Lots of us have woken up post election and discovered(not surprisingly) that O is a continuation of elitist globalization policies(Bush(s), Clinton, Reagan) destined to make the wealthy far more wealthy and the rest of us a little less well off, at best. If this means the deaths of 10's of thousands of innocent lives around the world, so be it.
===
Note to Michael Eric Dyson: You are culpable in Obama's disregard of Race!
thedailyvoice.com
Tolu Olorunda | Posted June 1, 2009 8:55 AM
FOUNDING SPONSOR
"My brain never touched the soap/
Refused to be another f**kin' slave that stuffed the boats/"
--Jus Allah, "White Nightmare," All Fates Have Changed (2005).
Speaking with legendary Hip-Hop Journalist Davey D, on Pacifica's Hard Knock Radio, Georgetown Professor Michael Eric Dyson had some strong choice of words for President Obama. To put it more accurately, Dyson scolded the president, questioning his commitment to the Black community.
Dr. Dyson began by criticizing Obama's semi-firing, late last March, of former GM head, Rick Wagoner. He highlighted the hypocrisy many saw as evident in Obama's refusal to follow suit in the cases of AIG and other collapsing insurance giants. Dyson praised Obama's reaching out to the Muslim world, and balanced approach to U.S. foreign policy, but had "questionable marks... on the issue of Race and ethnicity."
The problem: "It seems to be an incapacity of Mr. Obama to explicitly embrace Blackness." To buttress this contention, Dr. Dyson goes all the way back to August, last year, when Obama gave his Democratic National Convention speech, accepting the Party's nomination for the Presidency. Dyson's gripe is with President Obama's dismissal of Dr. King, in his speech, as merely a "young preacher from Georgia."
As one who has mentioned this remark in no less than 10 separate articles, I'm pleased that it finally is getting the traction it long deserved. But if Dr. Dyson is only now responding to that moment of cultural weakness displayed by his buddy, something is out of kilter.
That night, August 28, 2008, when Obama chose to avoid the implications Dr. King's radical struggle bore on his historic accomplishment, only two Black scholars, to my knowledge, stood up in public disappointment: Dr. Julianne Malveaux (Bennett College for Women) and Dr. Cornel West (Princeton University). Appearing immediately after on PBS, with host Tavis Smiley, both made known their dissatisfaction with Obama's approach to history. In Dr. Malveaux's words, his speech was a "whitewash of our history." Dr. West believed he might have attempted to "ignore" and "run" from "history" and "memory." He failed to, as Dr. West saw it, "acknowledge and affirm all of the sacrifice that has gone in for him to be where he is."
A day after, I wrote a blog-post about it, and even put up a clip of their conversation.
Rather than a reason-based approach, the response to their courageous criticism was an onslaught of antagonism, dealt out by the likes of Spelman History Professor Jelani Cobb, who said critics like Cornel West had "gone soft around the waste." The same intense level of hatred Tavis Smiley had received earlier in the year, generated by academic luminaries like Dr. Boyce Watkins, was showered on Drs. Malveaux and West, who were accused of hatin' on, and jealous of, the Brotha. They were "crabs in a barrel."
All this happened, and Dyson was nowhere to be found. Where was he? He was partyin' it up with TV One, giving Obama everything but the keys to Black America's electoral vehicle.
But now, he would hate to be perceived as "an uncritical celebratory figure." Though a "surrogate" for Obama during the '08 campaign, Dyson doesn't want YOU, the intelligent reader, to call him out on his acquiescence to Obama's many atrocities against Black America.
When Obama fought claims that the "ineptitude" of FEMA was color-conscious, Dyson said nothing--84% of Black folks disagreed. When Obama proclaimed Black people "90 % of the way" to equality in March 2007, he said nothing. When Obama ridiculed Black Women for being too poor and unable to feed their kids nutritional meals, he said nothing. It took Obama's disrespect and generalization of Black men, going so far as calling them "boys," to arouse Dyson's disapproval. And, even then, it was tepid.
Unlike other surrogates, a la Dr. Cornel West, who experienced perpetual "tension" in the Obama camp, due to his unrelenting "critical support," Dyson's quest for access kept his lips shut. Now he wants US to believe he was anything but "an uncritical celebratory figure"?!? Better luck next time!
But in the interview, Dyson also took umbrage with President Obama's contention that much need not be done to specifically develop the African American community, because "[a rising tide] will lift all boats." Again, where was Dr. Dyson when Obama had used similar rhetorical devices to articulate the same premise on numerous occasions, throughout the campaign, such as in his appearance at the '08 UNITY Convention.
Dyson contends that Obama "gets it. He ain't dumb." At stake, he argues, is the reality that Obama is "willing to sacrifice the interests of African Americans, in deference to a conception of universalism, because it won't offend White people."
Now, Dyson starts firing his rhetorical ammunitions at those he serenaded into voting for Obama: "The tragedy of Black people is that we're so grateful for having a Black person in the office, we don't demand anything of him."
Well, speak for yourself, Doc. Many African-American websites, including this one (TheDailyVoice.com), have consistently featured viewpoints that demand specific policy addresses from the Obama administration. Being out of the loop is not an excuse for such misinformed conjecture.
"Obama trades racial affiliations," he said, even "exploiting racial solidarity, without offering too much specifically targeted to Black people."
Wow! Knock me out with a feather, Iron Mike!
Dr. Dyson closes, almost comically, urging Black folks to "understand what's going on. If you gon' be kissed, understand who's kissing you. If you gon' be played, understand who's playing you."
It would be funny, if not already depressing, that Dr. Dyson actually sees himself as a prophet of sorts, warning Black people of the peril of uncritically supporting the presidency of a man whom he, during the course of the campaign, assured knew our struggle and felt our pain.
It seems as though Dr. Dyson is merely struck with what 2008 Green Party Presidential Nominee Cynthia McKinney, my candidate, referred to as the Obama-election "buyer's remorse." In other words, voters who, having waited unsuccessfully and hopelessly for the fruition of democratic policies from the Obama administration, now feel they've been had, tricked, bamboozled, hoodwinked. In their words, Obama "played" them with his mean oratorical game. White liberals were first to express such disbelief at what they perceived to be "deceit" on Obama's part, but more and more Black people are beginning to feel just as violated.
These voters, McKinney explained, can be "subdivided" into three categories:
[T]hose who voted for Obama, not knowing very much about our Power to the People campaign; those who voted for Obama, knowing a lot about Rosa, me, and the Power to the People campaign, but who chose instead to vote for Obama out of fear of a McCain/Palin White House; and finally, those who knew about our Power to the People campaign and were hostile to it because they were suspicious that our campaign was designed to deny the White House to candidate Obama-the spoiler campaign.
If anything, Dr. Dyson falls into the last category.
Tolu Olorunda is a Columnist for BlackCommentator.com, and a Staff Writer at ThisIsRealMusic.com. |
