In a radical free-market culture, when hope is precarious and bound to commodities and a corrupt financial system, young people are no longer at risk: they are the risk.

– Henry Giroux, p. x.

If youth once constituted a social investment in the future and symbolized the promise of a better world, they are now entering another stage in the construction of a global social order in which children are increasingly demonized and criminalized… p. 29.

As the politics of the social state gives way to the biopolitics of disposability, the prison becomes a preeminently valued institution whose disciplinary practices become a model for dealing with the increasing number of young people who are considered to be the waste products of a market-mediated society. p. 82.

Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability?
By Henry A. Giroux
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan (2009)
ISBN: 978-0-230-61329-4
ISBN10: 0-230-61329-2

It need not be said, though I find it necessary to restate, that Henry Giroux is one of the most important public servants the last 100 years have produced. In his expansive three decade plus academic career, Giroux has written over 35 books, contributed to countless scholarly journals, and received numerous educational honors.

But perhaps what most makes this former high school basketball star distinct is his tireless advocacy on behalf of the frail, the vulnerable, the disposable.

Giroux has focused much of his writing over the fragile existence disenfranchised populations are largely relegated to. Giroux’s “critical sympathy” to the often forgotten, as Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson once mentioned, is what pushes him time after time to engage issues many of his peers would rather stay far away from — for fear of sanction, resentment, or job loss.

In that spirit of deep moral determination and fervent conviction, comes his latest work: Youth in a Suspect Society, which, above all else, is an attempt to interrogate the increasingly hostile future our society is preparing, with no sense of shame or irony, for its next tenants — young people.

Giroux wastes no time condemning the “assault against youth” being waged by all those blind to the radical realities of reproof youth, and especially those of color, are being confined to by way of policy and legislation. An example of this is provided in the case of Deamonte Driver, a seventh grader from Prince George’s County, Maryland, who “died because his mother did not have the health insurance to cover an $80 tooth extraction.”

Under the Lyndon Baines Johnson administration, Giroux writes, there was at least a “willingness to fight for the rights of children, enact reforms that invested in their future, and provide the educational conditions necessary for them to be critical citizens.” But all advancements made in that era were rolled over as one neo-conservative administration after the other found its way into the White House. And the most devastating of them, in theory and practice, Giroux insists, was the 43rd one.

But government alone isn’t responsible, he notes, because anti-Youth legislations couldn’t be established as law without a media complex that has “habitually” reinforced representations, however false, of young people as “variously lazy, stupid, self-indulgent, volatile, dangerous, and manipulative.” It’s important to note that these suggestions “do more than degrade young people and resonate with their underlying marginality and disposability”; they also “legitimate the passage of draconian measures, policies, and laws at the highest levels of government.”

So, it then makes sense when schools become transformed into secondary stations for police officers, military personnel, and other agents of the State.

The message: Kids and, especially, Youth are a threat to society — a threat which must be watched with close scrutiny, dealt with diabolically, and, when necessary, punished with the power of the law.

Students are, as a result, targeted and treated as potential criminals, paving way for a society in which “children who commit a rule violation as minor as a dress code infraction or slightly act out in class can be handcuffed, booked, and put in a jail cell.”

In Youth in a Suspect Society, Giroux also takes special time out to dive deeper into the challenges confronting children, as they try to navigate a world where giant corporations see them as nothing but disposable commodities – to be bought and sold.

Children, Dr. Giroux writes, “constitute the primary index through which a society registers its own meaning, vision, and politics.” And today’s children are having to become more accustomed to a speed-driven society; a society that treasures punctuality over poignancy, and impatience over incandescence. Thus, kids are being encouraged to revel in “the suspension of judgment, the inability to think critically, [and] the avoidance of responsibility.” (Never mind that these very kids are still ultimately barraged with blame for low test scores or poor performance on state standardized tests.)

Kids would also have to get used to “a society that measures its success and failure solely through the economic lens of the Gross National Product (GNP)”; a society unable to “define youth outside of market principles determined largely by … market growth and the accumulation of capital.”

This society, children should be aware, sees them not only as an “expansive and profitable market but as the primary source of redemption for the future of capitalism.”

