When, like Obama has, you adopt the arguments and policies of the oppressors in order to be accepted by the supporters of continued oppression then those who really do oppose oppression win nothing by supporting an Obama.
Rev. Wright, like Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks before him, confronted the institutions of continued racist oppression in America. Obama denounced the Rev. Wright for doing the right thing. Rev. Wright is called divisive by the racists of the status quo for confronting and pointing out the continued institutions of racism in America. This, pure and simple, is adopting the arguments of the racists who attack as racist anyone like Rev. Wright who confronts the manifestations of racism in America.
Sen. Barack Obama supports the drug war policies that flood our streets with unregulated drugs and that the racists of America then use as an excuse to mass disenfranchise America’s urban minorities and the poor. Rev. Wright denounced these institutions and Obama smeared Wright for doing the brave thing by pointing to these institutions of oppression.
The drug war policies that Obama supports have spread more drugs into more parts of America. They have caused more violence and aided the proliferation of more illegal guns on the streets of America. All so that he can pander for votes to the oppressors of poverty oppressed urban Americans and minorities.
Please see my essays of last summer:
My analysis of Obama was and is inspired in part by The Nation essay by Ira Glasser, former head of the ACLU who wrote: “The fact that so many people arrested, convicted and imprisoned for drug offenses are black or Latino is not because they are mostly the ones doing the crime; it is because they are mostly the ones being targeted. This is not a phenomenon of the Deep South. It is nationwide. And it is not accidental. As the racial profiling scandals a few years ago showed, blacks are disproportionately targeted while driving cars on the highway; for example, in a lawsuit challenging this practice, it was revealed that although only 17 percent of drivers on a stretch of I-95 in Maryland were black, 73 percent of all the cars stopped and searched for drugs were driven by blacks. Nor was this an isolated example. In Florida blacks were seventy-five times more likely than whites to be stopped and searched for drugs while driving. And it turned out that these racially targeted stops were the explicit result of a Drug Enforcement Administration program begun in 1986, called Operation Pipeline, that “trained” 27,000 state troopers in forty-eight states to spot cars that might contain drugs. Most of the cars spotted were driven by blacks. And this happened even though three-quarters of monthly drug users are white!” Legalized Racial Discrimination in America
Further on Glasser observes (And could easily be speaking of liberals like Barack Obama): “Despite these patterns of racial targeting, it has not been fashionable among liberals to see drug prohibition as a massive civil rights problem of racial discrimination. Perhaps it would be easier if we examined the way racially targeted drug-war incarceration has damaged the right to vote, a right quintessentially part of the rights we thought we had won in the 1960s with the demise of Jim Crow laws.”
In conclusion Glasser notes: “The fact is, just as Jim Crow laws were a successor system to slavery, so drug prohibition has been a successor to Jim Crow laws in targeting blacks, removing them from civil society and then denying them the right to vote while using their bodies to enhance white political power. Drug prohibition is now the last significant instance of legalized racial discrimination in America.
That many liberals have been at best timid in opposing the drug war and at worst accomplices to its continued escalation is, in light of the racial politics of drug prohibition, a special outrage. It is also politically self-destructive, serving to keep in power white conservatives opposed to everything liberals stand for. Liberals especially, therefore, need to consider attacking the premises upon which this edifice of racial subjugation is based. If they do not, who will?”
Of all the carefully cherry-picked sound bites that the corporate media have played and replayed of Rev. Wright’s supposedly scandalous anti-American screeds, I have yet to hear a single thing with which I disagree. OK, the “God damn America” phrase might have been a little over the top, but in the context of the paragraph of which it was a part, it was no more than a rhetorical flourish to make a point. For every single supposedly offensive thing Rev. Wright has said, or at least that I have heard so far, there is a white fundamentalist demagogue who has said far more and far worse about blacks and latinos and gays.
And before anyone starts jumping to conclusions, I’m white. Plain vanilla. My people come from the same place as John Edwards and Jim Webb.
Yeah that ‘God damn America’ does get people all riled up doesn’t it especially as you say when that’s the only part that is repeated over/over instead of the whole sentence….”God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human.”
I didn’t see either that anything Wright said was anything but the truth-but that always does scare people doesn’t it. Especially the crowd who sticks their finger in their ears and sings lalalalala when they hear any unpleasant truth regarding this country.
This Obama-Wright flap is overdone. Wright had many fore-runners declaring America be damned–way back in the 1800s.
