Barack Obama Is a Pale Reflection of Martin Luther King
Obama’s determination to make
a viable run for the White House pretty much
requires him to be a pale reflection of King
– and here I am referring to moral
and ideological shades, NOT to skin-color
Selling his soul for privilege and power
In King’s view the simultaneous existence of mass
and disproportionately – but not at all exclusively -
black poverty at home and U.S. imperial violence abroad
attested to the fact that “a nation that will exploit
economically will have to have foreign investments
and everything else, and will have to use
its military might to protect them”
It informed King’s insistence that we
“question the whole society” seeing “that the problem of racism,
the problem of economic exploitation,
and the problem of war are all tied together
They are the triple evils that are interrelated”
It's important to recognize that Obama speaks, writes and legislates in ways that are richly consistent with his objective of being selected for the presidency.This aspiration is within an openly plutocratic and white majority nation where substantive democracy and its twin social justice are regularly trumped by concentrated economic power and the insidious, authoritarian logic of corporate-crafted winner-take-all politics.
Obama’s determination to make a viable run for the White House in such a context pretty much requires him to be a pale reflection of King – and here I am referring to moral and ideological shades, NOT to skin-color.
This would be the case even if Obama were predisposed to follow in the at once democratic-socialist, anti-racist and anti-imperialist footsteps of the great civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.
King, it is worth recalling, had “no interest in being president.” He rejected progressive calls for him to head an anti-[Vietnam] war ticket in 1967.
“I would rather think of myself as one trying desperately to be the conscience of all the political parties, rather than being a political candidate,” he told student petitioners.
As King told his key left (and former Communist Party member) advisor Stanley Levison, “I need to be in the position of being my own man” – something that would have been difficult indeed, given his left values – were he to try to run for the presidency.
Were he able to miraculously return today, King – who paid knowledgeable attention to detailed racial disparity data in his time – would certainly be displeased with Obama’s “appeasement".
He would question the Senator’s embrace of “absolute equality” only “in terms of people being treated on the basis of their color or gender.”
What, King would want to know, about economic and class inequality, which he knew to be intimately and dialectically related to the living and central problem of racial oppression?
King would worry that the success of people like Obama and Oprah is part of the problem for black America.
The much ballyhooed advance of a relatively small number of privileged blacks tends to strongly reinforce “white America’s” (King’s phrase) desire to believe that all the racial corrections have been made and that the only remaining relevant barriers to black progress and racial equality are internal to the black community itself.
He would be much less accommodating than Obama towards white denial of living racial oppression and the false belief that the nation’s racism problem has been solved.
Reflecting his awareness that racial oppression is historically cumulative in its impact on current inequality, he would not be as willing as Obama to accept “white America’s” (King’s recurrent phrase) sharp distinction between “past” (or “historical) and “present” racism.
The Pale Reflection: Barack Obama, Martin Luther King
and the Meaning of the Black Revolution [ZNet]
The black revolution is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws – racism, poverty, militarism and materialism.
It is exposing evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of society.
It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced. - Martin Luther King
Can you imagine Obama using that rhetoric?
AMERICA IS “THE GREATEST PURVEYOR OF VIOLENCE IN THE WORLD”
Obama’s record stands in sharp contrast to the legacy of that ultimate “Moses Generation” figure Martin Luther King. King refused to heed his more cautious allies’ call to avoid the divisive problem of United States imperialism within and beyond Vietnam.
How could he argue against violence inside the U.S., King asked, while remaining silent about the mass murder being perpetrated against Southeast Asia by the U.S. government – identified by King (on April 4, 1967, exactly one year to the day before his assassination or execution) as “the leading purveyor of violence in the world?”.
How could he credibly call for an end to poverty in the U.S. while not opposing the enormous squandering of government and social resources on American hyper-militarism – a waste that that was strangling the “War on Poverty” in its cradle?
How could he call for freedom at home when the United States was exhibiting its desire to export what King termed “so-called freedom” abroad by bombing villages and napalming children in Vietnam .
“WE WANT NO CASTES OR CLASSES”
By 1966 and 1967, King was openly and repeatedly criticizing what he called “the triple evils that are interrelated:” racism, economic exploitation/poverty (class inequality) and militarism/imperialism.
“The evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together,” King said, “and you really can’t get rid of one of them without getting rid of the others”.
Consistent with what we know to have been his deep and early rejection of Obama’s supposedly “efficient” American capitalist system, the democratic socialist King said that only “drastic reform” involving “the radical reconstruction of society itself” could “save us from social catastrophe”.
In King’s view the simultaneous existence of mass and disproportionately – but not at all exclusively - black poverty at home and U.S. imperial violence abroad attested to the fact that “a nation that will exploit economically will have to have foreign investments and everything else, and will have to use its military might to protect them.”
It informed King’s insistence that we “question the whole society [emphasis added],” seeing “that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. They are the triple evils that are interrelated”.
Obama lectures poor residents of the United States on how fortunate they are compared to miserable Third World masses.
In the summer of 1966, by contrast, King was most struck by the greater poverty that existed in the U.S compared to other First World states.
“Maybe something is wrong with our economic system,” King told an interviewer and observing that “in democratic socialist societies such as Sweden there was no poverty, no unemployment and no slums.”
KING WAS ANTI-CAPITALIST
King’s discomfort with capitalist values, it is worth noting, was distinctly personal.
He was exceedingly reluctant to enjoy the material accouterments of success and privilege while millions lived in poverty at home and abroad.
King incurred the wrath of his formidable wife Coretta by giving away his 1964 Nobel Prize money and insisting that his family “live in the most modest circumstances possible”.
It is difficult to imagine King even half-jokingly saying that there was anything “good” about wanting “the biggest car” or “house” and to cash in on the civil rights movement.
Given his socialist and anti-imperialist beliefs – probably intact by his early twenties – King naturally wrote and spoke of the need for cross-racial economic justice.
He included poor whites (making repeated sympathetic references to the white poor of Appalachia, for example) and the Third World along with poor black Americans in the circle of those who deserved a new social order beyond the narrow confines of capitalism.
“We want no classes and castes” he said in 1956, the year he first emerged on the national stage.
“There is a fire raging now for the Negroes and the poor of this society,” King wrote in 1967.
“They are living in tragic conditions because of the terrible economic injustices that keep them locked in an ‘underclass,’ as the sociologists are now calling it. Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds”.
By King’s observation in 1966, the impoverished blacks of the northern ghettoes were struggling what with “class issues – issues that relate to the privileged as over against the underprivileged” and were hardly limited to race.
At the taproot of the problem, King emphasized, was the fact that “something is wrong with the economic system of our nation…something is wrong with capitalism”.
That system, King felt, “produces beggars” alongside luxuriant opulence for the privileged few, thereby recommending “the restructuring of the entire society” and “the radical redistribution of economic and political power”.
He saw civil rights' early victories as having fallen far short of his deeper objective: advancing social, economic, political, and racial justice across the entire nation, including its northern, ghetto-scarred cities.
It was one thing, this King told his colleagues, for blacks to win the right to sit at a lunch counter. It was another thing for black and other poor people to get the money to buy a lunch.