Barak Hussein Obama: The Meteoric Rise of a Race-Neutered Presidential
Candidate
by BAR contributing
editor Nathaniel X Turner II
"How can
Obama warrant a prophetic crown of black leadership without presenting a
scintilla of evidence of having taken up the black cross?"
The first decade of 21st century has been
characterized by the decline of the Civil Rights era leadership, increasingly
supplanted by a new generation often bereft of vision, a sense of duty, and
self-sacrifice. This "new" leadership possesses a studied clinical tact of
being socially distant from core issues that affect the masses of
African-Americans. Further, these new
leaders are well-suited to mesh with the evolving post-Brown Decision black elite
who wallow in the dystopian non-racial world where being self-effacing,
self-loathing, self-censoring (regarding the deteriorating condition of
blacks), and slavish endorsement of the Faustian neo-liberalism is rewarded
with affluence and honorary white status.
Individualistic-bourgeois-hedonism,
cynical conformity to corporatist Aryan hegemony, and ethnic treason foment
social glaucoma and schizophrenia.
As a result of the detached retina of social vision, the
black masses stumble through a dark ghettoized abattoir exploited by a
judas-goat-comprador leadership caste that is acutely kleptocratic and
predatory in worldview and abetted by a cynical Shylockian, Gantryesque,
escapist, psychotropic, techno-vaudevillian, and anti-black clergy. Sadly,
since Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in 1968, the African American
masses have been matriculating through a school for the solipsistically blind
in a society whose social promotion policy for them is ethnocide and benign
neglect. Likewise, those blacks scarred by past conditions of servitude, discrimination,
and exploitation continue to be battered by structural poverty, inequality, and
racism - from without - and quislings and faith-based courtesans - from within.
"African
Americans are primed to be pimped by a garden variety of Ivy-Leagued and
corporate-minded hirelings."
To a large degree the historic sense of history and yearning
for self-determination has been compromised, gutted of purpose, or contaminated
by right-wing synthesized victim-blaming nostrums. Manipulated and betrayed and
narcotized by a homogenized mainstream and castrated syncophantic black media,
African Americans are primed to be pimped by a garden variety of Ivy-Leagued
and corporate-minded hirelings. Presently, African American peoples' fingers
are being pressed forcibly down on the neo-Bookerian Braille campaign flyer
proclaiming Obama as their messiah able to usher in a racial millennium.
Obama is not atypical of the newest bumper crop of
post-Brown Black Elected Officials
whose ties are more rooted in Wall Street, K
Street, the Loop, of some lily white world where even the janitorial staff has
no black presence. His Clintonian-like words at the 2004 Democratic Convention
that there was "no black America" is contradicted by his claiming in Selma,
Alabama earlier this year to be the Torchbearer of the Joshua
Generation to those Moses Generation African Americans who fought Jim Crow
in the 1950s and 1960s. If Obama has no tribe to which he owes loyalty, what
possesses him to claim the mantle of a group to which he feels has no stake?
This writer feels that Mr. Obama owes his limited
credibility in the African American community to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of
Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ and Obama's spiritual mentor - until
the presidential candidate found it prudent to disinvite
the liberation theologian from his official presidential announcement in
Springfield, Illinois.
Why is Obama due the mantle of African Americans without
facing down a Bull Connor, Mayor Daley, Frank Rizzo, Sheriff Clark, or any
genuine white supremacist institutional structure? Thin are his laurels that
manifest his mettle or ethnic-realpolitik testosterone needed in a post-Katrina
world of Black America. Nonetheless, Obama has been given a walk by Negro
leaders who are more accountable to AIPAC and Project 21 than to any African
American constituency. How can Obama warrant a prophetic crown of black
leadership without presenting a scintilla of evidence of having taken up the
black cross - minus individual slights, personal adversity, and his admitted
bi-racial schizophrenia. Even these minor scraps of personal angst have a
questionable origin which might well have been concocted to please a white
publishing executive's balance sheet.