Examples of such thinking abound in Youth in a Suspect Society. Giroux’s meticulous research unearths numerous reports of kids being selected by toy companies to act as representatives (unpaid employees), such as a GIA-sponsored event, Slumber Party in a Box, which enlists “agents” to “invite their friends to an overnight party, hand out free products to them, and then provide ‘feedback through quizzes’ to GIA headquarters.” Corporations have found kids and pre-teens great resources – peer pressure power — to use in expanding their brand — even if it commodifies the non-market value of friendship.

Giroux also turns a sharp gaze on pro athletes like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, who, he says, appear more interested in inflating their bank account figures than “using their celebrity status for educating young people about character, hard work, the value of sportsmanship, and the sheer joy of athleticism.”

But there’s another angle to this, which hasn’t gotten as much press among progressive circles. As Giroux writes:

More and more youth have been defined and understood within a war on terror that provides an expansive, antidemocratic framework for referencing how they are represented, talked about, and inserted within a growing network of disciplinary relations that responds to the problems they face by criminalizing their behaviors and subjecting them to punitive modes of conduct.

The war on terror and drugs, Giroux asserts, has added a new target: Youth.

This war, unlike the more glamorous cross-national disputes, doesn’t necessarily involve two sides in contentious combat. This war is characterized by “4th grade reading scores and graduation rates [being] used to determine how many prison cells will be built.” This war is against the growing population of “pint-size nihilists” amongst us. Extinguish them!

And so,

Instead of being viewed as impoverished, minority youth are seen as lazy and shiftless; instead of being recognized as badly served by failing schools, they are labeled uneducable and pushed out of schools; instead of being provided with decent work skills and jobs, they are either sent to prison or conscripted to fight in wars abroad; instead of being given decent health care and a place to live, they are placed in foster care or pushed into the swelling ranks of the homeless.

These enemies of our peace are then rightfully placed in schools where the squeaking sound of metal detectors is omnipresent, where police forces are dominant, where arrests, suspensions, and expulsions are as commonplace as being frisked, cussed-out, or strip-searched by security officers on your way to class. These enemies of our peace might be too young to legally “marry, drive a car, get a tattoo, or go to scary movies, but not too young to be put in prisons for the rest of their lives.”

And while we’re at it, let’s make sure they’re excluded from “various forms of student aid,” post-conviction, including but not limited to “welfare payments, Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, food stamps, and… public housing.”

Isn’t it so heartwarming to know that young people growing up have such a splendid future awaiting them?

Giroux calls on “intellectuals” of great courage to “take a stand” against these “collective problems” putting at risk “not only young people and adults… but the very possibility of deepening and expanding democracy itself.” But how many of these intellectuals wouldn’t have to be summoned from the dead?

As he rightly notes, the university has witnessed a radical shift in vision this past decade. Through hysteria whipped up by right-wingers following 9/11, many liberal or left-leaning professors have been silenced or fired to quell the paranoia expressed by some students that they’re being brainwashed. Their professors tried to force upon them “Marxist” and “Socialist” values – values that go by such scary prospects as critical thinking, intellectual freedom, and independent reasoning.

These young people, Giroux writes, have been bamboozled by the likes of David Horowitz, president of the Center for the Study of popular culture, who’ve “hijacked political power and waged a focused campaign against the principles of academic freedom, sacrificing the quality of education made available to youth in the name of patriotic correctness.”

Cheated out of an enlightening educational experience, Giroux contends, are young people, who, in exchange for being provided the tools to “critically engage what they know and to recognize the limits of their own knowledge,” are infantilized by appeasing academics. They are denied “opportunities to engage knowledge critically… [and] assume responsibility for what it means to know something.”

Giroux’s hopes are for a “larger public dialogue about how to imagine a democratic future,” in the context of a Youth-centered pedagogy. Unfortunately, “We have entered a period in which the war against youth, especially poor youth of color, offers no apologies because it is too arrogant and ruthless to imagine any resistance.” Nonetheless, this ambassador of hope reassures: “… [P]ower as a form of domination is never absolute, and oppression always produces some form of resistance.”

And though the laborious work of resistance must engage all sectors of society, Giroux’s call to young people is direct: “[G]o out into the world and actively try to change it.”

Youth in a Suspect Society is an unnerving prophetic call to action. Through tedious research and meditation, Giroux has provided a blueprint that all concerned can use in restoring the faith Youth once had in society — faith planted in the soils of non-privatized, non-corporatized values.

