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So we stay silent, as a rule, on the job. We stay silent as a rule, in the white world. Barack Obama is the living symbol of our silence. He is our silence writ large. He is our Silence running for president – With respect to Black interests, Obama would be a silenced Black ruler: A muzzled Black emperor. A Black man at the head of the White Amerikkkan State – one who’s unwilling to speak truth to power, but more than willing, like a Condi Rice or a Colin Powell, to become that power and to launch wars of aggression against other people of color. In Obama’s case the targets will be Iran (which he has threatened with “surgical” missile strikes) and Pakistan, rather than Iraq. That’s the only difference between Obama and Rice and Powell, or Bush, for that matter. Even ABC News notes that “Obama, one of the more liberal candidates in the race, is proposing a geopolitical posture that is more aggressive than that of President Bush.” Washington Post columnist Robert Kagan, in a column entitled “Obama, the Intervensionist,” cites Obama’s claim that “he wants the American military to ‘stay on the offense, from Djibouti to Kandahar.’” To help the empire stay on the offensive, and despite the fact that US military spending is breaking the bank at over $1 trillion a year, and far outstrips the spending of any potential imperial rival, Obama wants to beef up military spending, adding 65,000 troops to the Army and 27,000 more Marines beyond the obscene levels already under arms in the so-called “War on Terror.” That’s another matter. Most of us at my workplace, for example, don’t want to become that power, we don’t want to lord it over others or punish them if they disobey the corporate rules, much less the rules of Pax Amerikkkana. We don’t want to “succeed” that badly, not badly enough to sell our souls and boss around - and certainly not kill - people who, we know, suffer every day just like we suffer. Nor do we want to be cops – pigs – or to be the commander in chief of pigs, be they local police or the cops of the world. No one imagines themselves the commander. We’d like things to be better in our personal lives, of course, if we could have them better and still feel clean. And that’s the Obama equation. Keep your Black/ Brown mouth shut and you can “succeed.” And you can still feel “clean.” Here we have the real story behind Obama’s portrayal of his squeaky clean-ness. Yes, Black man, yes, Black woman, you can have power in this killer-racist system and stay “clean.” In Obama’s carefully constructed image lies a symbolic resolution of a profound inner conflict that all people of color in the US face in their daily lives. Obama plays the role of a Black Cinderella. He does for Black folks what Cinderella does for girls. He shows that oppression and silence can be good for you – at least if you are the one the prince chooses, or if you are the one who gets to be the prince. It’s total fantasy. It’s a glass slipper that will break at the arch and be turned on us like a broken beer bottle or a jagged-edged knife; the same knife Obama has threatened to turn on the people of Iran and Pakistan. But, he’s getting over with it, if for no other reason than that the inner conflict I’ve described remains largely unconscious for oppressed people in the US. That’s why one Black poet, spoken word artist Darian Dauchan, wrote a piece called “Damn You Barack Obama You Pretty Mothafucka.” It’s because Dauchan was trying to sort it through. Even though he fails – he buys into the Obama myth- nonetheless he had to sort it through as best he could, because Obama is the walking illusion of the realization of an impossible dream; the dream that in white racist Amerikkka a Black man could be judged on the content of his character, not the color of his skin. There is, of course, a racist subtext to Obama being called “pretty”- it’s the subtext of internalized racism and the imposition of an internal color-caste system within the Black nation itself, a color-coded stratification held over from the era of slavery - the era of the “mulatto, the “half-breed,” “quadroon” and “octoroon”; a caste system in which “whiter” is better – smarter, “prettier,” more worthy, etc. The rest of the racist subtext is this: Obama, with his extraordinary intelligence and presence (by any standard), is, in the eyes of white Amerikkka,(and, according to the standards of the so-called “Enlightenment,” which still rule the thinking of Euro-Americans) the half-white, and thus, half-redeemed “Black savage” – “redeemed” by his “white blood”, “civilized” by it - redeemed by his relative whiteness- ultimately redeemed and refined by the white nation itself. The question from the Black perspective has been posed as to whether Obama is “Black enough” – which is to say, “Is he loyal enough to the Black nation? The more decisive question, viewed from the white electorate’s standpoint, at least, is this; “Is he white enough, is he loyal enough to whiteness and to the white nation?” That’s why the question of his religion, and of his Arabic name, are points of attack and vulnerability from the standpoint of the more openly racist and xenophobic sectors of the white public. That’s why his “patriotism” is also questioned, unlike any white candidate. After all, everyone in the US knows that people of color with Arabic names are the enemy. It doesn’t matter, apparently, how many nukes Obama wants to hit Iran with, he’s got to stand up and recite the pledge of allegiance to prove he’s not a terrorist – at least not an anti-US terrorist.
Juan Santos is a Los Angeles based writer and editor. His essays can be found at: http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com /. He can be reached at: JuanSantos at Mexica.net.
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