I don’t care if Obama is black, white, or purple, and neither should you. I support Barack Obama over Hillary because he is intelligent, thoughtful, and would make a better President of the United States than she would. That is precisely why I could NEVER support a Sharpton or Jesse Jackson… not because they are too “black”… but too religious, too stupid. And easily outclassed by Hillary.

This isn’t a race to be the blackest black. It’s a race to be leader of the free world.

You do not substantiate the allegation of some “purely rhetorical and biased interpretation” in the ZMagazine article but I’m glad the essay appeared to have some decent impact.

I’m intrigued by George Thompson’s comments about religion but I don’t think King conflated militarism with capitalism. King regularly denounced (from 1966 on) what he called “the triple evils that are interrelated:” racism, economic exploitation/poverty (capitalism), and militarism. He did say you couldn’t deal adequately with one of these evils without tacklng the others.

I think Timber is correct on H.C. and B.O. Where I might tick off some DV readers is that I think Edwards (about whom I have no illusions; I am to the left of Kucinich) is more than insignificantly better than both of them. Granted, this says more about how right HC and BO are than about how “left” JRE is .

In my previous comment above, I meant to say (I insert missing words in CAPS) that “Robert V. has NO substantive response to the argument regarding institutionalized/structural/societal racism (a topic to which I just dedicated an entire book in regards to Chicago) of course and he IS reduced to the childish claim that I am addicted to the notion of racism. “

I agree with your take, George. I was thinking if anyone could throw a wrench, he would have to be a beloved sports icon, currently active and on top of his game. Shaq a few years back maybe…but the next Muhamid Ali HAS to be an over the top marketed hero who is undeniably the best….today.

Anybody else will be silenced or turned to a joke– and that goes especially true for politicians/preachers/activists who have no game minutes.

Black people should never have adopted the religion of our oppressors. That has been our greatest mistake. Once we believed a white Jesus was coming back to save us from white men we stopped doing what we needed to do to save ourselves. We are still operating in that “waiting on Jesus” mode. There will be no next great black leader like MLK or Malcolm X because this government will not allow it to happen. It would have to be someone that could not be co-opted by corporations nor personal financial gain. I’m afraid that black leader does not exist……………yet.

“At the end of the day” — let’s take a look at “Barack Obama”:

http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Feb2007/street0207.html

Much of this essay (above URL) is purely rhetorical and biased interpretation. But enough of it is based in documented fact to convince me against Barack Obama.

The frightening fact of life “American” workers fail to grasp is that, it really doesn’t matter who gets (s)elected “President”, anymore — if it ever did. In a nation where “our” government is controlled “by the corporation and for the corporation” rather than “by the people and for the people”, workers simply don’t have any sort of political or economic representation (”voice”) in the decisions that directly affect our lives.

It’s long past time for “life” to change in the United States, and for “American” workers set an example for the rest of the world to emulate. But Barack Obama is not the “crack hit” that will “make it all better”. Rather, “American” workers must agree to disagree on marginal issues, agree to agree on more pivotal issues, and “reclaim the commons” that a small minority of wealthy corporate elite seized from us 200- to 500-years ago in the name of “free-market capitalism”.

Same for Robert Vitaletti. The argument went in one eye and out the other. He’s just recycling b.s. from Obama Inc. He’s caught up in the same old campaign nonsense about getting beyond divisiveness and the “baggage of the past” (especially of those horrifying 1960s that Obama loves to demonize and distance himself from). Robert V. has substantive response to the argument regarding institutionalized/structural/societal racism (a topic to which I just dedicated an entire book in regards to Chicago) of course and he reduced to the childish claim that I am addicted to the notion of racism. Oh, okay: “I disagree with (or do not understand more likely) your argument…so I think you are addicted to your key concept(s).” There’s nothing to say. In any event I must mix my drugs since as much of my writing is about class and empire as it is about racism. Two down.

Dee Anna Roberts has I think written me before. But why bother? Again there’s no substance here. Basically she wrote to say “I like Obama but you don’t and so I don’t like you. I think you are wrong and mean.” Oh, okay. Nice argument! Yes, I have no substantive moral or political argument; it’s really all about my supposed (in fact non-existent) personal hatred of Obama. How incredibly childish and naïve. Inning over.