This faith, however, has been uprooted by years of indifference and antipathy, callousness and bellicosity.

Children are now much too aware of the degree of disregard society disses them with. And they respond to it in ways that anger some and amuse others.

But the concrete work of restoring this faith has hardly been addressed, let alone acted upon, before the publication of Youth in a Suspect Society.

I recommend it with inestimable gratitude to Dr. Giroux for his moral vigor and matchless vitality.

In a recent interview, President Chirac recounted an experience that left him deeply troubled. Through a secret phone call, placed in early 2003, George Bush tried to explain how his plans for war were in direct correlation with biblical prophecy: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East…. The biblical prophecies are being fulfilled…. This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to use this conflict to erase his people’s enemies before a New Age begins.”

All this, coming on the heels of new allegations that former Blackwater CEO, Erik Prince, purposefully operated his disgraced private mercenary machine as a modern-day crusade battalion against the evil forces of Islam—found dominant in the middle-eastern region. And just a few months after the release of tapes showing soldiers in Afghanistan being told to “hunt people for Jesus” and to “get them into the kingdom.”

Of course, this is hardly surprising for those who watched closely the unfolding and aftermath of the Iraq war. A great number of reasons to justify its moral imperative were put forth, but none took repugnance to a new low more than those provided by the former President, such as claims, on countless occasions, and to countless foreign leaders, that “God” was the driver of his war ship, that “God” had instructed him to “go and end the tyranny in Iraq,” that his 2003 war was, essentially, “the lord’s will.”

Many reports have also detailed private conversations Bush had with foreign Head of States about the “love” of God. And with GQ magazine’s exposé, published March this year, of the biblical quotes former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld regularly laced his top-secret memos with (“Open the Gates that the Righteous Nation May Enter,” “Behold, the eye of the Lord is on those who fear Him to deliver their soul from death”), the implications couldn’t be more startling.

Is it any wonder that those most eager to talk about their love for “God” are often the ones most likely to do the devil’s bidding?

Raised in a firm, Judeo-Christian home, I appreciate the roles spirituality and morality play in providing a young child with much needed structure against the many impurities this world contains; but “religion mis-overstood,” as the rap artist Nas once put it, is “poison.” And religious extremists, who’ve convinced themselves that the only true path to the afterlife is that which they’ve chosen to follow, are no less dangerous than the man who led the whole world into war based on conversations he imagined to be having with his “God.”

Conservative Christianity is chief culprit for a lot of the twisted pathologies our society partakes in today, but bigotry isn’t exclusive to the right only. Books by Sarah Posner (God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters), Bill Press (How the Republicans Stole Christmas: Why the Religious Right is Wrong about Faith & Politics and What We Can Do to Make it Right), and Frank Schaeffer (Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back) have outlined poignantly the right-wing’s co-optation of Christianity for commercial political causes, but not enough has been written on the fundamentalism of religion, and how easy it is for even the most well-meaning of liberals, leftists, or progressives to contribute to the chaotic conditions humanity remains subject to.

In 2009, no one is still left unsure whether religion, and its struggle for supremacy, has been the greatest dividing factor this world has entertained. The results—millions of lives lost (and counting)—is plenty proof. Innocent blood has been shed, and will continue to be shed, for as long as religion remains a deciding factor in the public spaces that govern our everyday concerns and careers.

My faith (small f) is private and I hope it remains that way. And though I believe I’m doing right by my maker, I’m not so arrogant as to proselytize it to everyone who comes my way. I don’t hold anyone to a lesser standard for refusing to commit to the same religion-based belief system I’ve adopted. I chose the prophetic route of theology, which puts at center the burdens of the disenfranchised above all other entities, but I’m not so quick to denounce atheists or agnostics as heathens whose special place in hell awaits them—if they don’t repent and turn from their wicked ways some time soon.

With the increase in church shootings, mosque bombings, and synagogue attacks, the need for inter-faith dialogue is more critical than it’s ever been. Pastors, Imams, Monks, Rabbis, Priests, Atheism Scholars, and all other religious/non-religious leaders must make a commitment, within the next decade, to broaden the discourse of faith, that it may include all those who find inequality distasteful enough to engage it in a way that frees the yoke of the oppressed and brings to justice the oppressors.

