by BAR Managing Editor Bruce Dixon
The spurious claim that Black Americans oppose Barack Obama because of his white mother, African father, and Harvard Law degrees is a racist slur against Black Americans by the mainstream news media, designed to trivialize and divert attention from real issues African Americans care about, but which are not addressed by Obama supporters OR their Republican opponents.
Black America's Real Issue with Barack Obama
by Bruce Dixon
Both Barack Obama's Republican opponents and the centrist Democrats who support his presidential candidacy agree on one thing. They all agree that black opinion on the senator is both uninformed and irrelevant.
To hear the mainstream media, black dissatisfaction with Senator Obama is all about his black African father, his white American mother, his light complexion and his Columbia and Harvard Law degrees. The day after Rush Limbaugh called the senator a "half-frican" on the air, the term was in the mouths of ignorant black talk show hosts in multiple cities. Black America was then admonished and chided by white Republicans and Democrats of all colors for not embracing Senator Obama based on some foolish standard of black authenticity.
This is a racist calumny and slur of the first magnitude against all of black America. Our people have never rejected leading figures because of light complexions, immigrant parents or advanced degrees. Black America emphatically did not reject Thurgood Marshall or W.E.B. DuBois, or Julian Bond or Adam Clayton Powell. Nor did the movement turn away immigrants like Stokley Carmichael or Roger Toussaint. Black opposition to Barack Obama on account of his parentage and Harvard Law degree is every bit as much a fabricated political issue as the wall to wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death and family issues are fabricated news. Both are served up to us by the same mainstream media, and for similar reasons.
In many quarters of black America there are sane, solid and sensible reasons for black voters to question whether Barack Obama will represent them at all. Many remember that his first act as a US Senator was to refuse to stand with the Congressional Black Caucus and California Senator Barbara Boxer in opposition to Ohio's nullification of hundreds of thousands of black votes. Obama's second, third and fourth significant acts were when he declined to ask any difficult, pointed or revealing questions of Condoleezza Rice and two of the president's disastrous Supreme Court nominees, and he actually voted for two out of three of these. Obama's sixth and seventh important acts as a senator were to vote for a bill that made it nearly impossible for ordinary people to sue giant corporations who rob, defraud, maim or kill, and another vote to renew the hated Patriot Act which he vigorously campaigned against. And though Senator Obama now claims to oppose the war in Iraq, he remains advocate of bombing Iran to start yet another.
This commentator was at Obama's 2004 Illinois primary election victory party. The white and black people there that night imagined that they had elected another Paul Wellstone or a Harold Washington, a senator who would bring their concerns to the halls of power, whether the powerful were ready to hear them or not. One wonders what they think today.
Black America is rightly worried. We are an eighth the nation's population and half its prisons, but we cannot get a mem
ber of the black caucus, Senator Obama included, to question the nation's policy of racially selective mass incarceration in public. We do have issues that matter to us, and if Barack Obama does not address them, he is truly somebody else's candidate, not ours.
For Black Agenda Radio, I'm Bruce Dixon.
TO LISTEN to this Black Agenda Radio commentary, click the mic.
TO POST A COMMENT ON THIS ITEM, click here to visit our blog.
At a time that we need more justice and access to democracy, the Black Misleadership Class is fighting for more prisons and tawdry police reforms under the guise of equity and Black liberation.
Guadeloupe and Martinique are officially French territories, but they are colonized in the truest sense of the word.
A Department of Homeland Security internal document acknowledges that deportations of Haitian asylum seekers are in violation of US law.
Toward the end of his life, Frederick Douglass served briefly as U.S. ambassador to Haiti.
A new archive tells the story of a radical community collective formed in the 1960s to challenge the treatment of Black pupils in UK schools.
