Truthdig.com Article: American Scholar Cornel West Says President Obama Is Taking Black Voters For Granted!!

The Obama Deception: Why Cornel   West Went Ballistic

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_obama_deception_why_cornel_west_went_ballistic_20110516/

Posted on May 16, 2011

By Chris Hedges

The moral philosopher Cornel West, if Barack Obama’s ascent to power was a morality play, would be the voice of conscience. Rahm Emanuel, a cynical product of the Chicago political machine, would be Satan. Emanuel in the first scene of the play would dangle power, privilege, fame and money before Obama. West would warn Obama that the quality of a life is defined by its moral commitment, that his legacy will be determined by his willingness to defy the cruel assault by the corporate state and the financial elite against the poor and working men and women, and that justice must never be sacrificed on the altar of power.

Perhaps there was never much of a struggle in Obama’s heart. Perhaps West only provided a moral veneer. Perhaps the dark heart of Emanuel was always the dark heart of Obama. Only Obama knows. But we know how the play ends. West is banished like honest Kent in “King Lear.” Emanuel and immoral mediocrities from Lawrence Summers to Timothy Geithner to Robert Gates—think of Goneril and Regan in the Shakespearean tragedy—take power. We lose. And Obama becomes an obedient servant of the corporate elite in exchange for the hollow trappings of authority.

No one grasps this tragic descent better than West, who did 65 campaign events for Obama, believed in the potential for change and was encouraged by the populist rhetoric of the Obama campaign. He now nurses, like many others who placed their faith in Obama, the anguish of the deceived, manipulated and betrayed. He bitterly describes Obama as “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”

“When you look at a society you look at it through the lens of the least of these, the weak and the vulnerable; you are committed to loving them first, not exclusively, but first, and therefore giving them priority,” says West, the Class of 1943 University Professor of African American Studies and Religion at Princeton University. “And even at this moment, when the empire is in deep decline, the culture is in deep decay, the political system is broken, where nearly everyone is up for sale, you say all I have is the subversive memory of those who came before, personal integrity, trying to live a decent life, and a willingness to live and die for the love of folk who are catching hell. This means civil disobedience, going to jail, supporting progressive forums of social unrest if they in fact awaken the conscience, whatever conscience is left, of the nation. And that’s where I find myself now.

“I have to take some responsibility,” he admits of his support for Obama as we sit in his book-lined office. “I could have been reading into it more than was there.

“I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with [Sen. Joe] Lieberman as his mentor,” he says. “But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, ‘Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.’ And the same is true for Dennis Rossand the other neo-imperial elites. I said, ‘I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitzand brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that’s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.”

West says the betrayal occurred on two levels.

“There is the personal level,” he says. “I used to call my dear brother [Obama] every two weeks. I said a prayer on the phone for him, especially before a debate. And I never got a call back. And when I ran into him in the state Capitol in South Carolina when I was down there campaigning for him he was very kind. The first thing he told me was, ‘Brother West, I feel so bad. I haven’t called you back. You been calling me so much. You been giving me so much love, so much support and what have you.’ And I said, ‘I know you’re busy.’ But then a month and half later I would run into other people on the campaign and he’s calling them all the time. I said, wow, this is kind of strange. He doesn’t have time, even two seconds, to say thank you or I’m glad you’re pulling for me and praying for me, but he’s calling these other people. I said, this is very interesting. And then as it turns out with the inauguration I couldn’t get a ticket with my mother and my brother. I said this is very strange. We drive into the hotel and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration. My mom says, ‘That’s something that this dear brother can get a ticket and you can’t get one, honey, all the work you did for him from Iowa.’ Beginning in Iowa to Ohio. We had to watch the thing in the hotel.

“What it said to me on a personal level,” he goes on, “was that brother Barack Obama had no sense of gratitude, no sense of loyalty, no sense of even courtesy, [no] sense of decency, just to say thank you. Is this the kind of manipulative, Machiavellian orientation we ought to get used to? That was on a personal level.”

But there was also the betrayal on the political and ideological level.

“It became very clear to me as the announcements were being made,” he says, “that this was going to be a newcomer, in many ways like Bill Clinton, who wanted to reassure the Establishment by bringing in persons they felt comfortable with and that we were really going to get someone who was using intermittent progressive populist language in order to justify a centrist, neoliberalist policy that we see in the opportunism of Bill Clinton. It was very much going to be a kind of black face of the DLC [Democratic Leadership Council].”

