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Weekend Edition March 13-15, 2015<br>
<b><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/selma-obama-and-the-colonization-of-black-resistance/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/13/selma-obama-and-the-colonization-of-black-resistance/</a></small></small></b><br>
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<div class="subheadlinestyle"><b><big><big>The Master of Propaganda
</big></big></b></div>
<h1 class="article-title">Selma, Obama and the Colonization of Black
Resistance</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by AJAMU BARAKA </div>
<div class="main-text">
<blockquote>
<p>“To cleanse history in the name of a false patriotism that
celebrates a new illiteracy as a way of loving the United
States is a discourse of anti-memory, a willful attempt at
forgetting the past in the manufactured fog of historical
amnesia.”</p>
<p><em> — Henry Giroux</em></p>
</blockquote>
<p>I tried! In my capacity as a member of the Center for
Constitutional Rights’ Board of Directors (CCR), I traveled to
Selma on Friday to attend the induction of Arthur Kinoy and
William Kunstler, two of the founding lawyers of CCR, into the
Selma National Voting Rights Museum. And even though I knew that
I would have to endure Obama’s presence in Selma on Saturday, my
plan was to stay in Selma until Sunday to catch up with friends
and participate in the peoples’ crossing of the Edmund Pettus
Bridge on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday.</p>
<p>But I never saw the sun come up in Selma. Before Air Force One
ever entered Alabama airspace, Obama’s presence overshadowed the
commemoration. In conversations on Friday, I heard over and over
again about how Obama was coming to town to symbolically “close
the circle” on the struggle for voting rights. And though it
shouldn’t have, I could not shake the deep sadness that I felt
every time I heard this and similar comments from so many of my
people who still had so much invested in this cheap
pro-imperialist hustler that after the induction on Friday I
found myself on Highway 80 heading out of Selma toward
Montgomery.</p>
<p>I made the right decision.</p>
<p>Obama’s presence on Saturday severely crippled most of the
people-centered discussions and activities that were scheduled
for that day. And as the master propagandist that he is, he gave
a magnificent performance blending themes of “American
exceptionalism” with the black middle-class version of black
history and black struggle to give an emotionally charged twist
to an otherwise trite and familiar narrative of racial uplift
and progress toward a more perfect union.</p>
<p>In fact his performance was so effective that very few seemed
to remember that just two days before the Selma speech his
Department of Justice announced that it would not indict the
Ferguson killer-cop Darren Wilson.</p>
<p>And none of the mainstream commentators seem to notice the
irony in President Obama proclaiming progress toward a more
perfect union the morning after another unarmed black teen was
gunned down by a cop in Madison, Wisconsin and that Selma and
the civil rights movement reflected the importance of
non-violence as a principle to resolve social conflicts, while
600 members of the 173<sup>rd</sup> Airborne were in the air
traveling to Ukraine to train the neo-Nazi Ukrainian national
guard to wage war against their own citizens.</p>
<p>Malcolm X once said that the black freedom movement wasn’t
integrated by white liberals and their Negro collaborators but
was instead infiltrated. That programmatic and ideological
infiltration was on full display in Selma on Saturday. In the
1950s and 1960s, the political and ideological space was created
for liberal infiltration because of state repression in the
1950s. A major target of the post-war national security state
in the 50s was the radical black movement and individual black
radicals. Dozens of radical black activists were prosecuted,
jailed, forced out of the country or confined to a form of
national house arrest by having their passports seized. Some of
the more prominent names associated with this repression
included W.E.B. Dubois, Claudia Jones, William Patterson and
Paul Robeson.</p>
<p>However, radical human rights organizing and resistance
continued, especially in the South. Building on the work that
took new organizational forms in the 1930s, a solid social base
of organized resistance was established that, while it suffered
in the repressive environment of the 50s, nevertheless, provided
the social base for what was renamed as the “civil rights
movement” reflecting the growing hegemony of more conservative
elements of the black freedom movement that started to garner
more liberal institutional support.</p>
<p>The elevation of Dr. King after he was chosen by labor leader
E.D Nixon to be the face of the Montgomery Improvement
Association’s bus boycott and the subsequent creation of the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) that provided
Dr. King a broader organizational base was facilitated by
powerful white allies. Dr. King and SCLC didn’t just give voice
to ongoing struggles throughout the Southern region but in many
cases they were grafted onto some of those struggles that had a
more militant, independent working class social base and set of
objectives. And while the racial caste system mitigated the
disperate class perspectives and interests within the movement
in the 50s and early 60s, the experiences of the Lowndes county
Black Panther Party, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
(MFDP) and the influences of Malcolm X, Robert F. Williams and
the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM) as well as other radical
black organizations, progressively sharpened the class and
programmatic contradictions of movement by the mid- 60s.</p>
<p>It was precisely the intensification of the black struggle for
democratic and human rights that resulted in the state
concession reflected in the Voting Rights Act (VRA) of 1965. But
it was the systemic contradiction of ongoing colonial/capitalist
reality of the black poor and working classes in the South and
the urban areas where blacks had migrated during the second
great migration that facilitated the explosion in Watts just
five days after the passage of the VRA. The rebellion in Watts
was the first in over three hundred urban rebellions that would
take place over the next few years.</p>
<p>This was the context that facilitated the placement of Dr. King
and SCLC by powerful elements of the ruling elite on front of,
and in some cases on top of work being carried out by local
organizations, including attempting to displace the national
influence and work of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC).</p>
<p>Today Barack Obama in his role as the President of the U.S. and
chief spokesperson for the white ruling class, and as a
representative of the “new” black professional-managerial class,
has been assigned the task to explain and legitimate the ongoing
subjugation of the black poor and working class five decades
after the reform legislation of the 60s.</p>
<p>The speech in Selma, with all of its pro-“American” and settler
colonialist sentimentality was delivered with a world audience
in mind. Its ideological objective was to counter the idea of an
irreconcilable black opposition by co-opting black resistance
and imposing a conservative meaning of black oppositional
politics.</p>
<p>The presence of George Bush and the imagery of Bush and Obama
with the masses of black people behind them as they jointly
crossed the bridge was meant to symbolically close any gap
between the policies of the Bush and Obama Administrations’ that
may have existed in the imagination of people outside of the
U.S. related to black people and their loyalty to the U.S.
state.</p>
<p>The message that Obama’s speech was meant to convey was that
despite killer-cops, mass incarceration and grinding poverty no
one should be confused: you will not split black folks away from
the state because these black folks <em>belong</em> to us.</p>
<p>And judging by the paucity of criticism or even discussion of
the Department of Justice’s decision last week not to indict
Wilson and the unrestrained praise of Obama’s speech in various
black media outlets, it is once again mission accomplished for
the propagandist in chief.</p>
<p><em><strong>Ajamu Baraka</strong> is a human rights activist,
organizer and geo-political analyst. Baraka is an Associate
Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in
Washington, D.C. and editor and contributing columnist for the
Black Agenda Report. He is a contributor to “<a
href="http://store.counterpunch.org/product/killing-trayvons/">Killing
Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence</a>”
(Counterpunch Books, 2014). He can be reached at <a
href="mailto:info.abaraka@gmail.com">info.abaraka@gmail.com</a> and <a
href="http://www.AjamuBaraka.com">www.AjamuBaraka.com</a></em></p>
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