Barack Obama and the "End" of Racism

Obama is not being judged on the “content of his character” – the question of how his character is perceived in a racist nation and, conversely, among a colonized African people, is a question that is sociologically inseparable from the color of his skin. 

Many people, nonetheless, think Obama is the realization of Dr. King’s dream.  The power of this archetype is immense.  It’s why the completely empty catch-phrase “Change” works for him, and it’s the deeper reason for the quasi-religious wave of “Obama fever.”  Obama is Cinderella and King’s Dream rolled into one.  He’s even had the myth of Kennedy’s so-called “Camelot” invoked on his behalf.  For many, he’s not only phenomenally charismatic, but irresistible.  There’s even been talk of an “Obama Cult.”  {The comments at this link, many of which attack the essay, are every bit as interesting as the essay itself.} 

But, if Obama is the realization of King’s dream, then the price of the dream is silence.  And, as the slogan goes, “Silence = Death.”  If Obama is the realization of King’s dream, then the price is silence about the oppression of Black people - and the abandonment of the millions locked away under the conditions of mass incarceration that have replaced Jim Crow.  If Obama is the realization of King’s dream, then being Black means being white – then Black is white, or at least it’s Black on white terms. It’s a Blackness that dare not speak its name. 

Obama’s shot at the presidency doesn’t signal the end of racism in the U.S.  It is made possible, rather, by the new form racism itself has taken, a form that offers a prison cell to poor people of color, and, for the middle class, on the other hand, an Apartheid-style pass card stamped “SILENCED.” 

The functioning of this new dynamic of racism is plain to see in Obama’s attitude toward the newest persecuted “Other” in U.S. society – Brown migrants.  On one hand, in one of his most impressive moments, he very rightly called attacks on migrants “scapegoating” (although he failed to critique NAFTA or US Imperialism at any level.)   

His campaign even lifts and translates the migrant chant of “!Si Se Puede!” into English as “Yes we can,” and uses it as a slogan.  (Obama himself has been a prime beneficiary of the mass opposition of the wrongly labeled “New Civil Rights Movement” in 2006 – the pro-migrant movement that not only cracked open and deeply divided the Republican Party so severely that it has not been able to re-group, but that also put white Amerikkka on notice that a it would never get by with making instant felons of millions of Brown people, and that openly racist persecution, at least, would not be tolerated from Republicans or anyone else.)  

Obama favors driver’s licenses for the undocumented, but he’s all for the Apartheid Wall being built on the US side of the Mexican/ US border.  Obama is willing to issue pass cards to migrants who make no trouble, since – after all - they’re here, for god’s sake.  

Obama’s attitude toward brown migrants is the much the same as that of white liberals toward the Black middle class.  It’s much the same as the attitude of the white ruling elite toward him.  Keep up the racist wall, but give the “trustworthy ones” a pass.  In the case of the Black middle class, the “trustworthy ones” are the ones who maintain silence about oppression.  In the case of immigrants the “trustworthy ones” are the ones who have “learned English”, and “have paid a fine,” as Obama puts it, for the violation of having been driven from their countries by hunger - by the gutting of their nation’s economies by the global capitalist empire headquartered in the U.S.  

Even more telling is Obama’s refusal to recognize the right of Palestinians to return to the land stolen from them by Israel during the Nakba of 1948– the disaster of the birth of the Israeli regime.  Obama supports and promotes the character of Israel as an exclusively Jewish state – in other words, as an Apartheid state, a Jim Crow state that not only keeps Palestinians separate, but which uses its military might to bomb them at will. 

Like the Israelis themselves, Obama wants a separate Palestinian state – separate, but certainly not equal. 

There can be no authentically autonomous Palestinian state located on the border of a nuclear-armed Israel – only a subjugated state militarily controlled by its neighbor – its oppressor.  Such a state can be nothing but a Bantustan.  In the meantime, while the whole world condemned the recent Israeli closure of Gaza, including a cut off of electricity that impacted its hospitals, Obama asserted that “Israel was forced to do this.” 

Obama knows the rules of the game, after all - he is the rules of the new race game- his candidacy itself is a manifestation of the new system of racism. 

He knows how to make white Amerikkka feel good about the status quo, here and abroad.  

There’s a reason for that. 

If he told the truth, if he stood up for justice, and on that basis, authentic healing, he couldn’t be president.  

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