Obama
Plays a Crooked Game
by
BAR executive editor Glen Ford
“Obama
ascribes all racial offenses to the past, where the only guilty white
people are dead.”
Barack
Obama thinks he’s a magician. Magicians have always been very
popular, so it’s no mystery that millions of people are fascinated
by the man, and especially that millions of African Americans are
desperate to see him pull off the biggest trick of all – become
president of the thoroughly racist United States of America.
Obama
is smart, but his basic game plan is quite simple. Knowing full well
the group most hostile to Black progress in the U.S. has always been
white males, he aims to neutralize much of this demographic by
assuring them an Obama presidency would be aggressively race-neutral.
In practice, that means Obama ascribes all racial offenses to the
past, where the only guilty white people are dead. The accumulated
white wealth and privilege that is the result of hundreds of years of
racist exploitation also was due to actions (crimes) of people now
mostly dead. Obama forgives the dead racists, and has never expressed
any intention of readjusting the ten to fifteen to one disparity in
median white to Black household income. Yes, Obama knows perfectly
well that wealth disparity, if not aggressively dealt with as a
racial problem, will take centuries – if ever – to disappear. But
Obama accepts the racial status quo as a fait accompli that can only
be altered by methods that do not penalize living white people who
benefited from their dead ancestors’ crimes. In practice, this
means Obama would leave American race relationships frozen in time.
“Obama
accepts the racial status quo as a fait accompli that can only be
altered by methods that do not penalize living white people.”
White
men, the recipients of the most unearned privilege, wealth and power
over the four centuries of English-speaking settlement (theft) in
North American, therefore have nothing to fear from Barack Obama.
Obama makes it quite clear that he not only considers white men’s
riches to be sacrosanct, but he believes every word of the mythical
origins of the white settlers who seized power from the British
Crown. These men were “farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots
who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution
finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia
convention that lasted through the spring of 1787,” said Obama. No
mention of slaveholders or slave traders in the bunch. By dishing
out a historical narrative of race in America that omits the theft of
the continent and genocide of Native Americans Obama tacitly accepts
the lie that most European settlers were escaping religious
persecution – a fairy tale that even children’s schoolbooks
seldom tell anymore – and pretends that the whites acquired Indian
lands by legal means. But what’s the point of arguing about such
matters, since everyone involved – especially the Indians – is
dead.
Having
taken “off the table,” so to speak, almost every aspect and
resource of American life that over many generations created a
thoroughly racist society, Obama then encourages Americans to engage
each other in mutual self-help, all the while deftly avoiding any
speech that might upset whites, especially males, jealous of their
privileges. “I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges
of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our
union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we
hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have
come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same
direction – towards a better future for ourchildren and our
grandchildren.” What does that mean? Nothing, except that people
should be nicer to each other and avoid hurting anybody’s feelings
by bringing up racial privilege.
“Obama
encourages Americans to engage each other in mutual self-help that
assiduously avoids speech that might upset whites, especially males,
jealous of their privileges.”
Obama’s
central message for white consumption, here, is that everybody’s
story is equally compelling, whether you are the grandchild of slaves
or slaveholders. This is sometimes called “moral equivalence,”
and is especially favored by whites of European immigrant descent who
remember how hard their fathers worked at jobs that wouldn’t hire
native-born, English-speaking Blacks. But hey! Everybody’s families
have had problems, right? Forgetaboutit!
Obama
claims his political beliefs are based on an “unyielding faith in
the decency and generosity of the American people.” Of course, he
never asks white people to acknowledge, let alone give up an iota of
privilege in order to even the score after all these years, so we’ll
have to accept the existence of this vast reservoir of decency on
faith.
Even
Obama can’t deny that slavery was an evil institution – although
he abhors the very idea of slave descendants making claims to present
day remuneration for their dead relatives’ free labor. After all,
that would tend to create unnecessary tensions that might stand in
the way of the quest for change. The quest for change should be calm,
quiet, cost nobody anything, and allow everyone to leave with a good
feeling.
Preserving
good feeling requires that Black people avoid at all cost telling the
truth about the United States. Euro-Americans have an absolute right
to tell bald faced lies, especially at the expense of Blacks. That’s
Obama’s version of democracy – the sacred right to lie,
especially about dead people.
“The
quest for change should be calm, quiet, cost nobody anything, and
allow everyone to leave with a good feeling.”
Obama’s
great friend and once-mentor Rev. Jeremiah Wright has gone beyond the
pale, and represents a one-man threat to racial harmony in the United
States. Rev. Wright went a lot farther than speaking out “against
perceived injustice…They weren’t simply a religious leader’s
effort to speak out against perceived injustice.” Oh, no. “Instead”
Rev. Wright “expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country
– a view that sees white racism as endemic.”
Let’s
take this slowly, so as not to distort Obama’s core beliefs. He
denies that racism is or has been “endemic” to American life. The
MSN Encarta dictionary defines “endemic” as “characteristic
of a particular place, or among a particular group, or area of
interest or activity.” Since slavery was legal in every single
colony that became the United States in 1776, it is safe to say that
slavery was “endemic” to the original United States.
Nevertheless, Obama is outraged that Rev. Wright has the nerve to
“elevate
what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with
America” – in other words, Rev. Wright is more angry about
slavery than the nice things that white folks did for Blacks during
and after slavery. What those nice things were, Obama doesn’t
mention, so we’ll have to take that on faith, too.
