2007: The Year of Black ‘Media Leaders' - Especially Obama
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford
"African Americans' most urgent duty is to methodically
rebuild a Movement that is independent of corporate media."
In the late Sixties, Black America seemed on its way to
reaching critical velocity in its arc to self-determination and some degree of
security. But in the intervening 40 years, the trajectory of true Black
progress has become erratic and uneven, for lack of the force that fueled the
initial takeoff: a People's Movement. Energies dissipated as self-concerned
grouplets among African Americans sought their own orbits - usually circling
hungrily in the gravitational pull of corporate America. These greedy little
satellites, imagining themselves much bigger and more powerful than they really
are, bask vicariously in the glow of real power, which is ever more
concentrated in a dwindling fraction of the overwhelmingly white super-rich
population.
Believing they have broken "free" of the Historical Black Political
Consensus on social justice, societal transformation, and peace, opportunistic
Black sub-classes - never representing mass Black opinion, but only their own
petty aspirations - have in the past decade been "empowered" by corporate
America to exert profoundly destructive centrifugal forces on the larger Black
polity. What is left of collective African American political cohesion is
rapidly shattering under the combined pressures of Black corporate satellites
and the bottomless Black Hole that the Corporate Order has become.
"What is left of collective African American political
cohesion is rapidly shattering under the centrifugal pressures of Black
corporate satellites."
The great historical irony for Black America is that this
deluded descent into the depths of dependency on corporate mechanisms - marked
most dramatically and horrifically by acquiescence to the racists' claim that
race is little or no factor in American life - occurs at precisely the epoch
when U.S.-led corporate structures are in terminal crisis at home and around
the globe. This is the "burning house" that both Malcolm X and Dr. Martin
Luther King foretold.
The year 2007, like those before it, yielded ever increasing
evidence that Black America must reverse the course that has been charted by
its own misleadership classes, and instead struggle mightily to defend itself,
and any allies that can be found, against the implosions that are wracking the
global and domestic Corporate Order - a wave of terminal crises that cannot be
overcome and will, domestically, impact most painfully on African Americans,
the Permanent Other in U.S. society.
Obamamania
Barack Obama's corporate-made and -financed presidential
campaign is the product of three distinct factors, all mitigating against Black
self-determination and political cohesion: 1) corporate decisions, made a
decade ago, to provide media and financial support to pliant Black Democrats
that can be trusted to carry Wall Street's water; 2) a widespread desire among
whites to prove through the safe and simple act of voting that they are not
personally racist, and/or to dismiss Black claims of pervasive racism in
society, once and for all; 3) a huge reservoir of Jim Crow era, atavistic Black
thinking that refuses to evaluate Black candidates' actual political stances,
but instead revels in the prospect of Black faces in high places. A President
Obama would, of course, be the zenith of such narrow, non-substantive,
objectively self-defeating visions.
"Many, if not most, Black folks yearn to see a Supreme
HNIC before they die."
In 2007, the Obama "package" amply satisfied all three
"constituencies." Corporations found him a loyal ally on Capitol Hill and on
the speaking circuit, rewarding him handsomely for his fealty; millions of
whites came to believe Obama could solve the "race problem" by his mere
presence, at no cost to their own notions of skin privilege; and infinitely
manipulable Black dreams of the ultimate Head-Negro-in-Charge. Many, if not
most, Black folks yearn to see a Supreme HNIC before they die, and will not
question how he got there or whom he really serves.
Paul Street has written often in
these pages and elsewhere of Obama's political charade: his impudent posing
as the "Joshua" to succeed Dr. King's "Moses Generation," while supporting none
of the fundamental social transformations sought by King; his fawning praise of
the same U.S. "free enterprise" system that King thought was incompatible with
racial justice and peace; Obama's ridiculous and statistically baseless
declaration that Blacks have already come "90 percent of the way to equality,"
inferring that his election would provide the final ten percent; the senator's
initial insistence, later modified, that the Katrina catastrophe and the Jena
outrage had nothing to do with race; his remarkable pledge to the Foreign
Relations Council to increase U.S. troops strength by 100,000
soldiers and Marines, all the while maintaining the farce of being a
"peace" candidate. The list goes on, and will doubtless lengthen as the
campaign continues.
