and, in fact, much to be celebrated about—the art of hip-hop, or learning to survive as a so-called baller when other avenues have systemically been closed to you.

Perhaps more problematic were the president’s remarks to Morehouse graduates on Sunday—after all, perhaps the first lady can and should be spared the most egregious consequences of this administration’s decisions on communities of color. It will be Barack Obama, and not his better half, who will inherit the legacy of continued criminalization schemes that secure the inordinate number of blacks in jails and prisons, along with increased deportation schemes that secure a record number of immigrant removals. The outrageous bounty placed on Assata Shakur, the flawed use and defense of drone strikes that result in extrajudicial killings—these are some of the ways in which this president will inevitably be remembered.

During his address, the president, too, evoked Dr. King, Thurgood Marshall and Fredrick Douglass, and included personal observations such as the times when he used to write off his “own failings as just another example of the world trying to keep a black man down.” But that conviction was swayed after learning that “there’s no longer any room for excuses.” While Barack acknowledged the legacies of slavery and segregation, and the continued practices of racism and discrimination, he stressed the need to overcome these barriers because of an increasingly competitive global market in which “nobody is going to give [black graduates] anything that [they] have not earned.” He could have added that even earned rewards can quickly evaporate once race mediates the situation. Like his partner, the president stressed individual responsibility—dangerous and impractical guidance at a time when an undying system of white supremacy continues to dictate not only access to wealth and education, but also continues to determine matters of life and death.

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Graduation is often a time for inspiration, not attacks—although that may have been lost on the first couple. Still, neither Michelle Obama nor Barack Obama could possibly fail to grasp that their words echo beyond commencement services and to audiences far and wide. In that respect, the speeches they’ve shared were written for all of us, and perhaps for black youth in especially, who are at once being bombarded with insulting stereotypes, and being blamed for a reality they haven’t constructed or can easily benefit from. As the president is being rocked by a right-wing-manufactured scandal, he might consider searching for support from the imaginative movements that helped bring him to power—movements that recognize that it’s not black people who are failing to succeed, but that a long-entrenched power structure fails to fully recognize the value of its entire people.

The Obama adminstration could take executive action to ensure better jobs for workers paid by government contracts and subsidies. Read Josh Eidelson’s report on today’s strike action.

Prospects for a peaceful settlement of the civil war in Syria are dim, despite the peace conference expected to take place next month in Geneva, jointly sponsored by the United States and Russia. It’s unclear, yet, whether either side—the Syrian government or the rebels—will participate, though both are under great pressure from their respective patrons. If the conference fails, President Obama, Secretary of State Kerry and the Russian leaders, Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, will have egg on their faces. Worse, of course, the killing will continue.

This week, Kerry will meet with the troublesome and fractious opposition movement in Jordan. His job there will be to persuade the rebels not to boycott the conference. That task could, conceivably, have the happy effect of splitting the opposition into moderate and radical factions—but just as well it could result in the opposition as a whole deciding not to talk to the government of President Assad. However, if the Syrian government agrees to take part, under pressure from Moscow, and the rebels don’t, it will be very, very difficult for the United States to continue supporting the rebels, at least in their present form.

As The New York Times says, in an editorial today:

[Kerry] will need to do a better job of clarifying the American vision, and organizing the allies, than Washington has done so far. The opposition forces are scheduled to meet in Istanbul on Thursday, followed by an Arab League meeting in Cairo. For the opposition to boycott the conference would hand a significant propaganda victory to Mr. Assad.

Meanwhile, on the battlefield, it appears that the Syrian government is making significant progress, bolstered by arms from Russia and Iran and taking advantage, perhaps, of disarray among the opposition. The Wall Street Journal reports today that the battle for Qusayr, a small city with strategic importance between the Lebanese border and Homs, Syria, could be a “turning point” in the war, tipping the balance in Assad’s favor. It says:

The bloody battle over the city of Qusayr, near the Lebanese border, has the potential to transform Syria’s conflict, say fighters, diplomats and analysts. A government victory there could give the regime of President Bashar al-Assad a corridor of territory connecting Damascus to Syria’s pro-Assad coastline and to Lebanese territory controlled by Iran-backed Hezbollah. This would split rebel forces into fragmented strongholds.

The article quotes a Western diplomat thus:

“The entire paradigm has shifted” in Syria’s conflict, a Western diplomat said, describing the government’s push into Qusayr as the latest in a string of “confident, defiant and strategic moves.”

That’s a far cry from the expectation, two years ago, that the Syrian version of the Arab Spring movement that topped rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen would make short work of Assad.

The Los Angeles Times, in a parallel report titled “Syrian military shows unexpected resilience,” says that rebels elsewhere in Syria, outside Qusayr, are worried that the government will move against their positions next.It’s worth quoting the piece at length:

The military onslaught this week against the strategic Syrian town of Qusair has dramatized a surprising combat resilience that has already put rebel forces on the defensive on other key fronts, including near the capital, Damascus.

The military’s still-robust fighting ability—apparently bolstered in Qusair by the presence of combatants from Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group—has confounded predictions from experts and foreign capitals that the Syrian government’s days were numbered.

Some are recalibrating their forecasts of the regime’s certain demise, even as Russia and the United States try to organize an international conference meant to jump-start peace talks and create a transitional government in Syria.

In recent weeks, forces loyal to President Bashar Assad have scored significant victories in the south and north.

In the media, much is being made of the fact that Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia backed by Syria and Iran, is taking part in the fighting. While the reports are mostly accurate, the main Syrian fighting force is the state’s own armed forces, who are being supplied readily by Iran and, especially, Russia. Russia’s support, which is routinely demonized in the Western media, can be a good thing, because it gives Russia leverage over Assad in the peace conference. But the success of that conference will depend on whether or not the United States is willing to exercise similar leverage over the rebels, more and more of whom are jihadist-influenced Sunni radicals and Al Qaeda types.

