Corrente

If you have "no place to go," come here!

"Is Barack Obama a Fit Role Model for Black Youth?"

lambert's picture
Submitted by lambert on Thu, 03/08/2012 - 9:00pm

Awesome post by Paul Street. Read it all, but this should dispose of the "role model" argument:

How far do we really want to go in holding up Barack Obama as a role model for young blacks or indeed for anyone else? This is a slick politician whose entire career (from Harvard Law to the present) has been about making deals with dominant white, capitalist, and imperial power elites. He has thrown his fellow minority Harvard Law students, a progressive black Illinois state senator (Alice Palmer), his (allegedly beloved) white grandmother, his former (supposedly beloved) preacher (Jeremiah Wright), the single payer health insurance movement, the labor movement, the peace movement, the civil rights movement (and the broader struggle against racial inequality), the environmental movement, the Wall Street reform movement, the campaign finance reform movement, the civil liberties community, the Palestinians, and many others under the bus in the pursuit of two terms in the White House and (he dreams) a space on Mount Rushmore.

Along the way, Obama has unwittingly given the world a rich tutorial on who really rules America behind the charade of “democracy” – the nation’s “unelected dictatorship of money.” He has worked to discourage and downplay public consciousness of the continuing problem of racism and the need for programs and policies specifically addressing the distinctive barriers and difficulties faced by black Americans. And he sent a large number of innocent people (including many women and children) to premature deaths with criminally deployed drones, missiles, bombs, bullets, and shells in the oil-rich Middle East and Southwest Asia.

Also, too, killing US citizens whenever he thinks it's a good idea. Holder says its all legal, and that's enough for me!

0
No votes yet

Comments

lizpolaris's picture
Submitted by lizpolaris on

Best paragraph in my view:

Obama has deposited a shameful hat-trick on the bust of Dr. Martin Luther King that sits in his oval office. He has put a technically black presidential face on each of what the democratic socialist King called “the triple evils that are interrelated”[iii] – economic exploitation (capitalism), racism (deeply understood as a many-sided institutional system with unequal racial outcomes beyond the relatively trivial question of whether some whites are ready to vote for a certain type of black candidate for mayor or president) and militarism – and on related evils as well, including eco-cide and the Big Brother police state.