Into a vacuum caused by drugs, class segmentation, deindustrialization,
familial dissolution, mass incarceration, apathy, top-down class treason, and
the federal government's retreat from social justice programs and New Deal/War
On Poverty income redistribution programs, Obama, untouched by this carnage, is
allowed to ascend to the throne of African American leadership as an untested
and unknown quantity. Is Obama a hero, villain, prescient sage, or a non-racial
"fool from the village" that Nostradamus' prophecy warned of?
"How can
Mr. Obama reconcile the diametrically opposed agendas of Anglo American
supremacists and African American self-determinists?"
In Obama's best-selling "noir-Horatio Algeresque" Audacity
of Hope chapter titled "Race," he claims his ethnically diverse family
background - with members who resemble Margaret Thatcher and Bernie Mac - makes
him unable to take sides on race or group identity alone. He, therefore,
eschews having loyalty to any one "tribe."
The question must be asked: how can Mr. Obama reconcile the
diametrically opposed agendas of Anglo American supremacists and African
American self-determinists without the less powerful and affluent black
people's cause being short-handed? Anglo-Saxon hegemony does not accept
half-way covenants. One must choose the Anglo tribe or be marginalized.
Therefore, considering the singularity of white oppression in African American
life, Mr. Obama's doctrine that he forswears allegiance and fealty to any one
tribe smacks of a lie. African Americans must ask, What draws this race-neutral
politician to our community's doorstep since he comes as an avowed friend of
even those who hate us?
We cannot allow Anglo media oligopolists to trick us into
thinking that Obama has a unique racial heritage. Since time immemorial
the African American family has been diverse, having whites, Indians,
Caribbeans, Jews, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, and more. The
existence of variety never made the majority of us somehow unique. We were
always African Americans and members of the black nation in America. Further,
the game that the media is playing regarding Obama is insidious, because
African Americans since the late 1960s have been chided for supporting black
candidates for elected office. Nowadays, we are being ordered that we must vote
and support this black person. All the while he claims that race is not really
that important to him.
Furthermore, why does his foreign travel make him so unique?
Did not Kathleen
Cleaver grow up in India and other African Americans live in far-flung
locales? Why is Obama's race neutral ideology something that makes him
deserving of uncritical African American support? Why is his international
experience given him a more revelatory vantage on race relations than Malcolm
X, Huey Newton, DuBois, millions of black veterans, and all those before him?
How does his soft-peddling of race and racism into the trivialities of slurs,
stereotypes, and whites simply not understanding differ from the hypercritical
fair-weather white liberals of yesteryear? How does Obama justify the mass
imprisonment of black men and police brutality and economic discrimination as
something not fundamentally race-based, but rather, is the result of unfamiliarity
and ignorance? How can individuals remove the vestiges of racism with simple
disapproval? At the same time, how can Obama differentiate himself from other
black conservatives when he calls on people of color to give up the claim to
victimhood and persecution that, he believes, limits their ability to reach
their full potential?
"How does Obama justify the mass imprisonment of black men and
police brutality and economic discrimination as something not fundamentally
race-based?"
We have embraced a serpent - be he venomous or not - into
our bosom. He claims to be for peace but in speeches calls for expanded
intervention abroad against people of color and of the Muslim faith. He claims
the mantle of African American leadership and maintains that our older
leadership has passed the torch to him, but professes no loyalty to any tribe.
So how can he lead those with whom he does not acknowledge an exclusive tie? He
spouts that racism can be eliminated with the simple changing of attitudes. He
draws on the writings of Gunnar Myrdal and Robert Park but is unfamiliar with
Frantz Fanon, Amos Wilson, Robert Allen, and virtually any other counter
hegemonic writer or thinker. He has attain his preeminence on the cheap as a
thundering cloud of change that has no rain to nurture those who count upon
him. He is callow but ideally suited to a lethargic African American leadership
caste that is little more than style and whole lacking in substance.
Furthermore, Obama's emergence is antithetical to the self-determination of the
African American people. If he is the Joshua incarnation of the Moses
generation's dream we have been enroute to despoliation for 40 years and
oblivious of it.
As
many of you may have guessed by now, Nathaniel X Turner II is a pseudonym. But
he checks in regularly with us, and can be reached at Publisher (at)
BlackAgendaReport.com.
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