Attorney General Eric Holder. (Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

Democrats and Republicans working together in Washington to address abuses of basic liberties? Bipartisan responses to the challenges that arise in the gray area where balances are struck between constitutional guarantees and national security demands? Impossible. Can’t happen. There is no way in these days of fury and scandal-mongering.

Actually, there is a way.

A genuine left-right coalition has developed over the past several days in response to the revelation that the Department of Justice seized Associated Press telephone records in its recent investigation of a CIA leak. And that coalition is likely to strengthen in light of the news that the DOJ investigated the reporting activities of Fox News’s chief Washington correspondent as a potential crime—“solicitation” of leaks. The latter development, in many senses more troubling than the former, calls into question whether basic protections for both reporters and whistleblowers are crumbling after more than a decade of Patriot Act abuses, Bush and Obama administration excesses and the politicization of debates about what were once accepted standards for protecting the public’s right to know and the privacy rights that underpin it.

In moments so rigorously partisan as these, many members of Congress will retreat to their corners, mounting attacks or making excuses. But there are some serious legislators, libertarian-leaning Republicans and progressive Democrats, who understand the urgency of the moment.

They get that the revelations about DOJ overreach reveal a threat not just to freedom of the press but to the most necessary of press functions: the work of revealing for citizens the details of what their government is doing in their name but without their informed consent. None of these members are foolish or casual in their approach; they understand that it is necessary for the government to protect against the leaking of information that could endanger people. But they also understand that it is possible to provide that protection within a constitutional context.

Perhaps most importantly, they get that the best way to protect the First Amendment guarantee of a free press is to protect the Fourth Amendment guarantee of privacy. Journalists do not need—and should not seek—an array of special protections to do their jobs. But journalists and their sources do need to know that information can be shared without the threat of unwarranted—and self-serving—government surveillance of necessary conversations.

It is with this in mind that four very different members of Congress (Michigan Republican Justin Amash, South Carolina Republican Mick Mulvaney, California Democrat Zoe Lofgren and Colorado Democrat Jared Polis) have proposed a precise and appropriate response to the overreach by the Department of Justice. While the White House and key members of the Senate are backing a Shield Law, which protects journalists from being required to reveal sources, the House members are going deeper—to protect not just journalists but all citizens from “unreasonable searches and seizures.” They seek a Telephone Records Protection Act, which requires court approval when the government demands telephone records from service providers.

“The Justice Department’s seizure of the AP’s phone records—likely without the sign-off of a single judge—raises serious First and Fourth Amendment concerns,” says Amash, who has emerged as a hero to libertarian-leaning conservatives. “Regardless of whether DOJ violates the legitimate privacy expectations of reporters or ordinary Americans, we deserve to know that the federal government can’t seize our records without judicial review.”

Polis, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, says, “Americans of all political stripes were shocked to find out that the Department of Justice had been accessing telephone records of reporters at the Associated Press. The Department of Justice claims that they operated within the confines of the law, which makes it abundantly clear that we need to provide a higher level of protection against government intrusion into an individual’s private records.”

This is an essential equation for all Americans who value the right to privacy outlined in the Fourth Amendment. But it is especially essential when it comes to constructing a press system that serves the intention expressed by the founders: to inform citizens so that they can, with their votes, steer the affairs of state.

This is what Thomas Jefferson recognized more than 227 years ago when he wrote to John Jay, “Our liberty cannot be guarded but by the freedom of the press, nor that be limited without danger of losing it.”

In the same letter, Jefferson wrote: “No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth. Our first object should therefore be, to leave open to him all the avenues to truth. The most effectual hitherto found, is the freedom of the press. It is, therefore, the first shut up by those who fear the investigation of their actions.”

Associated Press President Gary Pruitt updated the Jeffersonian premise when he explained that the Justice Department’s actions were not just “unconstitutional” but destructive to the public’s right to know, insofar as such monitoring of media makes sources less willing to talk to journalists and reduces the likelihood that citizens will learn what their government is up to.

“If they restrict that apparatus [of newsgathering about controversial government actions] the people of the United States will only know what the government wants them to know and that’s not what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they wrote the First Amendment,” explained the head of the country’s largest news service.

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Pruitt’s right. No matter what action is taken, or not taken, journalists will continue to clog the corridors of the Capitol and crowd into White House press briefings. The question is whether those journalists will be present to challenge the status quo or as mere stenographers to power.

That’s a distinction that members of Congress who take seriously their oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States understand. Indeed, it is the distinction that James Madison, the essential player in the drafting of the core document and of the Bill of Rights, was getting at when he said, “A popular government without popular information or the means of acquiring it is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy, or perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”

Justin Amash and Jared Polis are not going to agree on most issues. Neither are Mick Mulvaney and Zoe Lofgren.

But they can agree on the basic outlines of the American experiment and how it must operate.

This is as the founders of that experiment intended: a free press providing a free people with the information they need to be their own governors.

John Nichols is the author (with Robert w. McChesney) of the upcoming book Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America. Hailed by Publisher’s Weekly as “a fervent call to action for reformers,” it details how the collapse of journalism and the rise of big-money politics threatens to turn our democracy into a dollarocracy.

Why trade happiness for anti-government malcontent? Read Tom Tomorrow’s scoop.

Can workers from traditionally non-union positions like the fast-food industry be the future of the labor movement? The alt-labor movement, as described by The Nation’s Josh Eidelson, consists of workers who have never collectively tried to negotiate for better wages. Eidelson speaks with NPR’s Jennifer Ludden on Talk of the Nation about where the labor movement goes from here.

— Max Rivlin-Nadler

Read more about the future of labor organizing in the service industry.