The spurious claim that Black Americans oppose Barack Obama because of his white mother, African father, and Harvard Law degrees is a racist slur against Black Americans by the mainstream news media, designed to trivialize and divert attention from real issues African Americans care about, but which are not addressed by Obama supporters OR their Republican opponents.
Both Barack Obama's Republican opponents and the centrist Democrats who support his presidential candidacy agree on one thing. They all agree that black opinion on the senator is both uninformed and irrelevant.
To hear the mainstream media, black dissatisfaction with Senator Obama is all about his black African father, his white American mother, his light complexion and his Columbia and Harvard Law degrees. The day after Rush Limbaugh called the senator a "half-frican" on the air, the term was in the mouths of ignorant black talk show hosts in multiple cities. Black America was then admonished and chided by white Republicans and Democrats of all colors for not embracing Senator Obama based on some foolish standard of black authenticity.
This is a racist calumny and slur of the first magnitude against all of black America. Our people have never rejected leading figures because of light complexions, immigrant parents or advanced degrees. Black America emphatically did not reject Thurgood Marshall or W.E.B. DuBois, or Julian Bond or Adam Clayton Powell. Nor did the movement turn away immigrants like Stokley Carmichael or Roger Toussaint. Black opposition to Barack Obama on account of his parentage and Harvard Law degree is every bit as much a fabricated political issue as the wall to wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death and family issues are fabricated news. Both are served up to us by the same mainstream media, and for similar reasons.
In many quarters of black America there are sane, solid and sensible reasons for black voters to question whether Barack Obama will represent them at all. Many remember that his first act as a US Senator was to refuse to stand with the Congressional Black Caucus and California Senator Barbara Boxer in opposition to Ohio's nullification of hundreds of thousands of black votes. Obama's second, third and fourth significant acts were when he declined to ask any difficult, pointed or revealing questions of Condoleezza Rice and two of the president's disastrous Supreme Court nominees, and he actually voted for two out of three of these. Obama's sixth and seventh important acts as a senator were to vote for a bill that made it nearly impossible for ordinary people to sue giant corporations who rob, defraud, maim or kill, and another vote to renew the hated Patriot Act which he vigorously campaigned against. And though Senator Obama now claims to oppose the war in Iraq, he remains advocate of bombing Iran to start yet another.
This commentator was at Obama's 2004 Illinois primary election victory party. The white and black people there that night imagined that they had elected another Paul Wellstone or a Harold Washington, a senator who would bring their concerns to the halls of power, whether the powerful were ready to hear them or not. One wonders what they think today.
Black America is rightly worried. We are an eighth the nation's population and half its prisons, but we cannot get a mem
ber of the black caucus, Senator Obama included, to question the nation's policy of racially selective mass incarceration in public. We do have issues that matter to us, and if Barack Obama does not address them, he is truly somebody else's candidate, not ours.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Bruce Dixon.
TO LISTEN to this Black Agenda Radio commentary, click the mic.
TO POST A COMMENT ON THIS ITEM, click here to visit our blog.
In this week’s segment, we hear about events in the West African nation of Guinea-Bissau, a disputed election, and a so-called coup that was actually carried out on behalf of the president. But first…
Margaret Kimberley was a guest on the Jamarl Thomas YouTube Channel. We present excerpts of the discussion of her contribution to the new anthology China Changes Everything. Her chapter is entitled "…
The West African nation of Guinea-Bissau recently experienced an aborted electoral process followed by what was called a coup d’etat. But the reality differs from the narrative presented by the neo-…
Ajamu Baraka, BAR Editor and Columnist, joins Dimitri Lascaris to discuss the potential US attack on Venezuela and its regional impact. The conversation explores the legality and morality of recent…
U.S. sanctions, violence, threats, and theft are war crimes waged against Venezuela for decades. A scandal about a “double tap” killing should not be the focus of attention.
