Gilroy and West. Obama, the future and "progress".

Had a supervision this morning and will be a busy few weeks ahead doing work, but couldn't not watch this recent video of Paul Gilroy in conversation with Cornel West, two true luminaries on the nebulous and endless issue that is race (my supervisor today equated sociological engagement with science and race to getting a golf ball lost in a bunker. You naively think you'll get back out but will end up lost forever in the abyss of cogitation.)

Gilroy and West in conversation (A still from the video linked to above.)

I often find myself lost in a swell of emotion listening to Barack Obama hooting his horn about one thing or another. I remember, as an undergraduate, lying awake in the middle of the night to see the final decision called before he accepted his victory. It was a massive deal for me, perhaps because it was such a big deal for my parents - especially my father whose own dad came to the UK from Jamaica in the fifties. What West had to say about Obama - "the black face of the American empire" - was very stirring indeed. It gives pause for very serious reflection about the mindlessness with which I admit I often find myself imbibing the quotidian leftist rhetoric; rhetoric about a man who - though still a symbol, still the personage who offered succour after Dubyah, still a voice unlike that I had ever heard - has opened up new cans, and been unable to close others.

It is the second question from the audience that is my other choice moment from the hour and half of refreshing discussion. An audience member enquires about the sharing of wealth, asks how on earth do the poor and the wealthy stop hating each other. She appends to this a note about the super rich who are in control of state apparatus. It's this question of money - the material - that I find so dark and alarming. I think Bauman does a good job of bringing more than a tinge of fatalism to the modernity we find ourselves in. Gilroy doesn't necessarily have that dark edge to him though the implication of this may seem so. I'm not sure that it is. Here is what he had to say:

"Is progress really the right word for the readjustments that are necessary to understand a future with less of everything that you have. I mean, there’s a certain kind of ironic invocation of this in the language the government uses to speak about austerity. We repair our shoes. We learn to cut patterns again to have clothes. We are going to reequip ourselves with the idea of thrift… All of these things of our future. 

A carbon democracy. A carbon lifestyle. 

… We’re not going to sit around until someone comes up with a technological fix of this life that can’t be fixed. We’re not going to give any ground to that fantasy. We have to develop a different practice and the practice is centred on asking people to see their lives in the overdeveloped world in the light of what lies outside it and I think that’s a different politics. 

I don’t think that’s a left politics at all actually."