BAR & Friends Anticipate the End of the Age of Obama

In the wake of the disasters that have befallen Blacks under his watch, President Obama’s exit in 2017 may “provide an opportunity to move the masses away from the Democratic Party and towards a discussion of alternatives,” said Margaret Kimberley, editor and senior columnist for Black Agenda Report. Speaking at a BAR-organized Left Forum workshop titled “Black Politics at the Tail End of Obama – and Beyond,” Kimberley noted that “Black politics had been on life support for some time before 2008, but his election marked the day that the plug was finally pulled.” The supreme irony, said Kimberley, “that the election of a Black man meant the end of Black politics, cannot be overstated.”

The Black Class Divide

Polls show that upwardly mobile Blacks often share with whites an “utter contempt and hatred for the Black poor,” said Dr. Tony Monteiro, professor of African American studies at Temple University, in Philadelphia. “This class division, this ideological division,” can be seen in the politics of “the Cory Bookers and Michael Nutters” – the Black mayors of Newark and Philadelphia, respectively – “and other Black agents of the 1%,” Monteiro told the workshop.

Back to Basics

“We’re going to have to let go of top-down, patriarchal, backward leadership models like the Black Church, and we’re going to have to let go of the Democratic Party,” said BAR managing editor Bruce Dixon. We must “rediscover” basic organizing skills, “so that people who are most concerned about various issues can take leadership” of community organizations. And, we must “let go of the idea that we can come up with some creative act or persuasive argument that’s going to give us media access to galvanize huge numbers of people in some short period of time,” said Dixon.

Eyes on the Prize

“We’ve got to get back to old fashioned Marxist and Left Black Nationalist understandings of how race, racial identity and sham electoral democracy function within the overall context of capitalism and empire,” said writer and activist Paul Street, author of The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama and the Real World of Power. The renewed movement must be informed by the facts of “how labor markets work, how the criminal justice system works, how the real estate market works, instead of a game of Black and Latino and female faces in high places.”

The Doctrine of Mandatory Black Failure

Journalist Pascal Robert, a frequent contributor to Black Agenda Report, speaking at a Left Forum workshop on the Economy and Ecology of Haiti, quoted Napoleon’s rational for sending 60,000 troops to attempt to crush the Haitian Revolution, in 1802. “My decision to destroy the authority of the blacks in Saint-Domingue,” Robert quoted the Frenchman, “is not so much based on considerations of commerce and money, as on the need to block forever the march of the blacks in the world.” We must realize, said Robert, “that there is a part of western foreign policy that invests in the importance of failed models of liberation. There is a psychic benefit to western imperialist nations to make sure that certain Black and brown nations stay failed, and do not ever give examples of success.”

Listen to Black Agenda Radio on the Progressive Radio Network, with Glen Ford and Nellie Bailey – Week of 2/2913

The Looming Police State

“There’s a push to scare Americans into a police state,” said Dr. Johnny Williams, professor of sociology at Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut, referring to the overwhelming force brought to bear following the Boston Marathon bombing. State repression is designed to contain “a division within society that is expanding.” The only way to resist the police state, said Williams, “is to take it to the streets, to create chaos for them, because they understand nothing else.”

White Terror

“If we did a little racial profiling, in terms of the FBI’s list of groups and individuals that are engaged in domestic terrorism, they’re all white,” said Beau Grosscup, an author of several works on terror. “But, of course, that doesn’t fit the portrait that we have been encouraged to adopt in terms of who is responsible for U.S. terror.”

Operation Ghetto Storm

“Roughly 90 percent” of the extrajudicial killings of Blacks documented in “Operation Ghetto Storm,” an updated report by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, “are just straight-up coverups” of routine police practices, said Kali Akuno, one of the authors. The report concludes that a Black person is murdered by police, security guards or vigilantes every 28 hours in the United States. Police are “under no real pressure or threat” to change their practices, “except for what we organize as a community,” said Akuno, speaking on Your World News.

Stop the Torture of Solitary Confinement

Anti-mass incarceration forces must start now to build support for prisoners held in long term solitary confinement in California, who went on hunger strike in 2011, said Carl Dix, of Stop Mass Incarceration. “The authorities promised to change conditions” two years ago, “but they lied,” said Dix. This time, “we want to spread the word” before the inmates’ next tentative strike date, July 8.

Obama’s Behavior Predictable

President Obama is a deeply conservative politician who “has been making noise about rolling back” entitlement programs “pretty much from the beginning of his career,” said Paul Street, author of The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama and the Real World of Power. “Obama has damn near explicitly stated that, for all intents and purposes, he’s a Republican.”