Jul, 2015, 68
Black perceptions on race have swung 20 percent -- from 48 to 68 percent negative -- in the year since the emergence of an incipient movement against police violence. There has been a 38 percent rise in Black pessimism on race since the "we HAVE overcome" days of delusion, in 2009.
"Half of Blacks' negative perceptions on race disappeared the moment a Black family set up residence in the White House."
Race relations, as measured by Black perceptions, are now 9 percent "worse" than they were in 2008, before Obama's election. The objective reality, of course, is that the Black economy collapsed during the financial meltdown that reached its peak in 2009 -- the very year when Blacks perceived race relations as "least" bad, at 30 percent. So deep was the "Obama delirium" in 2009, that 39 percent of Blacks told pollsters for the Pew Research Center that African Americans were better off than five years before -- even though Black unemployment was hovering around 16 percent, nearly twice the level of 2004, and Black wealth had fallen to one-twentieth of whites, as evidenced by wholesale home foreclosures in Black neighborhoods. Black people's collective (subjective) perception at the dawn of the Age of Obama, according to the Pew poll, was that "the state of black progress in America [has] improved more dramatically than at any time in the last quarter century." Every indicator of Black economic well being crashed in 2009, yet Black folks believed the opposite.
The steady rise in "bad" feelings about the racial situation -- which is inextricable from the Black economic condition -- is, therefore, a good thing. Gross misperceptions, wildly misplaced optimism, and the outright delirium experienced by so many Blacks at the start of the Obama presidency, greatly weaken and disarm a people. "Good feelings" in "bad" and "dangerous" times serve only to accelerate the processes of disaster. We need more "bad" feelings about racial oppression, mass Black incarceration, late-stage capitalism, mad-dog imperialism, and the survival of the biosphere.
No More Empty Celebrations and False Optimism
The Black Misleadership Class, which for two generations has pursued its own narrow interests with no regard for the masses of Black folks, thrives on the illusion of progress, which gives the false impression that their leadership has born fruit. This perfidious class celebrated not only Obama, but also the brief and delirious "era of good feeling" that accompanied his rise, offering no resistance whatsoever to The First Black President's corporate neoliberalism and hyper-aggressive imperial policies. "Good" feelings led to disastrous results.
The most encouraging development since the emergence of an incipient, grassroots movement against police violence -- an occurrence that is inseparable from the increase in "bad" feelings about race in the U.S. -- is the growing rejection by young people of a Black Misleadership Class that strives for better "race relations" (peace) rather than a thorough transformation of U.S. society (justice). These are the kinds of Negroes that study the polls, wishing most of all for an increase in whites who sympathize with Blacks (whatever that subjectively means), rather than hoping that huge numbers of Black people get mad enough to make a MOVEMENT.
If an oppressed people don't believe they are oppressed, they will not do much of anything to change their condition. In the words attributed to Harriet Tubman: "I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves."
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