It’s not that Barack Obama, per
se, is worthless,
it’s
that none of the dreams in us
that he speaks to so deeply in
us can be fulfilled under the
system of oppression he is an
expression of and that his
candidacy concentrates in
visible form.
This is the wave Obama is
riding, the
ocean of energy he is trying to
steer into an acceptance of
the same old deal, the same old
wars, the same old systemic
racism, packaged as if it
were something new.
This wave of energy is
not something he’s inspired,
it’s something he’s riding and
that he is uniquely qualified to
channel
toward his own
ends – which are not our ends.
~ Juan Santos
Ive said earlier, one only needs
to see who underpins Obama's
campaign to comprehend that it's
about same old, same old. There
is no choice except to NOT VOTE.
Sadly, I have owned to myself,
"in your dreams, Is - in your
dreams."
~ Isabel, New Zealand activist
Barack Obama deeply troubles me. As
a Mexican who grew up in a Black
neighborhood in the U.S. at the
height of the Black Power era, I
absorbed Black people’s rage- their
righteous rage with the aim of
justice and, ultimately, with the
aim of healing - until it had sunk
into my very bones. It was not a
rage aimed at me; and no one
“taught” it to me, no one schooled
me in it. School was just everyday
life in a Black senior high, for
example; school was having my own
personal cop who stopped me every
time he saw me, the first pig who
ever took me to jail. I didn’t try
to act Black; I didn’t try to talk
Black; I never tried to walk Black
or dress Black; I didn’t even
particularly listen to Black music
outside of Motown and funk – the
crossover stuff.
So, I
was a little stunned and more than a
little confused when, as I entered
my 20’s, I had to confront how
different I was from people in the
white world and in the Mexican
world. I didn’t realize it as a
teenager, of course; It was just
natural. But as I came into deeper
contact - and sharp conflict – with
the world I had not grown up in –
the world outside of the working
class area that people now would
call the “ghetto,” I came to realize
that while I had not adopted Black
culture, I viewed the world through
a Black lens; and since I had only
been a kid when I developed the
lens, there was little about it I
could articulate, and almost nothing
I could find to help me illuminate
my experience of what post
modernists and other people who long
to go slumming these days now call
“the borderlands”- a phrase they
ripped out from under Gloria
Anzaldua, a Chicana lesbian feminist
writer, poet and cultural theorist.
They talk about “alterity” and
“difference,” and it’s nothing more
than chic poses and impotent
cultural elitism by those who have
no authentic experience of what
difference really is
Growing up on the border I grew up
on was not exotic; nor did I think
of it as a kind of crucifixion or
torment. It was just normal. The
Black world and my odd presence in
it were just normal. The sense of
torment would only come later, when
I learned that I reacted to white
middle class bullshit – the “polite”
evasions of naming the daily
realities of power and pain that
characterize the white middle class
– just the way any Black youth of my
time would have reacted. They
dumbfounded and enraged me. It
took a long time to get that they
are not just outright phonies,
straight-up deliberate hypocrites,
almost every one of them - but that
they don’t see - and that for that
reason, they are very dangerous to
those who do. My reality was not
their reality
Today, I am blessed to have a
radical white friend, Tim Bennett,
who gets this clearly. He calls
white people like this “Not-Sees.”
His pun is intentional. But I didn’t
get the white world at all as a kid.
They just enraged me. Not one of
them talked straight, as far as I
could see. The “nicer” they were the
more they enraged me.
The
real torment came later, when I had
to learn, not only to see, but to
fully articulate what I see. And for
someone in my position, there were
very few guideposts then for me to
follow. I had to learn for myself
and largely from myself which part
of me was which, what was Mexican,
what was absorbed from white
culture, and what was Black in how I
experienced myself and the world I
lived in. It’s easy now; I can
switch culture and tone like
switching a channel or clicking a
link. I can do it, but usually I
don’t bother; I just come from where
I am at the moment, secure in who I
am and what I know about the world
and the dynamics of it that I am
meeting in the moment. I rely less
on my own tone than on understanding
and knowing how to listen. Then,
however, it was all sheer suffering.
I
came from both inside and outside
the Black world. My reality was
Black reality, a Black world – and
even at that it wasn’t really mine,
in a sense, although I grew up in
it. The Mexican community wasn’t
quite mine either: I was lacking in
the proper resepto, and there was
nothing – or very little, of the
agachado in me. I was arrogant, a
sinvergüenza. Besides, my Spanish
was poor. White people very often
had no idea what to make of me; I
felt they instinctively feared me,
and I despised their thinly veiled
brutality.