However, we at Black Agenda Report are most concerned with
the paralyzing stupor that Obamamania has induced in the Black polity. Even
committed Black progressive activists have jumped on the candidate's
bandwagon-to-nowhere. My saddest, and yet most telling, experience with Obama-coma
came late last year, when I was bracketed with New York City Councilman Charles Barron on Ron
Daniels' weekly WBAI Radio political discussion show. Barron is one of my
favorite politicians, a former Black Panther who is also a grassroots community
activist and implacable foe of racism and entrenched power. Barron announced
that he and the local activist group with which he is affiliated were endorsing
Barack Obama for president.
"Even committed Black progressive activists have jumped on
the candidate's bandwagon-to-nowhere."
In what turned into a debate between us, I confronted the
councilman with all the facts outlined above, and more. He, like every other
Black Obama supporter, could offer no coherent response, except to pillory
Hillary Clinton, Obama's political twin. Indeed, the interview/debate
experience was audibly painful for Barron, who knows full well that Obama
stands on the opposite side of the political line - when he decides to stand
anywhere, at all. Finally, Barron could only offer that he "wants to give the
brother a shot." That was it. The phrase, which he later repeated, was like an
exhalation of used up air, an abdication of the imperative to Speak Truth to
Power if the representative of Power is Black and seems to be an unstoppable
phenomenon.
Barron's resigned response proved the truth of Louisville
University Prof. Rick L. Jones's
evaluation, that we are witnessing the "failure of the Black political
imagination." Obamamania is accelerating that debilitating process - even among
the best, brightest and most committed of African American politicians.
Obama is, of course, a media and money phenomenon - both
corporate derivatives. In that sense, his rise is only different in degree from
the proliferation of "media leaders" that have taken the place of real
organizers in Black America - and of former organizers who have held on to name
recognition by becoming media leaders, running from camera to camera in between
their radio shows. Nothing lasting, organizationally, can possibly emerge from
their performances.
Obama's
hook-up with Oprah Winfrey was perfectly logical. Both are famous,
unthreatening media celebrities with huge white followings. They compliment
each other, and achieve the same effect of mesmerizing fame-struck Blacks and
soothing the fears of whites - placebos for both sorely afflicted groups.
Media have displaced previous Black leadership-creation
mechanisms: that is, leadership forged in struggle. Now, "leaders" are presented with
theme music in radio studios and TV sound stages, chosen by executives on the
basis of corporate notions of marketability. It is a "virtual" - not genuine -
Black leadership, that only plays the role through broadcasting.
From an historical perspective, it is as if James Brown and
Aretha Franklin were the preeminent Black political leaders of the Sixties.
Both made great cultural contributions, and Mr. Brown dabbled in politics, to
various effect, but no conscious person of that era would have considered
either of these entertainers to be leaders - because real leaders,
heading real, often feuding sections of a mass movement, existed. Brown and
Franklin were background music for an actual People's Movement, like a score to
a movie. But today, there is no movie - no Movement - just a score that makes
no sense.
"Obama's rise is only different in degree from the
proliferation of ‘media leaders' that have taken the place of real organizers
in Black America."
In 2008 and beyond, African Americans' most urgent duty is
to methodically rebuild a Movement that is independent of corporate media - one
that forces media, especially Black-oriented radio, to respond to IT,
rather than taking its cues from on-air performers. There is no substitute for
people in motion, the only force that can compel the reinstatement of local
news on "Black" radio - which will in
turn nourish the Movement, as in years past, by empowering grassroots forces
through coverage of their activities. (See BAR, January 10, 2007, "Bring
Back Black Radio News - The People's Network.")
