Henry Ford said that "history is bunk". I think most Americans agree with that and truly want to believe that it is possible to completely erase the past and begin anew... But, in fact the relations between white America and the decedents of African slavery are America's Balkans, which as Churchill said, "produce more history than they can digest". Any American city is Bosnia-Herzegovina. And this is not really about color.... it's about history. A Bosnian Muslim and a Bosnian Serb share the same language and morphology, but history has them at each others throats. Color is just the uniform that American history assigns each player in this horrible game. Denying it doesn't change anything.

I first discovered this when, here is Europe, I was thrown into the company of Cubans and Venezuelans of color and later with African exchange students. No history separated us, there was no tension at all on either side, we hung out together in the most natural way... Even in England, the relationship with students of the British Caribbean, was fluid. African-Americans have told me they experienced the same thing. For all of us it was an inexpressible relief.

It is not about color it is about history. Contrary to what Obama says, we are not "one people", but two peoples, each with distinct, but overlapping cultures, people who must share the same space and learn to live with each other and even love one another. I think we have as good a chance as the Bosnians do, but not any better one.

I believe that Barack Obama illustrates perfectly my idea that race relations in the USA are cultural and that color is only a uniform that normally goes with the culture.

Obama is culturally "white". He was raised in Hawaii by white grandparents and went to private schools where the significant non-white population is Asiatic and that not only didn't Hawaii ever have any history of African slavery, it wasn't even a part of the United States at the time of the Civil War.

He also lived in Indonesia, where he would have been treated as an American expatriate... an object of mild curiosity. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think Muslim Indonesia attaches any particular stigma to African ancestry.

In short, to paraphrase Reverend Wright, I doubt if any white person ever called Barack Obama "nigger" in his whole life. It seems to me that the Obama took the personal decision to become part of African-American culture in the same way he could have gone to an ashram in India and become a yogin. Attending such a radically black nationalist church as Wright's was Obama's way of joining the new culture... Now he has been caught by it.

I think Barack Obama is an immensely talented politician, but for him to really become anything great, I think it is essential for him to first fail miserably at something important.

In my opinion this campaign if the first real event in his whole life. If he fails now at this imposture, he may come out of this trial by fire burned a shade darker and a much more interesting and important figure in American life.

More than President at this point I see him as the natural successor to Ted Kennedy. To be President he needs much more time in the oven. Paradoxically what Obama is going through now is making him into a culturally genuine African-American. That is when his real story finally begins.

Obama describes his grandmother as:

a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

I don't know for sure if I'm the only one who found this all a tad supercilious, but I suspect I'm not. In turns out that I too come from serially broken homes like Obama and, hey, I too had a white grandmother, who like Obama's, was

a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who love(d) me as much as she love(d) anything in this world

And hey, huge coincidence.... she too was frightened of black men just like Obama's. Wow.... and that made Obama cringe?

Cringe?

Good thing he never listened to Chris Rock on the subject:

"The media has distorted our image to make us look bad, why must you come down on us like that, brother? It ain't us, it's the media." Please, cut the fucking shit, okay. Okay? Okay? When I go to the money machine tonight, alright, I ain't looking over my back for the media: I'm looking for niggas!'

Now that makes me cringe, and I don't cringe very easily. You don't have to be Bill Cosby to know that there is huge problem in the United States of America with black men.

"The United States has the highest reported incarceration rate in the world. While the United States currently incarcerates 750 inmates per 100,000 persons, the world average rate is 166 per 100,000 persons.(...) African Americans, who are 12.4 percent of the population, are more than half of all prison inmates, compared to one-third twenty years ago. Although African-Americans constitute 14 percent of regular drug users, they are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses, and 56 percent of persons in state prisons for drug crimes." “Mass Incarceration in the United States: At What Cost? US Senate Report

And many of the causes of this problem were well described by Obama's "old uncle" Reverend Wright (I bet the 'old uncle' bit made Wright cringe). Here is how he preached it.

"The government gives them the drugs [referring to the Iran-Contra Affair], builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people...God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme"

Now brother Noam Chomsky couldn't have said that any better. If we were going for truth and not truthiness, Obama would have defended both his white granny's and Jeremiah Wrights views, because both of them are making intelligent and realistic comments about a problem that affects both their lives, as it does any American of any color that lives anywhere but places like Iowa and Minnesota.

So, in fact, where others see a history making, earth shaking, speech steeped in authenticity, I only see Tony Blair with a fabulous tan.

If I had to define what bothers me most about Barack Obama, it is that idea of transubstantiation he offers: that <i>through my body you will be saved.</i>

Obama seems to be offering himself to the nation as some sort of enormous communion wafer on whose ingestion the sins of slavery will be washed away in the blood of the lamb as it were. That he is not just an instrument of change, but change itself made flesh.

What really worries me it the ego on display. "It is not my policies, it is my special genes." And what worries me even more is how people eat it up.

William Faulkner defined the situation: "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past."

The past is always with us... to paraphrase Joe Louis, "we can run, but we can't hide."

The Indians (from India) put it in an even more graphic expression, "so the meal, so the flavor of the belch".

There is some idea going around that somehow, through Obama's divine grace, I suppose, we can miraculously put hundreds of years of history in the icebox and begin anew.

The Reverend Wright is the just the "flavor of the belch."

http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com

William Faulkner defined the situation: "The past isn't dead; it isn't even past."

The past is always with us... to paraphrase Joe Louis, "we can run, but we can't hide."

The Indians (from India) put it in an even more graphic expression, "so the meal, so the flavor of the belch".

There is some idea going around that somehow, through Obama's divine grace, I suppose, we can miraculously put hundreds of years of history in the icebox and begin anew.

The Reverend Wright is the just the "flavor of the belch."

I was just watching some Youtube of the Rev. Wright's sermons. The problem is that it is is a problem.

Because Wright is right. Everything he says is true. So was everything that Michelle Obama said that they dumped all over her for saying. Well ok, Jesus wasn't black, he was Jewish, like the ghetto's proverbial "Goldberg", but in general what Wright said is not that weird, especially when he spoke of who runs the country to whose benefit.

The sad thing is that white people are supposed to vote for Barack Obama because he isn't really black. And black people are supposed to vote for him because he really is.

Obama had such a fantastic "white" CV, with private high school in Hawaii then Columbia and Harvard, he was just trying to get a little "black" cred by attending Wright's church. Like some whigger trying to "get down".

The American left, which is afraid to touch "class politics" has gotten lost in issues of race and gender.The real problems of the United States are not about race or sex they are about class.

Race and gender are issues that cloud the vision and divide the working poor and keep them from facing their common problems together. This is part of the "genius" of the American system, its talent for endlessly dividing, co-opting and distracting dissent.

Being poor is what marks Americans for failure and desperate lives, not sex of gender. American women of color like Michelle Obama or Oprah Winfrey are firmly entrenched in the upper-middle class despite being "victims" of both racism and sexism.

The real victims of the American system are the poor (especially the children) of all colors and sexes. Unlike most other developed countries, in the USA it is almost impossible for them to escape from that condition. The chances of the children of a poor home moving into the middle class are much smaller than most of European countries. America is no longer the land of opportunity that it once was.

This should be what progressive politics should be about, openly fighting for social justice. I don't think the Democratic Party is really a vehicle for change. I think change has to come first from within the society and then the politicians will come tagging along behind.
http://seaton-newslinks.blogspot.com/