[News] Pop Goes the Race-Neutral Campaign!

[Anti-Imperialist News]

April 30, 2008
http://www.counterpunch.org/ford04302008.html


Obama Stumbles on His Own Contradictions


Pop Goes the Race-Neutral Campaign!

By GLEN FORD

Barack Obama's strategy to win the White House was to run a 
"race-neutral" campaign in a society that is anything but neutral on 
race. The very premise -- that race neutrality is possible in a 
nation built on white supremacy --  demanded the systematic practice 
of the most profound race-factual denial, which is ultimately 
indistinguishable from rank dishonesty. From the moment Obama told 
the 2004 Democratic National Convention that "there is no white 
America, there is no black America," it was inevitable that the 
candidate would one day declare the vast body of black opinion illegitimate.

That day came on Tuesday, April 29, when a battered and truly bitter 
Barack Obama made his final, irrevocable break with his former 
pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose televised Black Liberation 
Theology tour de force the preceding Friday, Sunday and Monday had 
laid bare the contradictions of Obama's hopeless racial "neutrality." 
It was the masterful preacher and seasoned political creature Wright 
- not the racists who had endlessly looped chopped snippets of the 
reverend's past sermons together in an attempt to make him appear 
crazed - who forced Obama to choose in the push and pull of black and 
white American worldviews. Obama was made to register his preference 
for the white racist version of truth over Rev. Wright's, whose 
rejection of Euro-American mythology reflects prevailing African 
American perceptions, past and present.

Obama was less than eloquent. "All it was is a bunch of rants that 
aren't grounded in truth," said Sen. Obama, low-rating Rev. Wright's 
remarks at the National Press Club, in Washington, the morning 
before. Rev. Wright had become a "caricature" of himself, said the 
wounded candidate - another way of calling the minister a clown.

Under questioning from reporters in Winston Salem, North Carolina, 
Obama swore up and down that he had never before, in 16 years as a 
member of Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ congregation, 
observed his pastor behave in such a way. The declaration rang 
patently false, as even a red-state Republican white evangelical 
observer would have recognized Wright's Press Club performance as 
that of veteran pulpit-master with a vast repertoire of 
church-pleasing moves and grooves to draw upon, all of them honed 
over decades for the entertainment of his parishioners - including 
Obama. But the senator was intent on giving the impression that Rev. 
Wright was - unbeknownst to Obama - a Jekyll and Hyde character, 
whose statements "were not only divisive and destructive, but I 
believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate."

An amazingly Bush-like turn of phrase! The man who married Barack and 
Michelle and baptized their children is now rhetorically linked to 
Osama bin Laden or the Ku Klux Klan.

Clearly, this is what panic looks and sounds like when Obama's flimsy 
tissues of "race neutrality" are stripped away. He berates Rev. 
Wright and other black voices for self-centeredness in failing to 
strike a balance between African American grievances and whatever 
ails white people.  "When you start focusing so much on the 
historically oppressed," said Obama, "we lose sight of the plight of 
others." Obama is desperate to convince these "others" that he 
rejects anything that smacks of an Afro-centric worldview, as 
represented by Rev. Wright. "What became clear to me was that he was 
presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for."

Rev. Wright succeeded in drawing a line in the sand, whether that was 
his intention or not, daring Obama to take his stand on one side or 
the other. Race "neutrality" - an impossibility in the actually 
existing United States - went out the window as Obama in extremis 
positioned himself at the political/historical fault line alongside 
the defenders of the Alamo and American Manifest Destiny. As dictated 
by the logic of power, Obama furiously maneuvered toward "white 
space," shamelessly taking cover in a kind of populist white 
patriotism that has always branded black grievances as selfish, even 
dangerous distractions from the larger national mission. Rev. 
Wright's "rantings" amounted to "a complete disregard for what the 
American people are going through," said Obama. "What mattered to him 
was him commanding center stage."

Obama had belabored the same theme in his Philadelphia speech on 
race, a few weeks earlier - a widely applauded piece of oratory that 
was at root an exercise in moral equivalence that equated white and 
Black grievances in the U.S., as if history and gross power 
discrepancies did not exist. Obama is as quick as any smug corporate 
commentator to dismiss as the ravings of extremists and those who 
"prey on hate" the very idea that U.S. imperialism is an historical 
and current fact. Chickens cannot possibly come home to roost in 
terroristic revenge as a response to American crimes against 
humanity, since "good" nations by definition are incapable of such 
crimes. It is beyond the pale to contemplate that the United States 
has Dr. Deaths on its covert payrolls dealing in ghastly biological 
warfare - the AIDS genesis theory.

In order for his race-neutral strategy to appear sane, Obama must 
constantly paint a picture of an America that does not exist. This 
cannot be accomplished without mangling the truth, assaulting the 
truth-tellers, and misrepresenting America's past and present.