I
reacted to the world like a Black
youth, not as a Mexican or white
youth would react, and I didn’t
understand it.
When
I was 16, I used to buy The Black
Panther newspaper at a little
convenience store across from the
local supermarket on what is now
called Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd.
It came to haunt me. I always bought
it- for a quarter - from the same
brother. Then, one day, I was
listening to the radio. The pigs had
the local Panther headquarters under
siege. There was a shoot-out. I
don’t know what may have happened to
him, but I never saw the brother
again. And I never talked to anyone
about it. There was no one to talk
to. It never occurred to me to talk
to anyone about it. As I said, I had
no teacher. I was just a kid, I
wasn’t Black, and no one in my
family cared – just me. I remained
silent. Millions of people from
the oppressed nationalities in the
US remain silent; and it’s not just
that white people don’t care about
oppression – it’s that we are
punished for speaking out, for
saying what we really see.
Here’s one simple example. About
half the workers at my place of
employment are people of color.
Supervisors are hired in-house, as a
rule. The boss is a “liberal” white
woman in a company whose work is
devoted to “liberal” causes. She
came to our office after busting
a union on behalf of the company
in another city. In her first year
and a half here not a single
person of color became a supervisor.
In my case, she tried to fire me –
she sent my case to the corporate
president and the corporate lawyers
to see if they could fire me for
having organized a union in another,
similar workplace in the past. I
came to work every day for four and
a half months last year not knowing,
if, that day, I would be fired.
That’s the way it is, that’s the
atmosphere white Amerikkka - liberal
and conservative alike - has created
for poor people and minorities.
Yes,
of course, those of us who work
there are the working poor. The
“passionate” liberals who run the
company act like they never heard of
a living wage - but there is a
shelf in the kitchen with “free
food” for the people whose paycheck
didn’t stretch far enough this week.
It’s bought with money the
liberal boss solicits from the
workers. No one says anything.
We all know the nature of the
white liberal façade; We all
know we’ll be punished if we speak
up, if we demand equality in hiring
or a raise, much less a living wage.
So, our rage simmers in a pot with a
tight lid. There’s one guy, though,
who has blown up at work a couple of
times over racist incidents at work.
He’s one of the company’s most
productive employees. I was told by
a lower level supervisor that he was
passed over for a promotion only
because he’d gotten angry on the
floor about racism – he’d
created “conflict.” He wasn’t
trustworthy.
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.
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 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.
Under those circumstances, if he’d
attracted any measurable attention,
much less the global attention he’s
gained today,
more
likely [he'd] be dead.
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
Amerikkka 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.
Obama
rejects the Black militant stance –
even the pro-Black stance of Dr.
King or Reverend Jackson– not only
by distancing himself from Jackson, but, much more importantly, by
remaining silent about the fact
that the white imperial
ruling class met the challenges they
faced with the end of segregation
and the rise of the Black Power
movement by flooding Black streets
with crack cocaine and guns -
creating a “gang problem” out of
nowhere - then by inventing “The War
on Drugs” and “The War on Gangs” to
carry out the greatest mass
imprisonment in human history,
a campaign more Draconian and
Machiavellian than anything most
dictators, even the demonized Saddam
Hussein, ever dreamed of.
The
isolation engendered by a
quarter-century of the War on Drugs
and the War on Gangs – which is
actually a war on poor people of
color in the US – is
overwhelmingly intense.
It’s
suffocating: and the
silence about the war on poor people
of color in the US has been
punctured only twice - first, by the
Los Angeles rebellion in 1992, and
secondly by the mass marches of
millions of Brown people protesting
the State’s efforts to retroactively
turn even more millions of migrants
into instant felons in 2006.
The
war against the oppressed
nationalities in the US is real. In
the ghettos, the barrios and on the
rez it’s a palpable phenomenon:
Millions of families are missing
their sons and daughters. Again,
their children make up roughly 20%
of the prison population of the
world, again –
not just of
the US –
of the world.
But
for white Amerikkka, it may as well
be taking place in Baghdad, not next
door. They know a little about
what’s up in Iraq, of course, but
not about what is happening to much
more intimately, right next door,
and in their names.
Barack Obama, in the meantime, says
that the invasion of Iraq was
misdirected. It was the wrong war.
The Empire’s real enemy, he says,
lay elsewhere.
He
says nothing at all about the War at
Home against his own people.
It’s
not after all, that racism is over.
