This article was first published at Black Agenda Report.
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.
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 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?
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?
Surrounded 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?
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 en route to despoliation for 40 years and oblivious of it.