Hard Teachings

The role of a white person looking at a political conflict among black people should be primarily to look and learn. Or at least that's what I think.   It's the same for men in a political conflict among women.  There will be things that those primarily involved with issues know about them, points that are important to consider that the experience of those not involved will not know or weigh accurately.   But in the conflict between Cornel West, speaking on behalf of the black prophetic tradition and those he names as sell-outs involved the President of the United States and the soul of the country, the actions of the United States government inside the country and in the world so it concerns us all.  I would assert that in the past it was when liberals and the left not only learned from that prophetic tradition but acted on its witness that things got better, that the country acted in a way at all in line with its asserted faith, in equality, in democracy, in justice.  That gives all of us a legitimate interest in the issues, though I still think it is best to let the primary figures tell us what it is about.  And on that:

“It is a spiritual issue,” West said. “What kind of person do you choose to be? People say, ‘Well, Brother West, since the mass of black folk will never be free then let me just get mine.’ That is the dominant response. ‘I am wasting my time fighting a battle that can’t be won.’ But that is not what the black prophetic tradition is about. History is a mystery. Yes, it doesn't look good. But the masses of black folk must be respected. Malcolm X used to say as long as they are not respected you could show me all the individual respect you want but I know it’s empty. That is the fundamental divide between the prophetic tradition and the sellouts.”

There is a conflict between those holding out for ultimate justice and those who begin by compromise and end up compromised, between those who really believe to the core of their being and at a real cost to themselves and their families that justice is not optional and those who think it's a nice sounding slogan, not much different from those the advertising industry uses to lie twenty minutes out of every hour, not counting product placement.

The disappointment with Barack Obama is legitimate, he sold himself as something he clearly is not and never intended to be, the head of an alternative to the corporate state, a progressive, if not liberal opposition to that.  Instead he has been the champion of it.  In the article about Obama's attempt to silence the prophetic tradition, by Chris Hedges,*  Cornell West practices the witness that is guaranteed to not be welcome by many, observing that it has always been the case that before prophets are accepted or, as is often the case, coopted, they are often opposed, imprisoned and not infrequently killed  

“The most pernicious development is the incorporation of the black prophetic tradition into the Obama imperial project,” West said. “Obama used [Martin Luther] King’s Bible during his inauguration, but under the National Defense Authorization Act King would be detained without due process. He would be under surveillance every day because of his association with Nelson Mandela, who was the head of a ‘terrorist’ organization, the African National Congress. We see the richest prophetic tradition in America desecrated in the name of a neoliberal worldview, a worldview King would be in direct opposition to. Martin would be against Obama because of his neglect of the poor and the working class and because of the [aerial] drones, because he is a war president, because he draws up kill lists. And Martin King would have nothing to do with that.”

“We are talking about crimes against humanity—Wall Street crimes, war crimes, the crimes of the criminal justice system in the form of Jim Crow, the crimes against our working poor that have their backs pushed against the wall because of stagnant wages and corporate profits going up,” West said. “Abraham Heschel said that the distinctive feature of any empire in decline is its indifference to criminality. That is a fundamental feature of our time, an indifference to criminality, especially on top, wickedness in high places.”

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For a white, American tradition, Liberal, the product of the past half century of American history, it is extremely hard to figure out the lines between the possible and the ideal.  The fact is that Obama is one in a line of merely the best we could get elected to office.  But with Obama and his campaign to sell another involvement in yet another hopeless foreign civil war, it's clear that is not enough anymore.

It is clear to me that Obama has not had any intention of striving for the ideal at a cost to himself.  He has almost never spent political capital on the legitimate program of liberalism.  For example, it's called "Obamacare" first by his opponents, trying to put a black face on health care reform in order to use racism to destroy it. They've done the same with most of the social welfare programs dismantled during my lifetime.  But Obama did nothing to push a really great bill whose implementation would transform the country, socially, economically and politically.    He didn't even do very much to get what was passed through.  He left it in the hands of people like Max Baucus and Joe Lieberman, trading away anything that would have comprised a really good bill in his futile attempt to woo the likes of Olympia Snowe in order to be able to duck behind the empty slogan of bi-partisanship.  And even that almost failed but for the insistence of Nancy Pelosi that the bill be passed.   That was the template for virtually every real liberal issue during the Obama administration.  He spent his political capital - ALL OF IT GIVEN TO HIM BY HIS SUPPORTERS - on behalf of those who were far more interested in using his race to whip up the most vicious and potentially violent opposition to a president in our history.  There is something pathological in Obama's repeated quest to get people who hate him because of his race and his party affiliation to like him even as it's obvious he expects the adoration of his supporters who he disdains and disrespects.   He might give us a speech on a special occasion, he might use symbolism to woo us when he needs us, he gives us way too little for the cost of having him as the voluntarily weak president he has been.   We must never give our most valuable political asset, out votes and our support, to someone who will so profligately throw it at those who will oppose us and the most basic of our values.   That is justice, equality, economic equality, not free trade, not bank deregulation.   I strongly suspect that Obama is prepared to give away more of that on behalf of Larry Summers than he ever would for even a moderately liberal member of the Supreme Court.

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As I said, my primary role in the dispute between Obama and West is to listen and learn and, though I don't agree with everything he has said and the way he says it is very hard,  West gets the last word in this post.

“Obama is the highest manifestation of the co-optation that took place,” West said. “It shifted to the black political class. The black political class, more and more, found itself unable to tell the truth, or if they began to tell some of the truth they were [put] under surveillance, attacked and demonized. Forty percent of our babies are living in poverty, living without enough food, and Obama comes to us and says quit whining. He doesn’t say that to the Business Roundtable. He doesn’t say that to the corporate elites. He doesn’t say that to AIPAC, the conservative Jewish brothers and sisters who will do anything to support the Israeli occupation against Palestinians. This kind of neglect in policy is coupled with disrespect in his speeches to black folk, which the mainstream calls tough love.”

“He is a shell of a man,” West said of Obama. “There is no deep conviction. There is no connection to something bigger than him. It is a sad spectacle, sad if he were not the head of an empire that is in such decline and so dangerous. This is a nadir. William Trotter and Du Bois, along with Ida B. Wells-Barnett, were going at Book T tooth and nail. Look at the fights between [Marcus] Garvey and Du Bois, or Garvey and A. Philip Randolph. But now if you criticize Obama the way Randolph criticized Garvey, you become a race traitor and an Uncle Tom. A lot of that comes out of the Obama machine, the Obama plantation.”

*  Hedges, who I respect even as I sometimes disagree with him, has the kind of earned credibility that few other figures in the left opposition to Obama have.  He does a fine job of letting Cornel West speak for himself even as it's obvious he's also saying things Hedges would like to say.   Hedges sometimes manages the uneasy dual role of someone trying to balance between the roles of journalist and prophet,  I think it would be good for him to realize that someone who has witnessed as much as he has can't any longer function as a journalist and go back to his pre-journalism roots.