Michael Hureaux homers to deep Left. That’s it exactly sir: “all the ‘research’ they claim they have done on the opposition to Obama’s ambitions is of the same quality as the research they’ve done on their candidate… culty and sloppy. Hence, Ms. Roberts flies into an attack on the author of the article, wherein she doesn’t bother to cite any of his alleged ‘race baiting.’ The reality is that many black folks, Ms. Roberts included, are quite fine with imperialist warfare and the continued capitalist destruction of infrastructure so long as a black face is driving it. They completely lose their minds when it comes to the follies of the bought out African American leadership, which due to its embrace of late capitalism has forever lost sight of the need for independent African American leadership. It is Ms. Roberts who is race baiting in order to serve a political mercenary who is no more worthy of support than George W. Bush or Rudolph Giuliani or any other political gangster of late capital.” Bulls eye!

Atheo doubles to left and asks an I think excellent question, noting that racial elites enlist selected members of racially oppressed groups to further racial oppression in Latin America as well. There are mestizo counterparts to Cosby and Oprah and Barack and Henry Louis Gates.

The Obama Girl video (well the Obama Girl) is very hot in my opinion.

I’m down with Deadbeat’s comment. He singled atheo in. That is a lot of what white liberals like about B.O. in my observation. It was something that Martin Luther King Jr. warned about.

To TS I say look at the last chapter of my next book (Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis – out next month from Rowman & Littlefield) where I talk about some policy solution areas but also at the whole book where I systematically assault the “class (and economics) over race” argument. A problem statement/diagnosis doesn’t inherently have to give solutions but I do strive for solutions. And for what it’s worth I say in the book and elsewhere along with Dr. King that racism will not be overcome within the framework of capitalism.

VCubed offers some very useful criticism of the old guard and what passed and passes for radicalism/activism in racial and other social justice areas. It’s pretty sad for sure. But I don’t read Derrida – this piece isn’t all that intellectually ambitious (or over intellectual)…the concepts are fairly matter of fact. And VCubed is far too kind to Obama — he’s one of the corporate aliens in the movie “The Live” (not one of the noble humans). B.O. did do some stuff on criminal justice issues in Springfield, but the terrain and priorities are very different on the national/presidential stage and his ex-offender stuff was very diluted and superficial in my opinion. I have quite a few substantive pieces on all this. I’m not part of the civil rights or any other kind of elite – academic or otherwise. I left all that behind (it was and is very much what VCubed describes at the end) and am just a Left writer calling contemporary events like I see them for better or worse. Of course, as Marx said, the point is to change history not just understand it. I never confuse publications like this or more widely distributed print ones with social transformation. Last year I was depressed to see Noam Chomsky fill up a large Iowa City theater standing room only (people were waiting to get in five city blocks back) after attending an antiwar protest that barely got 100 folks. Left celebrity (truly brilliant and prolific man, yes) comes to tell us what he’s written and says about global and domestic oppression and the masses flock in. They can’t get enough. Event to actually resist some aspect of the imperialism that Chomsky describes? A small outpouring as usual.

Fact is Obama denies none of the realities used like sledgehammers here. He took on racial profiling and the death penalty, very unpopular issues with many whites, liberal or not. He co-sponsored and promotes in not-friendly venues his support for the Second Chance Act to remove legal discrimination against ex-felons and to establish long-term employment and financial and social stability. There are plenty of Dixiecrat/DLC Black politicians that have done less and undermined the Civil Rights movement much worse than poor Obama. God, do you hate him because his mom’s white? Because his dad’s from Africa, not the Ole South?

The Old Guard of radicalism that settled for conferences, booksignings, and preaching to the converted see their cliques disintegrating and getting replaced by some who, yes continue the denial of the Anglo world’s racism, but also by some who take the hard-fought hard-won integration prize and use all the benefits gained to push to move everyone forward.

It’s a fact that we all know: if you act more like a white man, you get more access. Full stop. White male Derrida is not needed to explain it. White women in power are not trying to get white men to act more like white women, and they’re certainly not trying to get themselves or their men to act like Black men, much less Black women! They’re not trying to raise the prestige of poor white women either.