At the core of each credible faith is the belief that reciprocity should guide the believer’s actions, reminding him/her that no God is worthy of worship who lets injustice go unpunished or a good deed go unrewarded. For those who truly cherish life over death, peace over war, liberation over imperialism, that should be common ground we can all gather around.

There’s a woman in Chicago… She has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands.

– President Ronald Wilson Reagan (1976)

… This legislation provides an historic opportunity to end welfare as we know it and transform our broken welfare system by promoting the fundamental values of work, responsibility, and family.

– President William Jefferson Clinton (August, 22, 1996)

All I’m trying to do is restore some balance to our economy so that middle class families who are working hard – they’re not on welfare, they’re going to their jobs every day, they’re doing the right things by their kids –they should be able to save, buy a home, go on a vacation once in a while.

– President Barack Hussein Obama II (March 18, 2009)

It’s unclear what possessed President Obama’s intimation at welfare recipients as lazy, selfish, uncaring bums, but the suggestion that they are not “working hard,” or “doing the right things by their kids,” is a cruel and mean one. The characterization of poor single-mothers, who coincidentally live a life dependent on food stamps and other government subsidies, as irresponsible narcissists is surely no new phenomenon. One need only look to Ronald Reagan, two decades ago, and find ample relief in his infamous description of financially-disempowered Black and Brown females as, Welfare Queens. Obama’s high-fiving of the ‘Great Communicator’ is, sadly, unsurprising, for one who has praised Reagan at every step possible.

In the heat of the ’08 presidential campaign, last year, Obama couldn’t contain his admiration for the man whose economic policies successfully demolished the dignity and dreams of a whole generation of people: “I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it.” Obama went further in his praise of Reagan, for eliminating “the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s.” A couple of days back, on St. Patrick’s Day, Obama again drew inspiration from the man many—and they are certainly in no short supply—have compared to the devil, on numerous occasions.

Whether Obama understands this or not, the demonization of welfare recipients has to STOP! As long as the narrative of laziness remains affixed to the character of this group, the right-wing’s war on poverty (the war to perpetuate it) would have foot soldier in the White House—an ally in the most powerful man in the world. Another notion, as it relates to Welfare, that deserves death by a thousand execution squads, is the premise that Black and Brown single mothers are the major recipients, and thus, welfare is but another Affirmative Action-esque ‘handout,’ which must be eliminated, to enforce personal responsibility on these communities. Every legitimate study shows that White women are, in fact, the overwhelming beneficiaries of welfare programs. This detail is not meant to bash economically handicapped White women, but rather, to put to bed, once and for all, the lies concocted by the right-wing, in attempts to abolish the safety net which has held many families intact, for the last few decades.

In 2000, when Obama enacted a run for Congressman Bobby Rush’s Congressional seat, the then-relatively unknown State Senator sought to convince inner-city Chicago constituents, which Rush represented, that he was not the Ivy League, Harvard educated, Hyde Park snub Rush’s campaign had depicted him as. Unfortunately, the charge stuck to him, like a lapel pin, and many Black and Brown residents had a hard time seeing the faces of their struggle in Obama’s eyes and promises. Bobby Rush, the former Black Panther, won handsomely, and without breaking a drop of sweat.

Obama might not have to worry about those claims lingering any longer, but, as every politically-astute observer knows, old ghosts come haunting back—chickens come home to roost. If Obama keeps up his antics of lambasting poor Black mothers for feeding their kids Popeyes Chicken remnants for breakfast, and asserting that a “good economic development plan for [the Black community] would be if we make sure folks weren’t throwing their garbage out of their cars,” it wouldn’t be such a tough sell, next election cycle, for his opponents to argue that, perhaps, the populist President isn’t so populist after all! It might not be so hard to propose that Obama, himself the child of a food-stamps recipient, has forgotten were he came from.

Obama’s remarks, though intensely troubling, might be just the wake-up call progressives could have only dreamed of. In the mid-‘90s, when Bill Clinton fulfilled his solemn vow to “end welfare as we know it,” many Clinton supporters were unable to reconcile the actions of the then-popular president, to the promises—of equality for all—he had made on the campaign trail. In his reflective book, Death Blossoms, political prisoner and prophetic leader, Mumia Abu Jamal described Clinton’s “legislative obscenity” as a “chilling” plot, drafted to dash “the hopes of millions of the poor, all in order to protect his political ass.” Brother Jamal, as always, was right on target, and the question now looming larger than ever, is if Obama might be considering a relative “legislative obscenity,” which might come in handy, in the event of a need to “protect his political ass.” The prospect might look improbable, but history informs us of the moral obligation to remain combat-ready at all times.