It’s that whites imagine that they
can now be at peace about it – that
the race war in Amerikkka is over as
a two-sided affair. Glen Ford of
Black Agenda Report, in a
fascinating and important debate
with Michael Eric Dyson, says the
Obama campaign is “relentlessly
sending out signals to white people
that a vote for Barack Obama, an
Obama presidency, would signal the
beginning of the end of
black-specific agitation, that it
would take race discourse off of the
table.” Ford says, “Barack Obama
does not carry our burden, in
addition to other burdens. He in
fact promises to lift
white-people-as-a-whole’s burden,
the burden of having to listen to
these very specific and historical
black complaints, to deal with the
legacies of slavery. That is his
promise to them.”
An
exhaustive NAACP report indicates
that there is very little difference
between the stances of Obama and
Clinton on issues important to
Blacks. Others have noted the
centrist nature of the Obama
campaign more broadly. Black
legal scholar Vernellia Randall, of
the University of Dayton, Ohio, says
that Obama has No specific plan for
addressing institutionalized racism,
and that he doesn’t even acknowledge
the issue. (Others have noted
the centrist nature of the Obama
campaign more broadly.)
In
the white imagination, Barack Obama
represents, not the “End of Racism”
(racism has an experiential,
existential meaning for only the
barest sliver of the white
population), but, he represents,
rather, the end of the struggle to
end racism.
The
“End of Racism,” like the ”End of
History” proclaimed by Francis
Fukuyama with the fall of the Soviet
Union, is meant to signify and hail
the end of polarization and
struggle, a final assimilative
victory in which the antagonist
(Communist or Black, respectively)
is absorbed into the benevolent
embrace of the white capitalist
empire – there to disappear as a
problem - even as a distinct entity.
Obama, in this context, can be
viewed as a kind of Gorbachev, a
figure that surrendered the
sovereignty and independence of his
nation, opened it to overt
capitalism, collapse and chaos, and
who, in the process, became the
darling of the capitalist world; who
became, in the West, at least, a
figure representing “reconciliation
and peace” – not capitulation and
betrayal.
In
the Amerikkkan imagination, Obama
signals the co-optation, not of the
pseudo-Marxist Soviet style
socialism, but of the drive for
Black liberation, autonomy and self
–determination – the end of Black
Nationalism, of the Black nation as
a distinct people with a distinct
history, distinct needs, a distinct
culture, a distinct oppression and a
distinct agenda. It signifies the
supremacy of the white nation over
the Black nation, just as the
so-called “End of History” is meant
to signify the supremacy of
capitalism over all anti-capitalist
potentials for organizing society.
The
only awareness most whites have of
racism comes as a result of the
immediate and very short term impact
of the struggle of peoples of color
upon their consciousness. The
silencing of that struggle means
only the end of its painful
intrusion into white awareness –
not the end of racism as an
omnipresent, violent burden on the
oppressed, not the end of racism as
omnipresent oppression and
degradation. As noted above,
Obama has no plan, and thus, it is
fair to say, no intention of ending
systemic racism in the US. It’s
easier to pretend for popular
consumption, that it no longer
exists.
Barack Obama is priceless. If he
didn’t exist, as the saying goes,
they’d have had to invent him. And,
no matter Obama’s subjective
intentions – white people did just
that in their imaginations and in
setting the social terms of the New
Racism. The very best one can say is
that Obama’s let them get by with it by pandering to it. I’ll
leave the worst one can say to you.
It’s closer to the point, and to the
truth.
It
should be more than clear by now
that Barack Obama will not save us.
But neither is the point to expose
the man as an individual, or even as
a hypocrite, betrayer or oppressor.
The point is to see him in context,
within the limits of the system, the
matrix, the cultural and political
environment in which he arose and in
which he operates. It’s not that
Barack Obama, per se, is worthless,
it’s that none of the dreams
in us that he speaks to so deeply in
us can be fulfilled under the
system of oppression he is an
expression of and that his candidacy
concentrates in visible form.
There
is nothing wrong at all in the hopes
we have that Obama’s rhetoric speaks
to. The problem lies in what Herbert
Marcuse called “repressive
desublimation" – a hope, a need,
that has been buried and denied by
an oppressive system, is allowed
some room to breathe, then co-opted
and redirected back into a form that
ultimately reinforces the oppressive
system that denied and suppressed
out hopes and needs in the first
place. That’s what Obama
represents.
