by Danny Haiphong
President Obama milked the Selma commemoration for all it was worth, depicting the events of 1965 “as a symbol of American exceptionalism.” For this month’s participants, the contradictions of the occasion were acute. “While some didn't march in the Selma celebration because of GW Bush's presence, it is equally deplorable that these same critics marched alongside Obama.”
Obama's Selma Celebration Speech: Another Brand For US Imperialism
by Danny Haiphong
“Legal segregation may be out of the official federal law books in the US, but racism remains the law of US society.”
Black America's movement for Black lives has brought an onslaught of desperate attempts from the ruling class to revive the memory of the Civil Rights movement's most palatable moments. The events in Selma to resist Black voter suppression have been of particular interest to the Empire. At the commemoration of Selma, the Black misleadership class and its top lieutenant, Barack Obama, were in top form. Obama's speech at the event represented a peak moment in the imperial establishment's efforts to re-brand empire and soften the resistance of the nascent Black Lives Matter movement.
Obama dived into his trademark neo-liberal, war criminal behavior. The first name he uttered in his speech was George W. Bush. Some Civil Rights leaders declined to march in the Selma celebration because of Bush Jr's attendance. However, few took the same action against Obama's similar, if not worse, policies of war, austerity, and domestic surveillance. Obama moved right along to praise Selma's marchers with historical fallacies, stating "For founders like Franklin and Jefferson, for leaders like Lincoln and FDR, the success of our experiment in self-government rested on engaging all of our citizens in this work. And that’s what we celebrate here in Selma." Of course, he made no mention of Franklin and Jefferson's participation in the enslavement and genocide of Black people or FDR's policy of Japanese internment (a PC word for forced imprisonment without due process a la Guantanamo Bay).
Obama uses Selma to cast the Black Freedom movement as a symbol of American exceptionalism. This is nothing new. However, there once was a time when the anti-imperialist movement, largely led by the Black freedom movement, would not allow the likes of Obama to equate the movement's principles to imperialist policies such as the destabilization of the Soviet Union in 1991 and Ukraine in 2013. Martin Luther King and the movement he led would cite the millions that have perished from poverty since the oligarchy took power in Russia and the direct role Obama played in propping up a fascist "Maiden" government in Kiev as examples of American hypocrisy. The US-backed regime in Ukraine has banned communist and progressive parties from parliament, sold off public assets to the IMF, and killed thousands of Ukrainians who refuse to live under fascist rule.
“He made no mention of Franklin and Jefferson's participation in the enslavement and genocide of Black people or FDR's policy of Japanese internment.”
After spewing historical fallacies and romantic comparisons between Selma and fascism, Obama finally turned his attention to the current state of Black America. He praised the Black misleadership class of corporate board members and politicians as beacons of progress made possible by the Civil Rights movement. After affirming his most supportive followers, Obama gave Black America’s oppressed majority the usual lashing. This time though, rather than telling Black America to straighten up like White America, Obama took the time to throw charges of racism in the US straight back into the face of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. Here are two illustrative examples:
“Just this week, I was asked whether I thought the Department of Justice’s Ferguson report shows that, with respect to race, little has changed in this country . . . It evoked the kind of abuse and disregard for citizens that spawned the Civil Rights Movement. But I rejected the notion that nothing’s changed. What happened in Ferguson may not be unique, but it’s no longer endemic. It’s no longer sanctioned by law or by custom. And before the Civil Rights Movement, it most surely was.”
“We do a disservice to the cause of justice by intimating that . . . racial division is inherent to America. If you think nothing’s changed in the past 50 years, ask somebody who lived through the Selma or Chicago or Los Angeles of the 1950s. Ask the female CEO who once might have been assigned to the secretarial pool if nothing’s changed. Ask your gay friend if it’s easier to be out and proud in America now than it was thirty years ago. To deny this progress . . . would be to rob us of our own agency, our own capacity, our responsibility to do what we can to make America better.”
