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Dr. Maulana Karenga
Los Angeles Times, 01-10-08, p. A-7 |
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It is a fundamental lesson of our history, witnessed and
inscribed in the hard-rock reality of our daily lives and enduring
struggle, that there is no easy walk or way to freedom, no shortcut
or quick jump to justice or empowerment of the people and no
untroubled and trial-free path to an enduring peace in the world.
Every inch of ground gained and every achievement worthy of the name
requires serious and sustained struggle. Indeed, Frederick Douglass
forever reminds us “Without struggle, there is no progress.” Thus,
as we dare the awesome task of repairing and remaking society and
the world, we must also remember Amilcar Cabral’s advice to “mask no
difficulties, tell no lies and claim no easy victory.”
And so, when we see Barack Obama embraced and voted frontrunner in
Iowa, we must not misread the signs or see signs where there is
none. Even the most cynical among us can see that Obama speaks to
the masses of people needing and longing for another way to
understand and assert themselves in the world. They yearn to move
away from the Bush-men’s fear peddling and people-hate, their
war-mongering and wanton waste of lives and futures, and their
polar-cold contempt for the rightful concerns of the masses of
people of this country and the world. Certainly, the people would
rather send their sons and daughters to college than to die an
undeserved death in an unjust and illegal war. They are tired of the
crass con-games of Karl Rove, the cultivating of paranoia posing as
patriotism of Dick Cheney and the readiness of the crazed right to
blow up the world in the name of an imagined superior race,
racialized religion or some other illusion on which they
self-medicate and sell to others. And Obama lifts the people up;
talks hope, healing, unity and change, and offers a chance for
everyone to come together on common ground and to act together for
the common good.
But there are signs that all is not as it seems here. First, the
claims of the maturing of America is code for the maturing of White
America thru its media-claimed move beyond racist and racialized
thought and practice to endorse a Black man as frontrunner in a 95%
White and small state called Iowa. Surely, the problems of centuries
of racial injustice and oppression are not solved even by the
election of a Black president of the country let alone by the
political endorsement of a small Midwestern state. The question
remains what will they do in the long run and when they don’t vote
by raising their hands as in Iowa but vote in secret and serious
remembrance of race and class in states still to speak?
Perhaps, the White support for Obama is softer and more ambivalent
than we want to believe and depends for many on his temporary use as
a sellable symbol of racial reconciliation without resolution thru
struggle; an undeniable asset in party-building, bringing in new
voters and those once alienated; and for providing a mask and moral
message of change from an African American known for compromise and
seeking consensus.
Secondly, one cannot claim political or moral maturity on the issue
of race if Obama is compelled to practice ethnic self-concealment as
an African American. Much has been made of his being a “Kansas
Kenyan”, which is seen as a mixed and “global identity”, free of the
“urban identity” that suggests anger, indictment and social justice
claims. But this makes as much sense as finding relief and some
confused and convenient meaning in Colin Powell’s being a “New York
Jamaican”, instead of an African American shaped, like Obama and
other mixed race and nationality Blacks, in the crucible of life and
struggle in America. And what justice or principled unity is there,
if we, as Africans, have to come to the table of common ground naked
and in need of White approval rather than fully clothed in the
concerns and identity of our own cultural community, not needing
permission or sanction from anyone?
Thirdly, when Obama talks of change it must be more than one
president and administration replacing another. It must be
structural, systemic not simple surface change? This means change in
the unegalitarian distribution of wealth and power in this country
which are overwhelmingly in White hands and this requires a movement
not just an election. Moreover, if we declare the need and desire
for real change, we must prefigure in our current practice the
future we wish to forge and bring into being. Thus, if he values
multicultural and multiracial cooperation for common good, Obama
must have more than Whites around him as major advisors and they
must be seen and known, recognized and respected. Surely, there are
Native Americans, Africans, Latinos, and Asians, conscious, capable
and committed enough to merit position and power now. Without such a
prefiguring of the future, the message is clear that our identities
of color are disadvantageous; Whiteness is normal and thus the
solution for us is self-concealment and pathetic dependence on White
approval and patronage.
Moreover, Obama, if he is to be at his best, must be allowed to
reaffirm his rootedness in the African American social justice
tradition in which he is grounded and grew, It is a tradition which
is defined not only by an ethical insistence on shared good in the
world, but also by a commitment to relentless struggle to achieve
and sustain it. Indeed, it is this social justice tradition and the
Movement it generated to expand the realm of freedom in this country
that offers Obama his most important lessons.
Among these are the lessons that for fundamental change in this
country, there must be a progressive multicultural movement that
struggles for it beyond electoral politics and the self-masking that
elections encourage; that an expansive vision and program that
address the critical issues of our time and world are indispensable;
and that we must move beyond the conception of America as a White
finished product and understand and approach it as what it is, an
ongoing unfinished multicultural project. Within this project, each
people has both the right and responsibility to speak their own
special cultural truth and make their own unique contribution to how
this society is reconceived and reconstructed. Anything less is a
dangerous self-deception which will, in New Hampshire, New York or
some other states retrogress to or simply reveal a racist Jekyll and
Hyde hypocrisy of quoting the Constitution in daylight and whistling
Dixie in the dark.
Dr. Maulana Karenga, Professor of Black Studies, California State
University-Long Beach, Chair of The Organization Us, Creator of
Kwanzaa, and author of Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community
and Culture, [www.Us-Organization.org and
www.OfficialKwanzaaWebsite.org]. |
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