Since Obama's candidacy is predicated on minimizing the pervasiveness 
of racism in American life, it is necessary that he cast doubt on the 
legitimacy of those with race-based grievances. Otherwise, he would 
be morally compelled to abandon his neutrality and side with the 
oppressed minority. Thus, he announces in Selma, Alabama that Blacks 
"have already come 90 percent of the way" to equality - a non-truth 
by virtually any measurement. He says the "incompetence was 
color-blind" in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, thereby deracializing 
all that occurred in New Orleans from the moment the winds died down 
to this very second. He claims that 1980s Ronald Reagan voters had 
understandable grievances due to "the excesses of the 1960s and 
1970s," in the process cleansing the Reagan victory of any racist content.
Race neutrality requires that Barack Obama become a cleanup boy for 
racists, historically and in the present day. At the same time, Obama 
is driven to loathe most those people and facts that might lead to 
divisiveness. America's worst enemies are not the racists, but those 
who point out the facts of racism, as Obama explained in mid-March in 
Philadelphia:

"Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, 
divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time 
when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems - 
two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health 
care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that 
are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems 
that confront us all."

Rev. Wright and his ilk, by this reasoning, are Public Enemy Number 
One, standing in the way of the racial harmony that is the natural 
order of things in Obama's mythical America.

Ironically, in practice, race-neutrality also requires that Obama 
disarm himself in the face of racist attacks. "If I lose," he told 
reporters with a straight face, "it would not be because of race. It 
would be because of mistakes I made along the campaign trail."
Perhaps it is fitting that, having absolved American racists of all 
manner of crimes against others, Obama also holds them blameless for 
their assaults on himself. That's his prerogative, as long as he's 
the only one being assaulted. But Obama was also trailed over the 
long weekend by the ghost of Sean Bell, whose death in a 50-shot New 
York City police fusillade was held blameless by a white judge. Many 
African Americans anxiously awaited Obama's reaction to the three 
police officers' acquittals on all charges. "We're a nation of laws, 
so we respect the verdict that came down," said Obama, when asked 
about the case by reporters in Indiana. "Resorting to violence to 
express displeasure over a verdict is something that is completely 
unacceptable and is counterproductive." That was it.

Hillary Clinton, aware that the Sean Bell verdict was an outrage to 
Black America, issued a prepared statement:

"This tragedy has deeply saddened New Yorkers - and all Americans. My 
thoughts are with Nicole and her children and the rest of Sean's 
family during this difficult time. The court has given its verdict, 
and now we await the conclusion of a Department of Justice civil 
rights investigation. We must also embrace this opportunity to take 
steps - in our communities, in our law enforcement agencies, and in 
our government - to make sure this does not happen again."

It is difficult not to conclude that Obama distanced himself from the 
facts of the acquittal - except to counsel against violence and urge 
folks to "respect" the verdict, whatever that means - while Clinton 
had the sense to prepare a statement that sounded sensitive to black 
anger and on top of developments in the story. The Sean Bell police 
and judicial atrocity revealed with horrific clarity that black life 
continues to be systematically devalued by police in the United 
States, even when the officers involved are of African descent, as 
were two of the three shooters in the Bell case. The New York verdict 
shows that black lives are devalued by all actors in American 
society, including black actors: the essence of institutional racism.

Institutional racism is alien to Barack Obama's version of the 
nation, a fantasy place where racial oppression has never been so 
endemic to the political culture as to overshadow the "promise" of 
America. In Obama's public vision, his Democratic caucus victory in 
98 percent white Iowa, which began the cascade of Obama wins, proves 
that the U.S. is ready for profound racial "change." Left unnoted is 
the fact that Iowa incarcerates African Americans at 13 times the 
frequency that it locks up whites, the worst record in the nation.

For people like Rev. Jeremiah Wright, mass black incarceration and 
slavery are seamlessly linked, part of the continuity of racial 
oppression in the U.S. Most African Americans see the world the way 
Rev. Wright does - that's why he's among the five top rated 
preacher-speakers in black America. This black American world view, 
excruciatingly aware of the nation's origins in genocide and slavery, 
is wholly incompatible with the American mythology championed by 
Barack Obama. When the two meet, they are mutually repellant.

The relationship between Rev. Wright and Sen. Obama has undergone 
"great damage," says Obama, understatedly. But the break was 
inevitable and is no tragedy, because it reveals the incompatibility 
of Obama's adapted world view with the body of knowledge amassed by 
African Americans since before the landing of the Mayflower. The 
truth is always a revelation.

Glen Ford is executive editor of Black Agenda Report 
(<http://www.BlackAgendaReport.com/>www.BlackAgendaReport.com) where 
this article appears. He can be contacted at 
<mailto:Glen.Ford at BlackAgendaReport.com>Glen.Ford at BlackAgendaReport.com.




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