Who Is Barack Obama For?

Legacy of a President

Photo by History in HD on Unsplash

Barack Obama has found himself once again the subject of some major criticism. This time for his praise of George Washington and the Founding Fathers despite them having owned slaves.

To quote Obama’s words exactly, he said: “I think sometimes we get confused in thinking that these two stories are separate. They’re intertwined, right? Which is why it’s possible for me to be a great admirer of George Washington, and also acknowledge he was a slaveholder… That does not negate [Washington’s] greatness; it simply acknowledges that there’s a profound, deep flaw in these Founding Fathers who were also geniuses and gave us these tools… It’s that we’re this mixed bag, we’ve got contradictions. And embody the country’s contradictions.”

Obama’s words seem to have gotten him criticism from both the right and the left, and for similar reasons. Those on the right are attacking Obama for daring to acknowledge the nature of America’s Founding Fathers, and those of us on the left are critical of what he said because it’s a really bad reading if history.

Sure, on paper, there may be some truth to what Obama is saying. There can be no doubt that many figures throughout history are deeply complex and multifaceted. Just recently I read Edward Said’s *Culture and Imperialism* in which he critiques Rudyard Kipling for his support of imperialism, while also acknowledging that he was a very good and very creative writer. It would be foolish to deny that people from history are any less complicated or full of contradictions than people today are.

You could even look to the example of someone like John Stuart Mill, the British philosopher and member of parliament in the 19th century. Mill was a supporter of colonialism in India, something which even the conservative Edmund Burke was not outright in favour of. However, Mill was also one of the earliest supporters of women’s suffrage in Britain and, towards the end of his life, described himself as a socialist. Mill’s legacy is one that is certainly contradictory, to say the least, and his support for racism and colonialism has to be addressed if we are to be honest about the man.

However, where Obama goes wrong here is applying this concept to the Founding Fathers. While it may make sense to point to certain literary or historical figures as being complicated, this gets more than a little bit messy when we start applying this concept to political leaders who presided over a number of very real, destructive, and harmful events.

The American Revolution and the actions of the Founding Fathers were not the actions of a number of otherwise good people who happened to have some views we now look back on as bad. As a matter of fact, I have a bit of a problem with describing the American Revolution as a revolution in general because in a lot of ways, it was hardly a revolution at all.

When we think of great revolutions from history, that is to say revolutions which, setting aside personal views regarding the politics at the heart of said revolutions, were nonetheless historically significant, we think of events which truly transformed a given society. One of the most obvious examples of this is the French Revolution of 1789.

The French Revolution represented a true revolution insofar as a genuine restructuring of society away from the old, feudal system in favour of what became known as liberalism. The old ruling class were killed en masse, with the King and Queen in particular being publicly executed, as well as a whole host of other counter-revolutionaries. From here you saw a radical restructuring of society that looked nothing like the one that came before it.

Another example is the Haitian Revolution, which was the product of a successful slave revolt. If nothing else, the Haitian Revolution signified a radical restructuring of society and all corresponding institutions along lines that no longer celebrated and allowed slavery as had done so before. For this reason, many oppressed people around the world have looked to the Haitian Revolution as an example of a true uprising of the oppressed and colonised.

You also have the examples of the Russian and Chinese Revolutions from the 20th century, and regardless of your thoughts on all these revolutions, as well as the politics behind them or the events which occurred after, there can be no doubt that they were incredibly significant. Each of these revolutions brought forth a radically different society which previous generations could never have dreamed of. It really was a case of out with the old, in with the new.

When it came to the American so-called Revolution, however, this wasn’t really the case at all. The American Revolution did not bring out a radical restructuring of society built on some radical new framework of social organisation in any real sense. Social relations were not dismantled to make way for something new. Instead, the American Revolution was but a petty squabble between one group of white supremacist slave owners who raped their slaves and another group of the same.

After the Revolutionary War and the Declaration of Independence, these same white supremacist slave owners remained in power and were able to carry on in basically the same way they had before, just without Britain in the picture. Sure, there may have been a new constitution, and the Founding Fathers may well have declared “We the people!” but this was all a farce. By “We the people!” they literally just meant the people in the room.

Huge swaths of the population were excluded from having any voice in this supposedly new society which was supposedly built on freedom and prosperity for all. For someone like Barack Obama to say the Founding Fathers were complicated for owning slaves while “giving us these tools” simply betrays that he doesn’t understand what the Founding Fathers wanted at all.

The Founding Fathers did not want a new society with genuine equality and freedom for all; again, they literally owned slaves and only allowed white men who owned property to vote. The fact that these people were white supremacist slave owners who raped their slaves is all that matters about them because it’s this fact which led to the America we now have.

Everything about America and its history makes sense in light of this. While white men were able to own property, including people, Black people were kept in chains, and indigenous people were massacred and driven off their land to make way for the expansion of the settler colony. Like the Black people who were enslaved, Indigenous people suffered, were killed, and were raped by the colonising forces who wouldn’t even allow them a voice in the new society they built.

From here, it makes sense why even after slavery was abolished, Black people still continued to live under a horrific apartheid system which would not be overturned until the 1960s. It makes sense because the country of America was never supposed to include them as genuine citizens or people; it was always meant to exclude and marginalise them.

The Founding Fathers were not interested in designing a system which would include Black people, women, or even the working class. “Freedom” to the Founding Fathers meant the freedom of the ruling class to exploit and subjugate those they deemed less than them. Only the ruling class, the white, property-owning and slave owning men, were deemed as people, and such, their ideas of freedom and equality only applied to them.

Contrary to what Barack Obama says, the legacy of the Founding Fathers is not a complicated one to navigate; it’s actually incredibly simple. America looks the way it does because it’s built on exactly the ideas the Founding Fathers believed in: capitalism, racism, and patriarchy. Nothing else about them matters because nothing else went into their ideas of what their new society would look like.

What the Founding Fathers wanted was to create a state in which white male property owners reigned supreme, and this is what we got and still have. The only way to understand America as it exists today and especially how it existed in the past is to accept this fact. Everything about American history makes sense when you realise that America was always designed to be a country built on racism, capitalism, and patriarchal dominance.