Obama and West’s last personal contact took place a year ago at a gathering of the Urban League when, he says, Obama “cussed me out.” Obama, after his address, which promoted his administration’s championing of charter schools, approached West, who was seated in the front row.

“He makes a bee line to me right after the talk, in front of everybody,” West says. “He just lets me have it. He says, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself, saying I’m not a progressive. Is that the best you can do? Who do you think you are?’ I smiled. I shook his hand. And a sister hollered in the back, ‘You can’t talk to professor West. That’s Dr. Cornel West. Who do you think you are?’ You can go to jail talking to the president like that. You got to watch yourself. I wanted to slap him on the side of his head.

“It was so disrespectful,” he went on, “that’s what I didn’t like. I’d already been called, along with all [other] leftists, a “F’ing retard”by Rahm Emanuel because we had critiques of the president.”

Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president, has, West said, phoned him to complain about his critiques of Obama. Jarrett was especially perturbed, West says, when he said in an interview last year that he saw a lot of Malcolm X and Ella Bakerin Michelle Obama. Jarrett told him his comments were not complimentary to the first lady.

“I said in the world that I live in, in that which authorizes my reality, Ella Baker is a towering figure,” he says, munching Fritos and sipping apple juice at his desk. “If I say there is a lot of Ella Baker in Michelle Obama, that’s a compliment. She can take it any way she wants. I can tell her I’m sorry it offended you, but I’m going to speak the truth. She is a Harvard Law graduate, a Princeton graduate, and she deals with child obesity and military families. Why doesn’t she visit a prison? Why not spend some time in the hood? That is where she is, but she can’t do it.

“I think my dear brother Barack Obama has a certain fear of free black men,” West says. “It’s understandable. As a young brother who grows up in a white context, brilliant African father, he’s always had to fear being a white man with black skin. All he has known culturally is white. He is just as human as I am, but that is his cultural formation. When he meets an independent black brother, it is frightening. And that’s true for a white brother. When you get a white brother who meets a free, independent black man, they got to be mature to really embrace fully what the brother is saying to them. It’s a tension, given the history. It can be overcome. Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination. It is understandable.

“He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want,” he says. “He’s got two homes. He has got his family and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers blows his mind because he’s so smart. He’s got Establishment connections. He’s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home. That is very sad for me.

“This was maybe America’s last chance to fight back against the greed of the Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats, to generate some serious discussion about public interest and common good that sustains any democratic experiment,” West laments. “We are squeezing out all of the democratic juices we have. The escalation of the class war against the poor and the working class is intense. More and more working people are beaten down. They are world-weary. They are into self-medication. They are turning on each other. They are scapegoating the most vulnerable rather than confronting the most powerful. It is a profoundly human response to panic and catastrophe. I thought Barack Obama could have provided some way out. But he lacks backbone.

“Can you imagine if Barack Obama had taken office and deliberately educated and taught the American people about the nature of the financial catastrophe and what greed was really taking place?” West asks. “If he had told us what kind of mechanisms of accountability needed to be in place, if he had focused on homeowners rather than investment banks for bailouts and engaged in massive job creation he could have nipped in the bud the right-wing populism of the tea party folk. The tea party folk are right when they say the government is corrupt. It is corrupt. Big business and banks have taken over government and corrupted it in deep ways.

“We have got to attempt to tell the truth, and that truth is painful,” he says. “It is a truth that is against the thick lies of the mainstream. In telling that truth we become so maladjusted to the prevailing injustice that the Democratic Party, more and more, is not just milquetoast and spineless, as it was before, but thoroughly complicitous with some of the worst things in the American empire. I don’t think in good conscience I could tell anybody to vote for Obama. If it turns out in the end that we have a crypto-fascist movement and the only thing standing between us and fascism is Barack Obama, then we have to put our foot on the brake. But we’ve got to think seriously of third-party candidates, third formations, third parties.

“Our last hope is to generate a democratic awakening among our fellow citizens. This means raising our voices, very loud and strong, bearing witness, individually and collectively. Tavis [Smiley]and I have talked about ways of civil disobedience, beginning with ways for both of us to get arrested, to galvanize attention to the plight of those in prisons, in the hoods, in poor white communities. We must never give up. We must never allow hope to be eliminated or suffocated.”