The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power.
– Malcolm X, The Power of Media (1964)

… The cops be trying to pop and lock me/
They cocky, plus they mentality is Nazi/
The way they treat blacks, I wanna snap like paparazzi/
– Hip-Hop artist Common, Real People, Be (2005)

… The media be crucifying brothers severely/
– Tupac, “Blasphemy,” The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory (1996)

Only in a failed media state is an innocent peace-maker, with a knee to his head and palms pressed upon his back, deemed the perpetrator of his own death in an execution. This is the story of Oscar Grant III – the murdered 21-yr-old Oakland father. In a rush to reverse the graphic images, caught on tape, the mainstream media, and its companions, have sought to diminish the credibility of Mr. Grant, and exonerate, before legal trial, Officer Johannes Mehserle of all wrongdoing in the death of Oscar Grant.

Borrowing predictable moves from the old playbook, CNN, MSNBC and FOX News (and their many affiliated siblings) have all reported that Oscar Grant supposedly had a (police) record, and thus, somehow – logic be damned! – culpable in his own death. Those who payed keen attention during the Sean Bell fiasco are well aware of this trend. As Sean Bell’s precious body was riddled by the 50 bullets of four New York police officers on duty that November night (the eve of his wedding), and the inexcusable homicide of Bell was sentenced justly in the court of public opinion, mainstream media channels, with unseemly haste, were swift in reminding viewers that Sean Bell, and his counterparts, possessed a criminal record. It’s a rehashed move to lessen the humanity of the unjustifiably murdered, and diminish the extent of criminality – how logical.

Soon after commercial news channels found the shooting of Oscar Grant too popular to disregard (with over a million hits on YouTube, of mind-gripping cell-phone documentaries of the incident), it was no shocker to see them (our dependable news-source) report of the death-threats Officer Mehserle has received, ever since (Death threats, who could imagine?). Noting how Mehserle has been forced to take a paid-leave (poor him), move twice to different residential locations, and receive police protection, it became a sort of chorus, sang by pundits who find no cause of concern in the unprovoked shooting of an unarmed Black man, and received ample airplay on cable, national and local news outlets. Defending the officer’s actions, they have helped circulate the laughable (though, not that funny) report – 6 days after Grant’s death – that he (a two-year veteran of the transit agency), in fact, confused his taser for a gun.

The mainstream channels have deemed Oscar Grant’s behavior “threatening” to the officers who exercised full control over his handcuffed, subdued body. They have justified his death with unsubstantiated (and erroneous) reports of his participation in the scuffle, which ultimately ended his life. Oakland District 6 Council member, Desley Brooks, took note of this trend in a press-conference on Wednesday, January 7th 2009: “We [the community) want to be very clear to you, the media. We would not tolerate you criminalizing the victim, and making the suspect somehow victimized. The news that is being portrayed today is that this poor officer, who executed a father who begged for his life, that he is in protective custody. My question is, ‘Who was there to protect Oscar Grant, when he was shot?’”

Indeed, the “protect and serve” force was less interested in being forthright about the shooting, and waited several days, similar to the MSNBC-Imus incident, to see if it would ever yield any traction. As told by citizen-journalists across the country, the officers involved in the execution of Oscar Grant confiscated all cell-phones and video cameras thought to contain documentary of the shooting – purportedly for “evidence”-gathering purposes. The mainstream media has failed to report that.

What is certainly clear from this ordeal, is that mainstream media – which insists we live in a “post-racial” era – is not only a disseminator of untruths and prevarication, but also operates antithetically to the interests of everyday people. The mainstream press corps has failed to – just as in the cases of Abner Louima, Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Baron “Scooter” Pikes, Ronnie White, Kathryn Johnston, Michael Stewart, Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton Jr., etc. – keep track of the lovely widow, and four-year-old daughter of Oscar Grant. Dead Prez was right: “You can’t fool all the people all of the time/ But if you fool the right ones, then the rest will fall behind/ … For your TV screen, is telling lies to your vision.”