The same forces that shut down the Black Freedom Movement to
pursue their own private interests, 40 years ago, have metastasized into
corporate servants of the rich. With the gradual extinction of Black
journalism, African Americans have grown to believe that Celebrity = Power - a
fatal equation that strips Black America of independent agency, of political
autonomy, and makes them putty in the hands of media corporations and their
Wall Street masters.
This is the underlying, broader meaning and threat of
Obamamania (or Obama-ism). In the final analysis, it's not about how HE got
there, it's about why there are so few mechanisms to make Obama, the
Congressional Black Caucus, and any corporate-bought Black personality, an
instant "leader" - never to be held accountable to Black people at-large.
Colliding Crises
We are not being African American-centric in emphasizing steadily-eroding domestic Black political realities. Blacks remain, in the mass,
the most consistently
progressive and geographically concentrated group in the United States. Any
semblance of a progressive "movement" is inconceivable if Black political
coherence is shattered - or smothered - by corporate forces in blackface. This
would result in a permanently ineffectual domestic response to the deepening
and general crisis of the Capitalist Order, globally and at home.
The year 2007 showed that George Bush's attempt to alter the
global relationship of forces and resources by military means, centered in the
Middle East, has failed beyond redemption.
U.S. spies
and generals found it necessary to mutiny to prevent an insane attack on
Iran - a crime that would certainly plunge the planet into instant economic and
political anarchy. But the imperialists in both parties persist in finding
softer spots for corporate-military domination. The Ethiopian invasion of
Somalia was a joint
exercise with Washington, and threatens to destabilize all of the Horn of
Africa. The U.S. cynically deploys the humanitarian crisis in Darfur as a tool
for Euro-American
military intervention, and demands basing rights in the Gulf of Guinea to
control West
Africa's oil spigots. The crisis in Latin America largely revolves around
color lines - many colors, but always "white" on top, and the region's
subterranean "Black Gold" and other minerals the prize, below.
"Any semblance of a progressive ‘movement' is
inconceivable if Black political coherence is shattered - or smothered - by
corporate forces in blackface."
Given the prevailing racism in white American society - a
racism that craves revenge for U.S. defeats at the hands of darker peoples even
as it expresses opposition to particular, lost wars - and the ever southward
thrust of U.S. aggression, Black America is the historically logical center for
opposition to U.S. marauding, especially in Africa. Dr. King declared in 1967,
in the heat of the Vietnam War, that Black America's destiny was to "save the
soul of America" from the "triple evils" of "racism, materialism and militarism"
- a huge historical fact that Barack "Joshua" Obama conveniently fails to
process.
In today's world, that historical legacy is to move to the
forefront of saving the planet - and Black America - from the death throes of a
Corporate Order in a state of desperation. The U.S. sub-prime lending crisis,
which uncovered the shallow roots
of the Black middle class, also pulled back the veil from global capitalism's
ulcerated face. Five-hundred TRILLION
dollars in "derivatives" - derived from what, no one really knows -
were counted as "assets" of global financial institutions. Now, few of these
institutions want to trade in each other's "paper" instruments, whose bogus
face value is more than ten times that of the entire planet's yearly output of
goods and services. Implosion is inevitable, with consequences too vast to
imagine.
African Americans are already disproportionately reeling
from the precursor trembles of the global "liquidity" crisis to come, and
best-suited to comprehend the predatory nature of corporate institutions and
their inevitable resort to war to recoup "their" losses. But re-consolidation
of that deep historical understanding requires real leadership and means of
mass communication. The Black misleadership class must be purged, but first,
folks must recognize who needs purging. The paralytic effect of Obamamania
threatens to finally strangle Black activism - and organizable Black
consciousness, itself - on the eve of domestic and global catastrophe.
To paraphrase the idiotic Black "media leaders" P-Ditty and
50 Cent: "Organize to take back the means of communications, or die."
Happy 2008.
Glen Ford can be contacted at [email protected].