AP / Pablo Martinez Monsivais

President Obama shakes hands with Princeton University professor Cornel West after speaking at the National Urban League’s 100th Anniversary Convention in Washington in July 2010.

Are Canadian Born Gay Black Men White Washed?

I attended the gay black men’s group on Friday evening in downtown Toronto. The group  is not some coming out group. We are all gay black men that accept our homosexuality. The focus of the group is just for gay black men in Toronto to socialize with each other. There are not a lot of spaces in Toronto specifically for gay black men. I decided to attend the group last year because I wanted to have a connection to other black gay men.

Only about six group members showed up and the two facilitators. First, we talked about  the differences between Canadian born gay black men  and foreign-born black gay men. According to one  Caribbean gay man, he said that he feels some Canadian born black gay men act “white.”  Well, the facilitator he was furious because he is a Canadian born black gay man from Nova Scotia.  The facilitator said “I love black men and I am not white washed. My family has lived in Canada for centuries. I am very involved in the black community and I definitely do not act white.”

The rest of the group members we explained to the facilitator that the Caribbean gay man’s opinion was based on his personal experiences. The Jamaican man wasn’t saying “all Canadian gay blacks” act “white”, he was just saying that some of the Canadian black gays in Toronto  immerse themselves into the white gay scene. I think there are a variety of reasons why some Canadian born homosexual men assimilate into the white gay culture in Toronto.

First, maybe these gay black Canadian men feel more comfortable surrounding themselves with white gay people? Perhaps it is just about comfort about being accepted? I think the Jamaican gay man was suggesting that some Canadian born gay black prefer to be surrounded by whiteness by distancing themselves from blackness. It is very important to point out in North America, the white gay image is the norm. I believe some gay men of colour internalize the feeling that if they associate with white gay men they will somehow transcend race.  However,  even if some Canadian born gay black men do immerse themselves into the white gay scene they are still black. My personal opinion is, race trumps sexual orientation.

I agree with the Caribbean gay man because everyone knows certain bars in the gay village Church and Wellesley are white male dominated. For instance, the Woody’s bar is an exclusive white gay men’s bar. By contrast, the Crews & Tango’s gay club across the street from Woody’s is more racially diverse.  I remember last year in November 2010, my friend and I decided to have a drink at Woody’s.

My friend is a Jamaican immigrant and he prefers white men. He wanted to go to a bar where white gay men hang out so we went to Woody’s. I personally don’t like Woody’s because I never felt comfortable there. I remember a gay black man telling me that Woody’s is really a “whitey” gay bar.

Anyway, we decided to go to Woody’s. We are both black gay men and we noticed people in the bar looking at us. We saw a sea of white faces in Woody’s. It is hard to describe the white gaze but basically we felt the look was like “why are you two gay black men hanging out at our bar?” I felt very uncomfortable, my friend and I had our drinks and on our way out we noticed one black guy sitting alone all by himself in Woody’s surrounded by white men. Nobody was talking to this gay black guy. I am not saying people are supposed to talk to the guy I am just mentioning it because he seemed displaced in whiteness.

Another point to consider is, maybe it is an issue of environment and culture? For instance, an African or Caribbean gay man is most likely to have been raised in a predominately black environment. However, a Canadian born gay black man will probably been raised in a multicultural environment such as Toronto. I felt the Caribbean and African gay men were suggesting that some Canadian gay blacks are not proud of their “blackness” and black heritage.

The next discussion we talked about the paucity of black gay men organizing events in Toronto. The consensus of the group members was that, the African and Caribbean communities in Toronto are very homophobic compared to other communities. I objected to that loaded statement because in different cultures in Toronto homosexuality is not acceptable. For instance, in  some European, East Asian, and  South Asian communities being gay is not palatable. I stated that homophobia is indeed a problem in the black community, but it is also a quandary in many communities.

The third topic we discussed is gossiping in the black gay community.  A couple of group members said the reason some gay black men don’t come out to black events is due to internalized homophobia and gossiping.  One Jamaican gay man said that ” gay black men in Toronto love to chat other people’s business.” Another group member revealed that “someone outed me on Facebook.” I was shocked learning this information.

The final issue we discussed was gay pride. One group member asked if there was going to be a float for gay parade in July? The two faciliators said that the pride committee has not started the fundraising process. Gay pride in Toronto will be on July 3rd 2011 this year.