Furthermore, even as Obama uttered the word “poverty” in the speech (a word he rarely uses) and addressed the white supremacist attack on the Voting Rights Act, he made it perfectly clear that Black America shares much of the blame when he preached, “What’s our excuse today for not voting? How do we so casually discard the right for which so many fought . . . Why are we pointing to somebody else when we could take the time just to go to the polling places? “
In just a few words, Obama claimed that white supremacy is no longer endemic or inherent in the fabric of US society. In the world of Obama, Black America’s primary measures of progress should be ones that, well, are divorced from the actual lives of the majority of Black Americans. Obama has always believed that Black America is to blame for its plight and should vote for more politicians like himself. His constant disrespect of Black America comes despite having won both of his terms through the Black vote. None of this should surprise anyone who has listened to Obama speak in the past. His words mirrored a 2007 speech in another Selma commemoration where he claimed Black America was 90 percent of the way to racial equality. This type of branding has been crucial to preserving the rule of neo-liberal plunder, racism, and Empire.
Dissecting the Brand: Racism is endemic, inherent, and the Empire can’t be voted away
Obama can distort history all he wants but his speeches cannot change the fact that racism is both endemic and inherent to US imperialism. Every 28 hours, the occupying force of the police murders a Black American. Earlier last week, 19-year old Tony Robinson of Wisconsin was added to the long list of Black police lynchings in the US. Black America makes up nearly half of all prisoners in the largest prison gulag in the world. Imperialism's racist austerity and privatization measures have largely targeted Black America. Massive school closings, public (and private) sector layoffs, cuts to benefits like food stamps, attacks on pensions in Detroit, and Wall Street shark loans have exacerbated conditions of dispossession for large sections of Black America.
Because of imperialism's assault and robbery, the Black unemployment rate is twice that of whites in a period where real unemployment is over 20 percent in the US. Furthermore, white median wealth is 12.9 times higher than Black median wealth. Legal segregation may be out of the official federal law books in the US, but racism remains the law of US society. Every time a Black person is lynched, forced into poverty, and locked up in prison, the US establishment proves that racism and white supremacy is indispensable to the character of imperialism.
For this, Obama has zero moral high ground to stand on, but we wouldn't know that from the Black misleadership class. The Black misleadership class and bankrupt liberal elements in the media are never hesitant to exonerate him from criticism. As these collaborators of Empire kiss his feet, Obama is planning to cut Medicaid, build a federal super-max prison in his home state of Illinois, and sign off on the wholesale robbery of the city of Detroit by the banks. The war president has already killed thousands with drones and re-colonized Africa through AFRICOM. He was the architect of the imperial war on Libya in 2011 and a participant in the coup of Mali's government in 2012.
“Black America makes up nearly half of all prisoners in the largest prison gulag in the world.”
In these coups, thousands were murdered with US-backed terrorists and weapons. After a successful coup in Honduras in 2009 and a failed attempt in Ecuador in 2010, Obama now has set his murderous eyes on Venezuela. Obama has labeled the socialist nation a threat to "national security." He has also vowed to escalate the war on the US proxy agents, ISIS, and continue the occupation of Afghanistan until further notice. So while some didn't march in the Selma celebration because of GW Bush's presence, it is equally deplorable that these same critics marched alongside Obama.
The most important lesson of the Obama era is that the formation of the Black misleadership class, similar to the labor aristocracy that formed during World War II, represents a ruling class scheme to put a decisive nail in the revolutionary potential of exploited and oppressed people in the US. The purge of communists from industrial unions ensured that the leaders of the AFL-CIO would follow the dictates of the Democratic Party. This set the labor movement up for a full frontal assault by the capitalist class just two years after the World War II ended. Similarly, the Obama era has been a seven-year purge of progressive and radical politics from the Black freedom movement's anti-war, anti-establishment roots. A politics of opposition to this development has yet to emerge in full form, but the Black Lives Matter movement is taking the first leaps toward a much needed challenge to Power. We must do our part to dissect the brand of Obama-led imperialism and contribute to this movement's forward push.
Danny Haiphong is an organizer for Fight Imperialism Stand Together (FIST) in Boston. He is also a regular contributor to Black Agenda Report. Danny can be reached at wakeupriseup1990@gmail.com and FIST can be reached at bostonfist@gmail.com.
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