Elitism reigns, image trumps substance, and the beat goes on, only with a professional cadre of “leaders” who seem to only help themselves and their friends – just like those they criticize! Real change needs lots less self-proclaimed and clique-elected “leaders” and a lot more grassroots, and the grassroots wants results, not ideology. I agree with above commenters that the young folks don’t deny racism, they simply want to do more than support self-aggrandizing “leaders” who take us nowhere except where it fills their own pockets.

Every culture, movement, organization that tries to undermine the white-male-supremacist status quo faces the same problems, and railing against it and calling it names gets us nowhere. Been there, done that, was Captain of the PC Police in college. White supremacist oppression is the latest in a long list. Before white folks found us they kicked each other around, and we kicked each other around, in some places and times more ferociously and effectively than others, in some luckier times and places we got smart and worked together.

Tearing white folks up doesn’t make them any more likely to listen and learn. It’s like any other kind of hostile act – it begets vengeance and resentment, not greater understanding and certainly not meaningful progress. The same ones that decade after decade rewrite the tirades on race, class, gender and sexuality inequalities are the last ones to man the gates when the revolution erupts – and most of them forget disability, the great equalizing inequality that gets most of us sometime if we live long enough.

Rhetoric aside, there isn’t going to be a revolution, because the rich are too powerful to let one grow, and the poor have gotten too smart to sacrifice themselves only to end up some other leader’s sucker. It’s gonna take a much deeper evolution to create a deeper and lasting change.

This society is still worshiping idols, childishly, willfully or malignantly ignorant of the tremendous want that their gluttony creates in helpless tiny bellies and old, work-worn ones. The hypocrisy of religious leaders, lawyers, politicians, academics and activists is not lost on the communities they use. The communities see them on television, at bookreadings and conferences around the country if not around the world, while the problems at home remain. The people getting published, televised, paid, perks and/or publicity for hollerin’ and doin’ nothin’ else for the communities are the ones who most criticise the accommodators. The communities think of all those frequent-flyer miles, the thousands of dollars in airfares and hotels, the speaker fees, the rents for huge auditoriums – aren’t these leaders sounding more and more like super-church preachers?

Accomodators like Obama, who dissed the DLC but won’t try to tear it down entirely (as most white progressive Democrats also don’t try to do) displease lots of folks, but they get it done step by step, year after year, putting up with insult and indignity after insult, from both sides and every lazy ass fool in-between who’s got an opinion and not much else.

Malcolm grew wiser with time; his rhetoric was dynamic, stirring and provocative before he went to Mecca, but after Mecca, it was beyond rhetoric – it was truly inspiring. I hope our peoples get it together and stop acting surprised there’s still racism, and get on with truly helping our communities, our country and our planet get healthier, more stable, and certainly more just and peaceful.

The discrimination of today is more economically based than racially based. Poor blacks face the same problem of jobs that poor whites do. The middle class of both blacks and whites in under assault by stagnant wages, runaway inflation, and outsourcing (and illegal alien INsourcing) of jobs.

How is Obama (or any other politician) supposed to re-distribute wealth in this country by taking from whites only and giving to blacks only.

There needs to be more black leaders who can internationalize the movement and building bridges with other communities of colors. It’s time for blacks to realize the utter failure of Liberalism.

ALSO – you can buy Leah’s last song “My Box in a Box”

UPDATE: Pat Buchanan just said on MSNBC he liked our song and it wouldn’t hurt Obama. Sweet!

Go for it fans!

http://www.obamagirl.typepad.com/blog/

Mark/Arlington writes:
“The simple fact is that a majortiy of Americans view Obama from the perspective of values, policy positions and accomplishment which a majority identifies with and admires. ”

In fact Americans don’t share Obomba’s readiness to nuke Iran.

Overlooked in the Obomba coverage is the Latin Anmerican phenomena of Mestizo governance which perpetuates racism toward and exploitation of Indios. Would an Obomba administration be any different?

The reality is that many black folks, Ms. Roberts included, are quite fine with imperialist warfare and the continued capitalist destruction of infrastructure so long as a black face is driving it. They completely lose their minds when it comes to the follies of the bought out African American leadership, which due to its embrace of late capitalism has forever lost sight of the need for independent African American leadership. It is Ms. Roberts who is race baiting in order to serve a political mercenary who is no more worthy of support than George W. Bush or Rudolph Giuliani or any other political gangster of late capital.