Foreshadowed
by his roots and bottle-rocket-like rise, Barack Obama’s legacy is
one of betrayal and what might have been,… From the outset, he
courted and was courted by the pillars of counter-revolution, his
very blackness a cloak for his Manchurian mission.
by
Jon Jeter
Part
3 - Barack Obama and the counter-revolution
A year
to the day after another son of black Chicago, Barack Obama, vacated
the White House, his enigmatic legacy can only be understood as a
response to this insurrection, and any serious interrogation of his
record makes it painfully clear that Obama was the titular head of a
counterrevolution, intended to undo the democratizing efforts of a
generation of Americans who found their voice in the the
transformative post war years.
You
cannot, in other words, begin to make sense of the Republic’s first
black president without understanding Chicago’s first black mayor,
can’t get your arms around what has transpired over the last decade
without examining the eight decades that preceded it, and cannot
appreciate the arc of America’s political universe without some
clarity on both the top-down movement that catapulted Obama into the
catbird seat and the bottom-up populist movement that produced
Washington.
Washington
was everything that Obama was not — reversing public policies
steeped in white supremacy, while Obama deepened them. Washington
weakened the influence of money in politics, Obama strengthened it.
Washington accommodated immigrants and helped transform Chicago into
a sanctuary, while Obama deported more than any president in history.
Washington rewarded organized labor for its efforts to elect him,
Obama gave labor unions the cold shoulder, when he wasn’t trying to
bust them altogether. Washington opened space for women, people of
color, and even workers in the informal sector trying to make a
living any way they could in an enervated economy; on Obama’s
watch, the nation witnessed an unemployed black man lynched on a
Staten Island street corner merely for selling loose cigarettes.
Washington
invoked the anti-colonial theories of Fanon, exalted the messianic
quality of the African’s experience in the Americas, and exhorted
people of color to never give up the fight against injustice and
oppression; Obama invoked Reagan, trafficked in folklore, and scolded
black men for feeding their children cold Popeye’s chicken for
breakfast. Washington embodied Bessie Smith’s Blues, Obama the
mediocre hip-hop of Drake.
None of
this was by chance. If Washington’s election is viewed in its most
irreducible form — namely, the pinnacle of what the Rev. William
Barber characterizes as the nation’s second Reconstruction — then
Obama can only be contextualized as the plutocrats’ man in the
White House, installed for the singular purpose of preventing a
third.
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