Chris Bowers at Open Left alerts Obama will give a major speech tomorrow morning and should be worth a listen. The Obama camp ress release highlights the speech will cover race issues.
And for those watching the Polls, take heart. (via TPM)
CNN: Obama Above 50% Nationally Against Hillary, Respondents Split On Super-Delegates
Obama 52% Clinton 45%
Btw, last week, Gallup and Rassmussen polls had Obama near the CNN levels.
My sentiments precisely.
And I too am a pinker shade of gray commonly mischaracterized as white.
We are all homo sapiens on this third ball of dirt from the big glowing yellow thing in the sky.
UCC on Rev. Wright
Thanks for the link AliceDem, nice to read something reasonable on this whole overblown media mess.
You know, I was just reading this article, Obama’s church accuses media of character assassination, and in the article is this little nugget:
That was quite a fight, even though they lost and a Wal Mart was opened. But. Even though this is used to scare whites generally, when you consider who used to be a member of Wal-Mart’s Board of Directors, it really does make you say hmmmmmm. Payback, perhaps?
Just as I finally get a glimpse at part of what makes Obama tick, through his closeness to Wright, someone I can really identify with, Obama denounces him in the name of politics. And there’s no principle in that, is there?
On the other hand, it makes me question his political skill if he thinks that his association with Wright would not be a huge liability in a general election, the way they’re played here.
I’m glad to learn more about Obama’s influences, while at the same time lamenting the reality that there will likely never be a politician who could win in America while honestly displaying his or her core beliefs.
can’t you see how ridiculous it is to hold all of those views simultaneously?
The comment is confusing and I should’ve clarified it.
Reading about Wright in the last few days has given me an insight into values that Obama undoubtedly has that I could really say for the first time are the same as mine. I assume he wouldn’t attend that church for so long if he didn’t identify with Wright in many ways. I’m saying that I see that as a good thing. Denouncing him and renouncing his obvious beliefs is not a good thing. It’s weak. Especially the way he went about it by saying he wasn’t there for those particular sermons. Come on…that’s pretty weak. Definetily unprincipled.
As far as not seeing Wright as a liability goes, I really meant to say that he should have anticipated the nature of the media, the nature of the Clinton campaign, the attack mentality of the republicans, and most importantly, when trying to appeal to a broad cross section of Americans, the mentality of the average, wool over the eyes voter who is still apple pie and rah, rah, USA. He should’ve anticipated those hurdles and gotten out in front of it to begin with. You can’t believe he’s handling this well given the nature of the beast he seeks to tame long enough to vote for him, do you?
The only other thing i’d say regarding one’s core beliefs and electability is that the reality of American politics is such that it’s almost impossible to run a winning effort if you have strong beliefs that cut against the grain of the American identity. Wright’s beliefs and Obama’s by extension, definetily cut across that grain. The same for an Atheist. It’s the reality of appealing to voters in this country.
I’d rather see a politician go down in electoral flames holding onto his or her beliefs, or at least being saavy enough to not allow those beliefs to be used as weapons against you by your political enemies and by the media, than to do this pathetic tap dance that they all do when asked to clarify who they are.
Left-wing, liberal, progressive politicians who honestly espouse their core beliefs are unelectable only because the white right-wing that dominates the leadership of the two dominance parties fear-monger their members away from supporting honest politicians.
I would have loved to see Martin Luther King run for president with Bobby Kennedy as his VP in 1968. That would have changed America forever.
Okay, but where do they get the leverage to do that from? From the people who continually elect them, over and over to positions of power within both parties.
And I’ve seen plenty of gnashing of teeth and rending of flesh over Wright’s positions and Obama’s proximity to him on so called left wing sites and other outlets. True that a lot of it is glee at having an apparent political advantage fall in the laps of Clinton supporters, but there’s plenty of angst on the left that’s heartfelt, I think. Disgusting and disappointing as that is.
Of the top ten or twenty things I can think of that I wish a politician would run on, I can’t think of any that a majority of the public would support, except for the ones that no one would get excited about one way or another.
The problem isn’t the politicians. It’s the voters. Despite all the election shenanigans of the past few years, six years’ worth of elections is all it would take to eliminate every last incumbent and replace them with better people. The ballot box is still a loaded gun pointed against the head of the Establishment. The problem is that not enough people want to pull the trigger.
It can be argued that the people won’t take that step because they’ve been deceived by the politicians, but those deceptions are such thin and flimsy things that after ten years of adult life or so, failing to see through them is an active choice.