Barack Hussein Obama, 44th President of the United States of America, is one of my heroes. One of the most inspiring moments in my life was watching his acceptance speech in Chicago on some cold election night in November of 2008. It opened my imagination to the possibilities of achievement that I had the potential to make a reality. His election was a real life example that contemporary black male excellence did not stop at entertainment or sport, but could ascend to occupy the highest office in the land. It was that night that I wrote my first ever blog post (all be it in a school notebook with an old fashioned number two pencil) about how I now dreamed of myself as a King! My Aunt still has that journal entry framed in her office (or so she tells me).
From the time Barack Obama entered office I began to pay special attention to his messages towards the black community. I viewed him as a leader, OUR leader. His message was, even though I didn't realize it at the time, a message that was and still continues to be very problematic. You see Barack Obama's message to black america spreads the myth that many other "liberal" black politicians, activists, reverends, and other so called "leaders", also choose to perpetrate; the myth of the black moral pathology. Put simply the myth of the black moral pathology tells us that while white supremacy has in the past been a detriment to black achievement, we have to now throw the shackles that exist in our minds. This usually manifests itself into "no excuses" statements, demands that black people take responsibility, and lectures on how to succeed in the white world. I've compiled a list of ways in which Barack Obama himself has done this.
This is in no way unique to President Obama; it is a pattern among privileged members of the black community. We see many successful and prominent black people telling the poorest and most marginalized members of our community to get their acts together; we know the "buy a belt" politics, the politics of calling some of our fellow brothers and sisters "ratchet or ghetto", some privileged black people try and differentiate "niggas" as a separate group of people causing our people's problems (this has been my sole complaint about the "Boondocks" animated series). There is no doubt in my mind that this myth is in fact a myth. Or at least, the assertion that these pathologies are the driving force of our problems is fiction. I would argue the contrary: that there is something miraculous about a people who at every turn in American history has been hated, subjected to violence, and stolen from has still in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles found a way to not only overcome, but also hold onto love for God, fellow man, and country. Especially when it appeared that God, fellow man, and country did not love them back. Where black people have gotten this strength from is to me both a mystery and a testament to the power of the human will. However Barack Obama is still not off the hook. This is my one true bugaboo when it comes to our president. These "excuses" that he so often mentions are in reality black people reacting to disadvantages that result from the what is at best failed policy and at worst conscious negligence that has lead to vast structural and institutional inequities in black communities. In truth what President Obama is asking us to do is to not react in a human way towards systematic oppression. As the chief enactor of policy in the Federal Government, Barack Obama should be finding ways to create policy that undo those systems of oppression rather than lecturing black people on how to react to them. President Obama is, as he as says the "The President of the United States of America, not the President of Black America." He is exactly right. Which means that he represents a government who's policy for 250 years was enslavement, another 100 years of Jim Crow, 25 years of housing discrimination (conservatively), 35 years of mass incarceration, and overall 400 years of general economic pillage and negligence. A man who represents this kind of history of moral injustice has no place lecturing the morality of the people who were subject to it. -515
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October 2018
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