Trey Smith
For my next three posts -- this one today and two tomorrow -- I'm going to feature snippets of articles from the Black Agenda Report (BAR). The editors and writers at BAR have not drunk the Obama Kool-Aid and have been very critical of the president and his administration.
African Americans, the most politically volatile and left-oriented U.S. constituency – a people specifically targeted by Wall Street’s machinations – had an historical role to play. “The man STRUCK,” said Frederick Douglass, “is the man to cry out.” But Black folks had already been struck silly with Obama’Laid.
The rulers had, at long last, found our Achilles Heel, the weakest spot in African Americans’ political armor. Our reflexive racial solidarity (actually, an aspect of Black nationalism), which had served us so well, for so long, short-circuited our progressive political instincts. We became fodder for Obama, the slicker-than-Slick-Willie corporate guy with the brown face.
Despite his background, Obama knew enough about African Americans to pay us no attention and less respect. There would be no penalty. Black folks had convinced themselves that Obama needed our protection; it never occurred to most of us that we needed protection from him – not during the primaries, when he praised Ronald Reagan’s reaction to the “excesses” of the Sixties, or when he refused to endorse even a voluntary halt to home foreclosures (while Hillary Clinton and John Edwards endorsed “voluntary” and mandatory moratoriums, respectively); not in the last weeks before his inauguration, when Obama announced that Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and all “entitlements” would be “on the table” for chopping under his administration.
~ from Victory! – for the Non-Resistance by Glen Ford ~
One of the exit polls I saw on Election Day is that 93 percent of blacks voted for Barack Obama. While blacks historically have strongly supported whoever the Democratic Party candidate happened to be, 93% still is an eye-popping number.
A number that high suggests one thing: Blacks voted en masse for the incumbent because of the color of his skin! If 93% of whites had voted for Romney, you know as well as I do that people would say this amounts to racism. The same is true if blacks vote for a candidate simply because he too is black.
IF Obama had worked diligently over the past 4 years to address issues important to black Americans, that would be one thing. But as editor Glenn Ford and others at BAR have shown, this is not the case at all. In order to appeal to white folk, Obama has gone out of his way NOT to address black themes. Most of his economic plans and initiatives negatively impact the poor and, like it or not, our racist society dictates that a significant number of blacks sadly fall into this category.
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ReplyDeleteYes!! So many of my black friends and family voted for Obama simply because of his "halfrican-ness." And so many try to deny it. But come on, a black man running for president, of course some blacks would vote for him based solely on that reason.Of course, it's understandable why we would want to vote for Obama. Here in Hawaii, one of the mayoral candidates, a Filipino, pretty much controls the Filipino vote. People want to support people "like them." But voting for Obama simply because of his blackness (half-blackness) is a huge misstep. It reflects, like the article said, a sense of racial solidarity, but it also reflects the fact that people usually vote for candidates based solely on irrelevant grounds like race. Just because Obama is black doesn't mean he gives a damn about my black ass. He's still just another pawn for whom the people and their welfare is secondary. Real change for us, not just blacks but for Americans, will only come about when we realize where the power really lies.
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