Obama and White Racism

There is a reason why so many white folk are running to carry Obama. That reason has everything to do with racism and almost nothing to do with his politics.

White liberals, and other whites, are comfortable around Obama. He carries their fears about race and their racism with a committed silence.

Obama won't call white people on their sh*t. He can't. He is, afterall, a creation of the white imagination.

An imagination that needs to make the past and its racist present disappear from their lives.

Obama, like Oprah, and Powell and Rice, are modern iterations of Black servility to whiteness.

Their function is not about subverting whiteness, but rather it is about preserving and extending the reach of whiteness.

In these terms, Obama and the likes represent a disease, a pathology, of whiteness and its ownership.

To understand Obama inside of racism you have to understand what it means to be white and what whiteness means even where white people are physically absent.

Juan Santos has written what I consider to be one of the best deconstruction pieces on Obama and the false consciousness of 'post-racism'.

I strongly recommend this article. There is so much to quote but I will end this post with this passage from Santos:

Obama knows the rules of the game, after all. He is the rules of the new race game; his candidacy itself is a manifestation of the new system of racism.

He knows how to make white Amerikkka feel good about the status quo, here and abroad.

There’s a reason for that.

If he told the truth, if he stood up for justice, and on that basis, authentic healing, he couldn’t be president.

Under those circumstances, if he’d attracted any measurable attention, much less the global attention he’s gained today, more likely be dead.

Like King.

Like Malcolm.

Dead, like Steven Biko of the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania / South Africa, or Fred Hampton from Chicago.

Or imprisoned for decades, like Nelson Mandela was.

But Barack Obama doesn’t have that kind of vision and courage.

And he’s not, in the end, even a street activist. He’s been bought. What kind of "street activist" or "community organizer," after all, ends up a millionaire?

One who won’t say what white people don’t want to hear.

What white Amerikkka doesn’t want to know, Obama is not about to tell them. That’s a large part of why they like him; it’s key. Whites don’t want to know, as a rule, the actual conditions of Black America, just as the German people, as a rule, didn’t want to know the actual conditions of the Jews and Gypsies, even as the smoke of the crematoria drifted through their streets.

Onward!