Obama: Everyone's Favorite Uncle Tom
Obama is a power-respectful, bourgeois,
non-threatening “good” black
Whites are calmed by the cool,
underplayed blackness and ponderous,
quasi-academic tone of the half-white,
Harvard-educated Obama
He doesn’t shout, chant, holler or drawl
The technically biracial Obama’s campaign
and persona are perfectly calibrated for
this era of victim-blaming neoliberal racism
He allows whites to assuage their racial guilt
and feel non-racist by liking and perhaps
even voting for him while signaling that
he won’t do anything to tackle and redress
the steep racial disparities and systemic
racial oppression that continue to
deeply scar American life and institutions
“What . . . me and my country racist?
You can’t be serious: we’re thinking seriously
about voting for a black man as president
My wife and son just love Oprah and Jamie Fox”
The "Good" Black[Original]
The remarkable success of power-respectful, bourgeois, non-threatening “good” blacks like Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey and Colin Powell helps white Americans believe that blacks have only themselves to blame on the whole for black America’s persistently separate and unequal status in the U.S.
For many whites, loving national media stars like Oprah and Barack is the nice reverse side of hating inner-city Darnell and Lakisha.
The sophisticated and opportunistic Obama knows this very well.
He’s not going to complicate his comfortable funding relationships with the likes of Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Henry Crown and Co. and General Dynamics et al by substantively criticizing empire and/or class inequality at home and abroad.
In a similarly calculating and power-seeking vein, he’s not about to undermine his favorable post-Civil Rights situation with the white electoral majority by making strong public reference to the persistently powerful and pervasive role of anti-black racism in American life.
He’s going to try to ride white America’s self-serving racial confusion and denial as far as he can — all the way, he hopes, to the White House.
“HE’S NOT ALL THAT BLACK”
Part of Obama’s appeal to white America has to do with the widespread Caucasian sense that Obama “isn’t all that black.”
Many whites who roll their eyes at the mention of the names of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton — former presidential candidates who behave in ways that many whites find too African-American — are calmed by the cool, underplayed blackness and ponderous, quasi-academic tone of the half-white, Harvard-educated Obama. Obama doesn’t shout, chant, holler or drawl.
He doesn’t rail against injustice, bring the parishioners to their feet and threaten delicate white suburban and middle-class sensibilities. He stays away from catchy slogans (like Jackson’s “Keep Hope Alive”) and from emotive “truth”-speaking confrontations with power.
To use Joe Biden’s revealing terminology, Obama strikes many whites as “clean” and “articulate” — something different from their unfortunately persistent image of blacks as dirty, dangerous, irrational and unintelligible.
Obama has no moral or political obligation to shed his biracial identity, “multicultural” background and elite, private school education to “act [more classically and stereotypically] black.”
But whites’ racial attitudes are less progressive than might be assumed when their willingness to embrace a black candidate is conditioned by their requirement that his or her “blackness” be qualified.
Obama: Ruling-Class Lackey
For someone who marches across Iowa
and New Hampshire telling working-class
and middle-class Americans to “get fired up”
and “stand up” for democracy (and for him),
Obama sure likes to spend a lot of time
groveling before the white ruling elite
Maybe it’s because Barack Obama and his handlers
are sensitive to the need to reassure ruling forces
that the “first black United States president”
will not challenge existing hierarchies
Maybe it’s because he’s bought and paid for by big money
Or maybe it’s because he believes in his
“deeply conservative” heart that good Americans
show deep respect for their socioeconomic masters
Whatever the explanation, I’ve never seen
an avowedly “progressive” political candidate
more eager than Obama to display his deep willingness
to obsequiously kiss the ring
of dominant political and economic authority
Obama Is Deeply Conservative [Original]
It is nauseating to see Obama’s disturbing statements of fawning respect for the predominantly white capitalist economic elite – the top 1 percent that owns more than a third of U.S. wealth and a probably higher percentage of its politicians, policymakers, and opinion-makers.
Given his dependence on super-rich “election investors” to run a viable presidential campaign under the plutocratic rules of the United States’ self-negating “market democracy”, it’s not surprising that he would wish to avoid offending the nation’s leading corporate power-brokers.
But Obama goes beyond the call of class-deferential duty when he praises the arch-plutocratic Ronald Reagan for embodying “American’s longing for order” and when he pens the following sickening paean to aristocratic rule in The Audacity of Hope:
“The Founders recognized that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality, for if everybody is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank and an inherited social order…how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres?”
How’s that for commitment to the democratic and egalitarian ideals to which the United States so often lays special claim?
“OUR [GREAT] FREE MARKET SYSTEM”
Equally appalling is Obama’s eagerness to praise the glories of the capitalist system that produces grotesque fortunes at the top of America’s “inherited social order” while tens of millions of Americans go without adequate food, clothing, shelter, and health insurance.
One key question addressed in The Audacity of Hope comes straight out of the neoconservative world view Obama was so good at accommodating at Harvard Law: what makes the United States so “exceptionally” wonderful?
Obama finds part of the answer to this nationally narcissistic query in the wise and benevolent leadership of the nation’s great white Founders and subsequent supposedly sensible leaders like Harry “Hiroshima” Truman and JFK.
But Obama roots the excellence and eminence of America in something deeper than the magnificence of its political elite.
He also grounds the United States’ supposed distinctive impressiveness in its “free market” capitalist system and “business culture.”
The United States overclass should be gratified by Obama’s paean to the United States’ “free-market” system of (in reality state- and corporate-) capitalism.
This blog TELLS IT AS IT IS! Obama is more effeminate and white than
Hillary Clinton even-and he and she disgusts me and most of Muslim
Philadelphia Black or not for these very reasons stated in this blog. I'm
not even voting in the primaries in PA I'm so disgusted with the both of
them! I will only vote in the main election to choose the lesser of two
evils again-I wish a real, unapologetic black man who's family actually did
through the trans-atlantic slave trade and from poverty in Philadelphia
who's totally a man in how he carries himself instead of some sissy Kenyan
diplomat's son who grew up in the ease of Hawaii and prep school who is
unapologetic and not a syncophant and chocolate or darker complexioned had
a fighting chance, let alone any chance at all at becoming the president-or
while we're at it, any high political position whatsoever. I'm half white
myself. I'm also 1/4 Cherokee. At least I don't pretend I understand
everything black women go through-in most ways, even though I am from
poverty and my paternal grandpa did get to the Americas through the slave
trade-in most ways, I've had it a lot easier and didn't earn that
advantage. If you agree with the sentiments of this blog and my comments,
also please go to my rough comedic skit on YouTube called BAMA that I
filmed one night in October in front of my webcam in my bathrobe and no
makeup. My youtube URL is mixedtrickbaby and understand that skit was
rough, before Clinton showed her true colors, and before Bhutto was
assasinated. It's just rough comedy; but it might make you laugh.
I have never heard it put better. I agree on every level and with every
charge.
Very well said, too bad most Americans especially African-Americans are
incapable of seeing any of this.