“Reverend
Wright’s comments,” says Obama,” were not only wrong but
divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at
a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental
problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a
chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate
change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian,
but rather problems that confront us all.”
It is
at this point that I suspect Obama is playing stupid, but maybe he’s
just too sophisticated for my limited understanding. It appears he’s
saying that Rev. Wright and other Black complainers are responsible
for divisions in the nation. If memory serves, it was white folk who
extended Jim Crow and all manner of racial division to every aspect
of American life, including the toilet bowl, but Barack Obama
maintains Blacks have become the present day divisionists. Exactly
what year that happened, he doesn’t say. However, this great
division by Blacks has, according to Obama, interfered with “two
wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care
crisis and potentially devastating climate change.” Black America
overwhelmingly opposed the two most recent wars; I suppose that
amounts to creating divisions. Blacks haven’t blown up anything on
the scale of the Oklahoma City Federal Building, but maybe our
constant complaining about racism scares people into fearing we have
divisive intentions. We must admit, however, that high Black
unemployment and home foreclosures, as well as high infant mortality
and shorter life spans, tend to clutter up the landscape with
unattended Black bodies, alive and dead, a source of unnecessary
divisions in society and stinking to high hell in the warming
climate, for which we are also culpable. We should all thank the
eloquent and wise Barack Obama for pointing out our collective
failure to keep track of all these excessive, bloated Black bodies.
“Rev.
Wright is more angry about slavery than the nice things that white
folks did for Blacks during and after slavery. What those nice things
were, Obama doesn’t mention?
One
has to admit, Obama worked extra hard to earn such an historically
unprecedented proportion of white male votes. He admonishes us that
“to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as
misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in
legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks
the path to understanding.” Obama would have us cease and desist
all criticism of what might appear to be racist behavior, since there
always exists a small chance that a few of us might be mistaken. Such
mistakes by Blacks could cause climate warming to go entirely out of
control, not to mention war with China.
Quite understandably,
white males appeared to love Obama’s “race” speech. No wonder.
Every conceivable mode of eliminating racial disparities has been
methodically taken off the table by the Illinois Senator. We are left
only with an opportunity to conduct a “dialogue” about race, as
long as we do so politely and without a hint of redistributive
thought or intention.
Marlin
Adams seems to have figured out Obama’s complicated racial
diplomacy.
“Barack Obama, as the Grand Mediator, is proposing a racial
settlement agreement, Black folks get acknowledgment of our
historical struggles, and recognition of that legacy's impact on our
condition; White society, for its willingness to listen, gets a cease
and desist of the criticism of America's racial past, and full
allegiance to a White ethnocentric version of the future.”
So
far, I have heard nothing of facilitating the release of some of the
one million Black men and women held captive behind bars on any given
day in America. The subject of crime – or innocence of crime – causes
great stress among many white males. Therefore, the Black American
Gulag, the largest on the planet, is ineligible for dialogue.
Malcolm
X, in the year before he was assassinated, found himself and other
Black notables under pressure to “sit-down” (rather than stand
up) and have calm deliberations about what should be presented to
white authorities. Sounds very much like Obama’s admonitions that
Blacks and whites engage in some meaningless “dialogue.” “They’ll
have you sitting in everywhere,” said Malcolm. “It’s not so
good to refer to what you’re going to do as a ‘sit-in.’ An old
woman can sit. An old man can sit. A chump can sit. A coward can sit.
Anything can sit. Well you and I been sitting long enough, and it’s
time today for us to start doing some standing, and some fighting to
back that up.”
“The
Black American Gulag, the largest on the planet, is ineligible for
dialogue.”
But
then, Malcolm was not a modern Negro like Senator Obama. Neither was
the great Frederick Douglass, who had little patience for idle
sitters or time-wasting dialoguers. Called upon by white “friends”
in Rochester to speak on the 4th of July, 1852, Douglass
delivered a speech that would have caused Barack Obama some sort of
seizure:
“What,
to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that
reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross
injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him,
your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license;
your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sound of rejoicing are
empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants brass fronted
impudence; your shout of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your
prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanks-givings, with all your
religious parade and solemnity, are to him, mere bombast, fraud,
deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes
which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on
the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the
people of the United States, at this very hour.”
Clearly,
Obama would conclude that Frederick Douglass specialized in
unnecessary racial divisions. However, the illustrious Mr. Douglass
was an efficient speaker, who did not waste words on fools, no matter
how well-meaning. When whites demanded that Douglass convince them
just how bad slavery was, he recoiled. “I submit, where all is
plain there is nothing to be argued. What point in the anti-slavery
creed would you have me argue? On what branch of the subject do the
people of this country need light?”
In the
same manner, what is it about pervasive racism in American life that
honest people do not already understand? What does Barack Obama think
is within acceptable bounds of dialogue, and what is not? Is he aware
of some racial mysteries that have evaded the rest of us? To tell the
truth, Obama couldn’t manage to keep his own hind parts from being
singed when he tried to find some middle ground between the vicious,
thieving, genocidal, slaveholding God revered by most white
Americans, and the truthful Black narrative of four centuries in an
American hell.
Barack
Obama has literally nothing to contribute to such a conversation.
BAR
executive editor Glen Ford can be contacted at
[email protected].