Blah, blah, blah

Obama’s Latest “Beautiful Speech”
By Paul Street
March 22, 2008

“Obama has given a beautiful speech on race and his affiliation with the Trinity Unity Church of Christ.” — Barbara Ehrenreich, March 2008

“It’s hard sometimes for me to understand how Obama is able to milk so much reaction out of speeches that are not only pedestrian, but which contain truly startling statements. The speech he made yesterday, for example: how can he manage to dedicate a whole address to the importance of overcoming racism, and in the middle of that talk not only essentially smear his pastor with the ‘Angry Black’ stereotype, but also endorse the ongoing US policy of racism and injustice towards the Palestinians, and then somehow come out of the whole thing smelling like roses, sending hyperventilating progressives all over the country to their smelling salts, believing that they’ve heard the ‘greatest speech’ of modern times!” — “epppie,” an e-mail correspondent, March 19, 2008

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I just read Barack Obama’s Latest Greatest Speech – his celebrated address on race, titled “A More Perfect Union” [1], yesterday (I am writing on the morning of March 19 2008), in Philadelphia. Sparked by recent broadcasts of his longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright’s angry denunciations of U.S. imperialism and racism, the speech changes nothing for me.

Deluded Obamanists can stop sending me e-mails saying (to quote one this morning) “wow he really knocked them dead in Philly telling it like it is on Race. Now will you please finally get on board with the Great Barack?”

As his most recent Grand Oration shows, the Chosen One is not about to sacrifice political ambition for the sake of truth and justice.

Yesterday’s address was all about Obama using his former pastor as a pretext for yet more triangulation [2]. Wright was employed as a foil for Obama to pose as reasonable on race and racism while he continued his project of deepening public confusion on racist and other United States oppression structures at the heart of American society.

And Obama ain’t “telling it like it is.”

…

PAST TENSE

One of the most disturbing aspects of Obama’s Latest Greatest Speech was his tendency to see the racism that lurks behind these sorts of statistics (and behind the black anger they generate) as a function mainly of the past. Listen to the following bit of extended hyper-eloquence from The Chosen One:

“As William Faulkner once wrote, ‘The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.’ We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.”

”….A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.”

“But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it - those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations - those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years.”

What’s with the past tense? The Faulkner quote is nice (I used it to make a similar point in my book Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis) and it is good to see the reparations opponent Obama note the continuing relevance of not-so “past” racism. But there’s plenty of living and active, ongoing racial oppression and discrimination sparking rage today among black Americans of all ages, including a large number of younger black males I have repeatedly heard rip Obama as “bourgeois” and “a white man’s Negro.” The oppression that angers Wright and other black Americans is more than an overhang from the bad old past. The humiliation and hopelessness felt by millions of those Americans are being reinforced, generated, and expanded anew on a daily basis right now… in the 21st century. New “memories” of racial tyranny are being created right now beneath the national self congratulation over loving Obama. Black “anger and bitterness” is being generated within the U.S. by racist policies and practices in these “Joshua Generation” years as well as in “those” (“Moses Generation”) years.

Meanwhile American racial inequality and black poverty are deepened by an imperialist U.S. foreign policy Obama fiercely embraces (just read any of his speeches and essays prepared for such august bodies as the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Wilson Center).

UNITY UNDER CORPORATE IMPERIALISM

Later in his speech, Obama riffed on how we need to put our racial differences aside to rally around common solutions to shared social and economic problems. He was correct to note that an exaggerated concern with racial and religious differences can “distract” us from educational, health care, and jobs issues that matter to people of all colors and creeds. Too bad his policy agenda is militantly centrist and business-friendly and therefore inadequate on all of these critical policy areas,. Too bad it stands well to the corporate right of any self-respecting progressive agenda and even to the GOP side of Hillary Clinton’s domestic policy package (not to mention that of the departed and more genuinely “populist” John Edwards). And too bad he’s signed on so strongly to the domestically regressive American Empire Project.

Obama’s Latest Greatest Oration predictably honored “the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag.” Those were terrible words to utter on the fifth anniversary of the shameful occupation of Iraq. American troops are coercively united across race, ethnicity and gender in a monumentally immoral, arch-criminal occupation Obama promises to prolong. The U.S. soldiers’ sacrifices are all too real, of course, but their commanders have shed a vastly larger quantity of Iraqi and Afghan blood.

Obama was right to say yesterday that “America can change.” It can do that. But it cannot change in a desirable and democratic way by sticking its head in the sand about its continuing attachment to what Martin Luther King called “the triple evils that are interrelated:” racism, economic exploitation, and militarism. And it will not move forward in a desirable and progressive way if so many of its “progressives” continue to invest blind faith in a false savior whose increasingly tiresome eloquence masks maddeningly mealy-mouthed deference to the status quo.

Full article available here.