I think that I have the capacity to get people to recognize themselves in each other. I think that I have the ability to make people get beyond some of the divisions that plague our society… [D]uring my younger days when I was tempted by, you know, sort of more radical or left wing politics, there was a part of me that always was a little bit conservative in that sense; that believes… [in] recognizing everybody’s concerns, seeing other people’s points of views and then making decisions.

– Barack Obama on ABC’s This Week

In the wake of President-Elect Obama’s recent cabinet-appointments, many white liberals have taken it upon themselves to release pent-up aggression at a man they thought was the “progressive” candidate he had earlier claimed to be.. As they saw it, Obama had “betrayed” the loyalty that earned him victory. As a sort of catharsis, railing Obama’s reputation over the coals of indignation could make them feel better about their decision to elect a man who promised virtually nothing (of substance) in his bid for the presidency. White liberals, especially, have had to learn so much, in the last 1 month, about the man whose political dirty-laundry was never hidden from the public to begin with.

In a highly predictable move, they have sought to bash everything Obama, or Obama-like, and couch their frustration in the ‘eloquence,’ and ‘con-artistry’ of Obama. Spare me the misplaced aggravation. One of such liberals is writer and activist, James Petras who went as far as suggesting that no progressive organization or publication held Obama’s feet to the fire during the presidential campaign. Petras believes that, to guarantee John McCain a loss, every progressive and leftist news site accommodated and encouraged Obama’s sophistry, as he clinched victory into becoming the “greatest con-man in recent history.” As Petras tells it, “The entire political spectrum ranging from the ‘libertarian’ left, through the progressive editors of the Nation to the entire far right neo-con/Zionist war party and free market Berkeley/Chicago/Harvard academics, with a single voice, hailed the election of Barack Obama as a ‘historic moment’, a ‘turning point in American history and other such histrionics.” This is stunning because “self-opiated ‘progressives,’ who” once operated as the conscience of the Democratic Party, saw no wrongdoing in concocting “arguments in his [Obama] favor,” – long as it ultimately garnered Obama victory.

It is unclear whether Mr. Petras is engaging in grand-delusion. In the course of the ’08 presidential race, countless “progressive” publications never let a second slip-by without heaping fact-based criticism on the Obama campaign staff, and the candidate it worked for. Perusing the pages of Black Agenda Report and Black Commentator solves the puzzle. Black Agenda Report, notoriously known for its constructive criticism – characterized by some as, “attacks” – of Obama, must have mysteriously slipped Petras’ memory, as he proclaimed the progressive community to have cheerled Obama into victory. Another Black progressive publication, which I write for, BlackCommentator.com was unrelenting in its undressing of President-Elect Obama, as the tiresome 22-month long campaign drained the blood of reasoning from, otherwise, radically-inclined liberals, leftists, and progressives – most especially Black ones. At Black Commentator, readers were left to juggle between the biting commentaries of Cynthia McKinney-supporters, such as Larry Pinkney, Dr. Lenore Daniels, Tolu Olorunda (myself), etc., and the discontent Obama-supporters, such as Bill Fletcher Jr., Reverend Irene Monroe, David A. Love, etc., expressed on a weekly basis. How Black progressive voices became muted in Petras’ reproof of the progressive bloc is not a surprise to this writer..

Black progressives have always maintained an impeccable legacy of critical opposition to empire – in whatever form it comes in. Whether it was Dr. Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell, or Clarence Thomas, Black progressives have remained unbridled in their remonstrations against White power in Black face. Yet, the liberal wing of the American political system has never appreciated, nor accepted, their moral leadership. This reality is validated in the leadership of most unions, non-profits, and left-inclined political organizations. The membership might be disproportionately Black and Brown, but the management, mostly, retains a White identity.

Whilst Black progressives sought to rip the mask off of Barack Obama, in an attempt to unveil his true identity, we were deemed ‘Obama-haters,’ whose egos sought to stifle the chances of a Black man making history. The same white liberals, who now find no progressive solace in Obama’s unfolding cabinet, told Black progressives to be quiet, and “wait till he gets in first.” This logic of reprimanding Black souls to be silent, and reserved, dates back to the era of slavery, with pretentious white liberals, presented as abolitionists, urging Black slaves to fight for more substantial accumulations, other than freedom. “Higher wages,” “better treatment,” and other silly calculations were exalted above the pedestal of liberation. As it was then, so it is now. At a time when the inconvenient truth stares White liberals in the face, they seek to put the blame, instead, on a Black man who bathed them in his eloquent and rhetorical oceans. With this outburst of disillusionment, what most disturbs Black progressives, such as myself, is the reality that every disappointing appointment, by the President-Elect, was foreseeable a million miles away.

