Nathaniel X. Turner
“Just as Esau in his day sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, we have come to pretend that a race-neutral pathological liar and finance capital callboy and his status-striven wife hold the answers to our destiny as a people.” Esau never regained his inheritance, and the same disaster may befall Black America. “As I watch the social safety net being destroyed for generations to come, I can still hear African Americans saying it was worth this to have a black man in the White House.”
Barack Obama: Our Barabbas, an Assimilated Mess of Pottage
Nathaniel X. Turner
“The majority of us have turned our backs on our 500 year struggle for human rights and freedom just to see a bourgeois black family live in the White House.”
The Month of April is central to the Judeo-Christian faiths. Jews celebrate Passover and Christians observe Holy Week concluding with Easter. In the four Gospels of the New Testament, there is a narrative of the Passion of Jesus, and in this story Pontius Pilate, the governor of Judea, following the Passover custom of commuting one prisoner’s death sentence. Pilate, a skilled politician, offered a Passover mob a choice of his pardoning either the capital prisoner Jesus the Christ or Jesus Barabbas the insurrectionist, and the rabble was reported to have unanimously called for the insurrectionist over the “Son of David.” For nearly 2,000 years, Christians lament the Jewish mob’s choice of Barabbas over the Christ as the singularly greatest miscarriage of justice in human history. The other biblical story oft retold that has bearing on the plight of African Americans is the two brothers Esau (the eldest) and Jacob (younger); this Old Testament story depicts the rivalry of the twin siblings and how the eldest parts with his inheritance for a bowl of kidney beans. The entire fate of the Jewish people were impacted by these stories. Moreover, the African American people are very much like the short-sighted Esau and the “blood and gore” fans of the Passover mob that gave Jesus half of a peace sign with one hand and thumbs-down with the other.
For 28 months, we have been able to witness the phenomenon of having a Black President, and it has not made the majority of us wiser to our perilous condition. In the same manner that the Jewish mob turned its back on a man that represented their struggles and aspirations as a people for a man wholly bereft of credibility, the majority of us have turned our backs on our 500 year struggle for human rights and freedom just to see a bourgeois black family live in the White House. African Americans have a golden legacy of resistance to systemic, social, political, and economic evil, time immemorial, that has inspired the entire world from Northern Ireland, Tianmen Square, Tahrir Square, to the townships of Azania, to the favelas of Brazil. We might have never possessed the gold or the commanding heights of production but we have been the moral compass of the entire world. However, the thugs and banksters on Wall Street were not sated with defrauding us with subprime loans, student loans, and fettering us to debt writ large, because they knew that an assimilation-mad black sucker was born every second. So, they carefully plotted how to steal our dignity and urge to be free by offering us a race-neutral Messiah who promised an instant racial millennium. To support him, millions of folk dumped their sacred mission for justice and started being xenophobic patriots that bashed those blacks that dared to mention America’s crimson domestic and international legacy. Vehemently, these black dittoheads silenced veteran freedom fighters, because their racial rabble rousing threatened to keep “our man” from making everything alright.
“The thugs and banksters on Wall Street plotted how to steal our dignity and urge to be free by offering us a race-neutral Messiah who promised an instant racial millennium.”
In spite of the fact that the Obama adroitly ignored all salient issues concerning African Americans, the race-neutered obots prepared themselves to be full partners in the rapine Anglo-American empire right or wrong, thus casting aside our golden robe as humanity’s vanguard for socio-political righteousness.
Initially, some African Americans were slow to leave the Democratic Party plantation of Senator Killery Klinton. However, the combination of white love and acceptance for this race-neutral unknown and the bigoted, but, heartfelt comments about a black being able to win by the so-called first “black president” Bill Klinton galvanized an entire people behind someone who was neither an African-American nor in any way connected to our struggle besides his striving wife. Michelle Obama was able to channel Coretta Scott King albeit with considerably less adipose tissue to great effect for her husband. Quicker than a black nationalist could say Jonestown, Guyana, those blacks that voted embraced the Trojan Horse named Barak Obama and fastened this corporatist-asp to our bosoms. Over the course of the 3 year campaign Obama waged for the presidency, the masses warmed to him, and like hearing or seeing in the old days the Joe Louis fights, the Temptations, the Supremes, or Jackson 5 on prime time television every win by Obama became our vindication, and by extension people who advocate for the black cause became losers who are no longer relevant.
Almost two and one half years later, an increasing number of us can see that it was a hoax on us. The novelty of a black in the White House is over. African Americans have turned their backs on Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Josiah Williams, Harriet Tubman, Ida B. Well, Adam Clayton Powell, Huey Newton, Rosa Parks, and the legions of living and deceased men and women who have refused to lay down and die as space-age slaves with consumer debt. Millions bedeck their homes with pornographic black struggle negation images of Obama in their homes and churches. Just as Esau in his day sold his birthright for a mess of pottage, we have come to pretend that a race-neutral pathological liar and finance capital callboy and his status-striven wife hold the answers to our destiny as a people. Esau was said to be hungry and made his decision in haste, but scores of millions of people refuse to look and see massifs of evidence that Obama never had one desire to do anything but hurt African Americans.
“Whereas Jesus was for the poor and against war and social injustice, Barabbas represented those who had no problem with evil and poverty as long as his clique were among the rich and powerful.”
