Obama and Black "Leadership"

The Black Agenda Report has a set of articles on the current state of black "leadership" that I think the readers of Garvey's Ghost ought to read up on. The first: Putting Black Faces on Imperial Policies is an important piece because it highlights a point I have made regarding the death of black protest politics as seen with the ouster of Cynthia McKinney. From the article:

"Barack Obama is our son and he deserves our support," declared Illinois Senate President Emil Jones Jr., speaking to a gathering of Black Democrats at the party's winter meeting, in Washington, earlier this month. By Jones' logic, Condoleezza Rice deserves automatic African American support as "our daughter," and Colin Powell, her predecessor as George Bush's Secretary of State, was due fealty as "our brother."



And yes, this issue does put Obama front and center. I'm not hating on the man for what he's trying to accomplish but rather I object to the symbolism that goes with him in particular. As I have stated before, white people who like him, like him because they perceive him as "post-racial". That is, he does not carry the "racial baggage" that the "rest of us" carry. That white mother of his, unlike a most if not all previous black candidates, carries much "soothing" weight with white voters. This is nothing new as anyone familiar with the American racial system will know that blacks with white kin, were often the buffer class that was used as it's leadership class since their "peculiar" breeding was percieved as making them smarter and more civilized than the "off the boat" Africans. But my issue with Obama goes beyond his gene pool (which is really not an issue for me, but rather an issue I have with white people who love him so much). My issue with Obama is his apparent lack of firmly held positions. For example, I thought his non-comment on the Sean Bell shooting (which has basically disappeared from the news media) was a slap in the face of black folk in NYC. I'm not comfortable voting for a man who doesn't have the back bone to say 50 shots, and emptying 2 clips at a civilian is not OK. I have a problem with a any candidate who thinks the Iranian are incapable of the intelligence to have nuclear weapons, especially given that the US has no qualms dumping depleted Uranium on civilian populations. Anyway, the second article, A Valley of Buzzwords: Obama’s Soulless Book goes into depth about Obama's apparent lack of grounding:

Obama gets a lot wrong from start to finish. While people may indeed have a shared reality - which means we witness the same things - we don't always feel, understand, process, or react to what we witness in the same way. The simplest example of not having a "shared understanding" is the difference in how blacks and whites view the police.

What is lacking here is devotion to principles, which Obama constantly sacrifices on the altar of "shared values." And of course the issue is not of shared values. It's how we rank our values. Many people value religion, but which religion has more value? In this country we all know the answer to that question. As proof that the United States government values Christians over Muslims, consider that the United States is at war with an Islamic country. Consider that Muslims in this country are subject to increased government scrutiny and racial, ethnic, and religious profiling. No one in their right mind could believe that the United States places a Muslim on an equal footing with a Christian or Jew. The daily body count dispels that notion.

Read the articles for more info. That first one is very important.

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