Barack Obama and the "End" of Racism

Like King.  

Like Malcolm.  

Dead, like Steven Biko of the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania / South Africa, or Fred Hampton from Chicago. 

Or imprisoned for decades, like Nelson Mandela was. 

But Barack Obama doesn’t have that kind of vision and courage. 

And he’s not, in the end, even a street activist.  He’s been bought.  What kind of “street activist” or “community organizer,” after all, ends up a millionaire?  One who won’t say what white people don’t want to hear. 

What white Amerikkka doesn’t want to know, Obama is not about to tell them.  That’s a large part of why they like him; it’s key.  Whites don’t want to know, as a rule, the actual conditions of Black America, just as the German people, as a rule, didn’t want to know the actual conditions of the Jews and Gypsies, even as the smoke of the crematoria drifted through their streets. 

Here’s one part of the core truth that Obama is silencing: 

The U.S., which has roughly 6% of the world’s human population, imprisons 20% of the world’s prisoners.  The vast majority of those it imprisons are men of color.  American Indians have the highest incarceration rate on the planet.  Black men have the world’s next highest rate, although their absolute numbers make up the largest group of US prisoners.  Mexicans and other Spanish speaking Natives in the U.S. have the third highest rate of imprisonment of all the world’s peoples.  

According to a report from MSNBC, about 16% of black men in their twenties who are not college students are currently either in jail or in prison, while almost 60% of black male high school dropouts in their early thirties have spent time in prison.  

Human rights Watch notes that in the U.S., “Nationwide, blacks are incarcerated at 8.2 times the rate of whites.  That is, a black person is 8.2 times more likely to be in prison than a white person.  Among individual states, there are even more extraordinary racial disparities in incarceration rates.  In seven states -- Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin -- blacks are incarcerated at more than 13 times the rate of whites.  Minnesota has by far the highest disparity -- blacks in that state are incarcerated at 23 times the rate of whites.  In the District of Columbia, blacks are incarcerated at 34 times the rate of whites.  Even in Hawaii and Vermont, the states with the smallest racial disparities in incarceration rates, blacks are still incarcerated at more than twice the rate of whites.” 

But to hear the mainstream media spin it, racism in the US is over.  

After all, Barack Obama might be president of the US.  

To hear Barack Obama tell it, “There is no divide that we can’t bridge.”  The easiest divide to “bridge”, of course, is the one you pretend doesn’t exist, the one you never mention. 

White Amerikka wants to believe it is innocent- that racism is over.  It doesn’t want to know that its rulers solved the “problem” presented to them by the end of Jim Crow segregation and by the eruption of the Black Power movement by replacing the de facto chains of Jim Crow with the even more literal shackles of mass imprisonment.  

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