A mess of pottage is what we have accepted in exchange for our dignity and right to struggle to the final goal of self-determination and the elimination of the imperialist and corporatist state that is a terror to the entire world. I sometimes wonder if Clarence Thomas’s dark skin and white wife contributed to the masses of African Americans to see his venality and hate him without lots of remedial prompting. Ironically, the main difference between Clarence Thomas and Obama is that the president has the same values and idea, but has state power. Clarence Thomas cannot impact the Ninth Ward of New Orleans, but Obama can and does the same thing as Bush or Donald Trump. Whereas Christ is viewed as the Savior of the Christian, struggle has been the savior of African American people. Assimilation and compromise have been the fatal enemies of our people, and these are the chief political characteristics of Obama. He is our political Barabbas, and we have allowed the style of having a “cool” black president deaden our senses and intellect to the fact that American Presidents are killers, thieves, and liars for hire to the moneyed interests of this nation. These moneyed interests have always been the implacable enemies of African American people.
Everything about Mr. Obama’s performance as president indicates that he is a grinning foe to the best interests of African people globally. Just like Barabbas was a killer that belonged to the moneyed of the Sanhedrin and he symbolically and theologically represented compromise with systemic evil, Obama is his 21st century soulmate. Whereas Jesus was for the poor and against war and social injustice, Barabbas represented those who had no problem with evil and poverty as long as his clique were among the rich and powerful. African Americans like Esau have traded their spirituality for short-term material gain and a fleeting sense of empowerment that is not ours in the first place. One has to ask, Does having a black president bomb Libya or endorse illegal coups in Honduras, Ecuador, and Ivory Coast do less harm than if a white man did the same? Would people have McCain’s photos on their walls if the economic conditions that prevailed now happened and he was in office? As I watch the social safety net being destroyed for generations to come, I can still hear African Americans saying it was worth this to have a black man in the White House.
“Does having a black president bomb Libya or endorse illegal coups in Honduras, Ecuador, and Ivory Coast do less harm than if a white man did the same?”
How long will we play Esau and give Obama a skin color pass when he has followed George W. Bush’s lead or made worse domestic and international problems. He has disappointed his base be refusing to close Guatanamo, to repeal the Patriot Act I-II, to bring to justice crooked banks and executives that gutted the nation, demanded single-payer universal health insurance, ended the war on drugs and the mass incarceration of young people of color, end the wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Colombia, Somalia, and Libya, and invest trillions into Main Street to end the depression-level poverty hurting one third of American people.
Christ would never be able to turn his back on the poor but Barabbas could. Moreover Christ, like all revolutionaries, accepted the way of the cross. He died refusing to denounce the poor and needy and never sought to be accepted by the moneychangers and crooks of his day. We have many African American activists and fighters who refused to sellout. The African American people, many of whom claim to be Christians, have been trained by crooked preachers to not be able to see through a fraud – if they did, folks like “Bishop” Eddie “Muscle Shirt’ Long and other assorted liturgical thugs would not be the rich parasites that they are within the intellectual mediocrity of the Black Church.
I want to remind those religious folks reading this piece that it was the dirty Rabbis and cynical public intellectuals that decided that Jesus Christ be executed because his compassion for the poor and the needy and his upsetting their “religious Wall Street” when he cleansed the temple. The same situation speaks to now when intellectuals-for-hire think that broadcasting Malcolm X’s teenage foibles tabloid style is serious scholarship, or persons in the black business community (for example an unsaid radio corporation) depoliticize minds and deny the people access to information for profit, or selfish preachers who never stand up for anything but a another round of love offerings. In antiquity, the Jewish masses were kept stupid, frightened and indebted by their theocratic leadership that was a managerial caste that served the interests of the Roman elite. The welfare of the Jewish masses mattered little to them, and this is analogous to the African American condition today. Those that have little loath those that have not and they serve those that screw all of us.
“Unlike ever before, the fate of our people is dire and fixation with the false hope of a President-messiah still holds many weak minds.”
My question is, How long will Barabbas aka Obama be allowed to be a perilous threat to our corporate well-being and us pretend he cares? Black Agenda Report has been profoundly prophetic in warning readers that the Obama Miracle was hallow. How does the African American Church have any spiritual worth or legitimacy when it causes social deafness, schizophrenia, autism, Stockholm Syndrome, and a self-loathing degenerative nerve disease that would force new volumes of DSM to be written. Unlike ever before, the fate of our people is dire and fixation with the false hope of a President-messiah still holds many weak minds. In many ways, were have been primed by crooked preachers and other charlatans to follow Quisling Pied Pipers, and the Black Church has made the people intellectual chattel to a false hope in Assimilation that is mostly diametrically opposed to our freedom.
As we go through Passion Week and some rethink their fealty to Barak Barabbas Obama, it is important that we rational, progressive people find a way to rescue our brothers and sisters from that brothelized cesspool of insincere, cynically greedy, self-promoting preachers who mislead the folks, keeping them ignorant, reactionary, and firmly within the talons of the Democratic Party. For us unaddled by the Kool Aid of Newton Minow and the other Chicago handlers that manage Barabbas – I mean Barak – we now must begin trying to formulate a program to both educate people that there is another option to this strange man being seen as our Messiah. We can forward Black Agenda Report to friends and loved ones. It actually does wake some people caught up in the faux racial millennium euphoria and denial.
Remember Esau. Once he sold out for a mess of pottage he never got his possessions back. We have too precious a legacy to waste it on a false Kenyan-American employee of Wall Street.
Nathaniel X. Turner is an historian/theologian/researcher living in Washington, DC. He can be contacted at [email protected].
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