I could not help but shake my head all throughout the last Presidential race as I listened to person after person talk and sing about Obama as if he was The Wiz. I spent a good part of my time blogging during that time trying to convince people the Obama was nothing more than a politician and that’s it. But it was blasphemous to say things like that then, and with 91% of Black voters still behind him: honey, you better shut your mouth and support yo’ President!
As I said time after time after time on this site, government does not care about you or your kids. Government only cares for itself and will use you to get what it wants. Case in point, any densely populated Black community in the US. For decades now, we have been talking about some of the same problems: dilapidated schools, underfunded city hospitals, underfunded police and fire departments, higher taxes, etc. And how do politicians show their concern about these problems? By renaming a street after a slain civil rights activist only for that street to ironically become one of the most crime infested streets in the city. Government cannot solve all the problems in the Black community, but has certainly become an expensive do-little/do-nothing partner that spends most of its time selling “hope”.
Dr. Cornel West has never been 100% for Obama and he tips more of his hat of that fact in a recent interview in Playboy magazine. He was recently on NPR where both he and sit in host Tony Cox talked about some of his views on Obama.
COX: Let me ask it in this way, then: Are you suggesting by your comments that black people, black folk in this country, are relating to these issues of the economy and poverty in a completely different way than everyone else?
Prof. WEST: Well, I think in the past, we have. I mean, we look at the legacy of Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells and Ella Baker, Malcolm X and Martin King. We have, and part of the struggle now in the age of Obama is how do we keep alive the legacy of Martin King?
I know my dear brother, President Obama, has a bust of Martin King right there in the Oval Office, but the question is are is he going to be true to who that Martin Luther King, Jr., actually is? King was concerned about what? The poor. He was concerned about working people. He was concerned about quality jobs. He was concerned about quality housing. He was concerned about precious babies in Vietnam, the way we ought to be concerned about precious babies in Afghanistan and precious babies in Tel Aviv and precious babies in Gaza.
Martin King was fundamentally committed to the least of these. Of course, he was a Christian soldier for justice from the 25th chapter of Matthew.
And so more and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to Obama’s presidency, but does that mean they’re well-adjusted to injustice? Because we don’t hear our president talking about the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex.
We don’t hear our president talking about the need for high-quality jobs for everybody, giving it priority, not just giving a speech in Detroit. That’s fine, but speaking to Tim Geithner, speaking to Larry Summers. When are you going to make jobs, jobs, jobs a priority rather than Wall Street, Wall Street, Wall Street a priority? That’s what I’m concerned about.
COX: Have you communicated with him personally?
Prof. WEST: Well, I’ll tell you, I had not talked to my dear brother since the Martin Luther King gathering in South Carolina, and very briefly Super Tuesday. But he did come and make a beeline to me after his speech on I think it was Thursday morning in Washington, D.C. I hadn’t seen him for two and a half weeks, and he made a beeline to me, though, brother, and he was deeply upset. He talked to me like I was a Cub Scout, and he was a pack master, you know what I mean?
I said, well, my mother and father raised me right. I respect my dear brother, but I don’t like to be demeaned and humiliated in that way, and I didn’t get a chance to respond to him. And I hope maybe at some time we can. But it was very, it was a very ugly kind of moment, it seems to me, and that disturbs me because then it raises the question for me: Does he have a double standard for black critics as opposed to white critics?
Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, a whole host of brilliant, courageous critics say all kinds of things, and he treats them with respect. They get invited to the White House. I say the same thing, he talks to me like I’m a Cub Scout.
You can read the rest of the interview here.
Obama will NEVER be a MLK in any way. Why? Because MLK was not a politician. Yes, MLK was politically savvy to some extent. But he was not tied to the self-serving government. In fact, the government wanted to kill (and to some, it probably did) MLK. Obama is an employee of that same government. The only thing we can do is to hold Obama to the promises he made and not to these outlandish messiah-like standards people like West is trying to place on him.
Obama Fails The Messiah Test
by Duane on October 6th, 2010 at 9:48 amI could not help but shake my head all throughout the last Presidential race as I listened to person after person talk and sing about Obama as if he was The Wiz. I spent a good part of my time blogging during that time trying to convince people the Obama was nothing more than a politician and that’s it. But it was blasphemous to say things like that then, and with 91% of Black voters still behind him: honey, you better shut your mouth and support yo’ President!
As I said time after time after time on this site, government does not care about you or your kids. Government only cares for itself and will use you to get what it wants. Case in point, any densely populated Black community in the US. For decades now, we have been talking about some of the same problems: dilapidated schools, underfunded city hospitals, underfunded police and fire departments, higher taxes, etc. And how do politicians show their concern about these problems? By renaming a street after a slain civil rights activist only for that street to ironically become one of the most crime infested streets in the city. Government cannot solve all the problems in the Black community, but has certainly become an expensive do-little/do-nothing partner that spends most of its time selling “hope”.
Dr. Cornel West has never been 100% for Obama and he tips more of his hat of that fact in a recent interview in Playboy magazine. He was recently on NPR where both he and sit in host Tony Cox talked about some of his views on Obama.
You can read the rest of the interview here.
Obama will NEVER be a MLK in any way. Why? Because MLK was not a politician. Yes, MLK was politically savvy to some extent. But he was not tied to the self-serving government. In fact, the government wanted to kill (and to some, it probably did) MLK. Obama is an employee of that same government. The only thing we can do is to hold Obama to the promises he made and not to these outlandish messiah-like standards people like West is trying to place on him.