He
speaks to our dreams of connection,
of reciprocity, of balance, sanity
and a noble way of life. He speaks
to our hope for a world worth living
in, to our hope for the future
generations that have been crushed
for decades now under the heel of
the Bush regime and its
predecessors. The enormous energy
for change unleashed in the 1960s
has been buried deeper and deeper
under the weight of oppression, and,
especially for the last 7 years,
under the weight of the most
cynical, sadistic, apocalyptic
regime of our lifetimes, a regime
that has embraced a vision of global
destruction and that has denied
every life-giving hope.
The
Bush regime was and remains an
expression of a conscious plan by
the far right – especially of the
Christian fascists under the
leadership of Paul Weyrich, founder
of the Heritage Foundation and
co-founder of the Moral Majority -
to crush everything that came to
life in the upheavals of the
cultural revolutions of the 60s era.
They meant, as they consciously
expressed it, to counter the counter
culture, the culture of hope, and
offer a new “hope” of a “purpose
driven life” in the context of the
old traditions of oppression. They
meant to, as they put it, “reframe
this struggle as a moral struggle,
as a transcendent struggle, as a
struggle between good and evil”
along traditional Christian lines.
The
Christian Fascist strategist Eric
Heubeck wrote, “We will maintain a
constant barrage of criticism
against the Left. We will attack the
very legitimacy of the Left. We will
not give them a moment’s rest. We
will endeavor to prove that the Left
does not deserve to hold sway over
the heart and mind of a single
American. We will offer constant
reminders that there is an
alternative, there is a better way.
When people have had enough of the
sickness and decay of today’s
American culture, they will be
embraced by and welcomed into the
New Traditionalist movement.”
The
regime of Bush the Lesser was the
pinnacle of this effort – he carried
the agenda as far as it could go,
before it began to fracture and
collapse under the weight of its
own madness – before it met the
determined resistance of society’s
most vulnerable, scapegoated and
openly stigmatized targets, as they
marched in their millions refusing
to be victims. The combined force
of the Christian fascist juggernaut,
the repressive powers of the State,
and the US war machine looked
unstoppable until it met this
opposition at home, and until it
met the mad and fierce resistance
of the people of Iraq who have,
however chaotic and horrifying their
tactics, refused to be conquered.
With these events, the aura of
invincibility and unstoppable
momentum was destroyed, the lid
of repression began to crack, and
what had been suppressed in us rose
again to the surface. Literally,
in terms of time in office, and as a
sweeping reactionary social agenda,
the Bush regime is coming to an end.
With its end, inevitably, comes a
wave of hope and euphoria.
This
is the wave Obama is riding, the
ocean of energy he is trying to
steer into an acceptance of the
same old deal, the same old wars,
the same old systemic racism,
packaged as if it were something
new.
This wave of
energy is not something he’s
inspired, it’s something
he’s riding and that he is uniquely
qualified to channel
toward
his own ends – which are not our
ends.
As we
have seen,
Obama
doesn’t represent peace – he
represents an expansion of war and
the power of Empire. He’s even more
extreme on this than Bush himself,
except in his public rhetoric.
He doesn’t represent the real and
legitimate needs, desires and hopes
of Black people - he refuses to
speak openly of the most fundamental
issues affecting Black people. He
doesn’t represent the “end of
racism,” but the perpetuation of
oppression in a new guise.
Obama
doesn’t represent a new system or
the new way of life we dreamed of
and fought for and that has been
suppressed - he represents the old
one.
He represents a system
that is fundamentally rooted in
exploitation, oppression and
destruction on a global scale, and
he is living proof that no
fundamental change for the better
can – or will - come about under the
system he represents and upholds.
It doesn’t work that way. To tell
the truth is to betray the system,
and
he can’t bring himself to do it,
even though he is far too conscious
not to know it.
Attaining authentic freedom
requires, as its barest starting
point, the naming of what keeps us
subjugated.
What keeps us
subjugated is the very system Obama
wants to rule. The system, even with
Barack Obama as its first Black
emperor, is not our hope. It’s our
enemy, the enemy of the world, and,
because this system is rapidly
undermining the ability of the
planet to foster and sustain life,
it is the enemy of all Life on Earth.
This is exactly the
understanding that the Christian
fascists like Weyrich and Heubeck
wanted to crush out of our
awareness, and the lack of such
awareness is exactly what Barack
Obama depends on if he is to remain
a symbol of the impossible dream
that the system can be something
other than what it is.
Juan Santos is a Los Angeles
based writer and editor. His essays
from 2006 can be found at:
http://the-fourth-world.blogspot.com/.
He can be reached at:
JuanSantos@Mexica.net
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