From the selection of pro-war Zionist, Rahm Emmanuel; to the hawkish center-right triangulator, Hillary Rodham Clinton; to the grossly incompetent hoop-star, Arne Duncan; to Monsanto-shill Tom Vilsack; to religious-right ideologue Rick Warren, the inevitability stands out.

Since clinching the Democratic Party nomination – but really dating back to his Senate career – President-Elect Obama had dropped countless hints about the administration he planned to oversee. As a strong believer in bipartisanship, Obama had pledged to welcome voices, opinions and characters he ‘disagreed with.’ Most white liberals, instead of questioning this logic, played along with his divine call for “unity.” As one who could “bring together” all factions of society, and heal the “racial wounds” that “divide” us, it was only a matter of time before Obama was perceived as the second coming of Jesus Christ. Though voting repeatedly for an extension of the Iraq war, whilst a Senator, white liberals convinced themselves that he was more than willing to end the war in 2 years, as he had promised – or not.

While most White liberals were foaming at the mouth, many Black and Brown progressives sought to expose Obama as the unraveling of a hip, cool, and sexy imperialist-to-be. An example is L.A.-based writer and editor Juan Santos, whose phenomenal piece, titled “Barack Obama and the ‘End’ of Racism” (Feb. ’08), put to bed all claims to a war-ending-peacenik-post-racial-uniter – in the personage of Barack Obama. Santos captures the Obama personality with exceptionality: “Obama plays the role of a Black Cinderella. He does for Black folks what Cinderella does for girls. He shows that oppression and silence can be good for you – at least if you are the one the prince chooses, or if you are the one who gets to be the prince. It’s total fantasy… Obama, with his extraordinary intelligence and presence (by any standard), is, in the eyes of white Amerikkka, (and, according to the standards of the so-called “Enlightenment,” which still rule the thinking of Euro-Americans) the half-white, and thus, half-redeemed “Black savage” – “redeemed” by his “white blood”, “civilized” by it – redeemed by his relative whiteness- ultimately redeemed and refined by the white nation itself… Obama knows the rules of the game, after all – he is the rules of the new race game- his candidacy itself is a manifestation of the new system of racism.”

The problem with white-liberalism, and its inability to render deserved criticism, while it mattered, lies in the inherent non-identity of its political philosophy. White-liberalism is structured around celebrity, popularity and majority – Democracy? It blows with the cultural and political tide. Whilst it was convenient, and even expedient, to embrace Obama’s candidacy as the “dawn” of a new political paradigm, white liberals flocked with endorsement of this “charismatic,” and “new” Black politician, who doesn’t see Race or color. He was, in their imagination, the manifestation of Dr. King’s dream. Not the Dr. King who grew into consciousness from 1965-1968, but the “I Have a Dream” Dr. King, but the Dr. King who wouldn’t dare say that, many in “the white community” feel the Civil Rights movement “should slow up and just be nice and patient and continue to pray, and in a hundred or two hundred years the problem will work itself out because only time can solve the problem;” not the Dr. King who incinerated the petty belief that “integration” is “merely a romantic or aesthetic something where you merely add color to a still predominantly white power structure.” This belief that Obama is the birth child of ‘the other’ Dr. King’s dream, led White liberals into missing the point on Obama. Having been taking for a ride by the Obama campaign, they now feel the need to justify their gullibility with the infantile defense that Obama had misled them into thinking differently about his potential as a progressive president.

While some see latent value in the recent outrage surrounding Obama’s cabinet-picks, I’m not as convinced that disorganized screams are the keys to steering the wheels of the Obama administration in a progressive direction. With self-proclaimed “progressives,” such as cable-news host Keith Olbermann, ascribing unconditional praise to the grave of Mark Felt, otherwise known as “Deep throat,” without mentioning his supreme role in the formulation of COINTELPRO, it’s clear that White liberals still have a lot to learn.