Posted May 23, 2011
Recently BlackCommentator.com editorial board member Bill Fletcher wrote a very strange column. It polemicizes against unnamed, unquoted “progressives” who have “written off” not just Obama but those who gave him critical support in 2008, like Fletcher.
According to Fletcher, these nameless, quoteless progressives won’t make racism, epitomized by the racist assault to keep Obama from being re-elected, central to what they are saying heading into the 2012 elections. This even though next year’s elections are going to be the most racist ever.
Yet Fletcher, despite his jeremiad against those who “have said so little about race, racism, and the discourse of right-wing populism in the context of the upcoming elections” himself fails to say even one mumbling word about immigrant rights, the central issue around which the battle against racism is being waged in the United States most intensely right now.
And I suspect he has that blind spot because, even though Fletcher claims his column isn’t about “covering for Obama,” that is precisely what he is doing, whether he is conscious of it or not.
He says he identifies with “the many of us” who have “criticisms … of the Obama administration for what it has not accomplished, for its advance of a corporate agenda and for the unacceptable compromises it has made with the Republicans.”
But he forgets about one layer of people who were generally pro-Obama in 2008, and today are very critical of him. That’s activists in and supporters of the immigrant rights movement. Because we don’t criticize Obama for compromising with the Republicans: we criticize him for being worse than the Republicans.
Under Obama, deportations are at an all-time high, about 400,000 a year surpassing the worst year of the Bush-Cheney regime. By emphasizing that the administration is targeting criminals for deportations, Obama re-enforces the immigrant=criminal meme created by media and government use of terms like “illegal alien.”
Obama has maintained the carte blanche for racial profiling and arbitrary deportations of the 287(g) program that deputizes local police as immigration agents. And he has greatly expanded many, many times over the “Secure Communities” program, begun as a test in a few places under Bush. Under the guise of deporting criminals, “the worst of the worst,” this program deports mainly people convicted of only minor offenses or with no record at all.
Worst of all, he lulled much of the movement into demobilizing and relying on him and the Democrats because he promised during the campaign that he would get immigration reform done in his first year in office.
He made no effort to keep that promise. Although he had large Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress for two years, he didn’t lift a finger to get immigration reform done. But now that the Republicans have control of the lower chamber Obama has put immigration reform back in play and punted it to Congress, in an obvious attempt to shift the blame for his inaction to the Republicans.
I cannot read what was in Bill Fletcher’s mind or heart when he wrote this column about Obama, racism, and the 2012 elections. But whatever the reason he excluded immigration from his column, it was a mistake. Immigration is the cutting-edge issue in the fight against white supremacy within the United States today.
Even the attacks Fletcher mentions are intimately tied in with this struggle. There’s the birther canard, of course, but also the new “ballot integrity” measures in the South, like shortening the period for early voting or requiring picture ID’s. Their effect will be to keep poor and working people –and especially Blacks– from voting, but the justification is to prevent non-citizen immigrants from voting.
It isn’t Obama’s delay (or capitulation) in obtaining and making public his long-form original birth certificate that emboldens the racists. It’s his non-struggle, capitulationist approach on other issues where white supremacy needs to be challenged, and foremost among them right now in the United States is the issue of immigrant rights.
So while Bill Fletcher invites us to reflect on why those who criticize Obama from the Left don’t say more against things like the birther nonsense, I would invite Fletcher to reflect on whether it is possible to wage a real struggle against racism in the United States today without taking the anti-immigrant offensive head-on.
Race and 2012: What Too Few Progressives are Prepared to Discuss
By Bill Fletcher, Jr. BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board
May 18, 2011
In the context of the criticisms that many of us have of the Obama administration for what it has not accomplished, for its advance of a corporate agenda and for the unacceptable compromises it has made with the Republicans, there is something that I have seen few progressives address. To borrow from a comment offered by television commentator Tavis Smiley, the 2012 elections are likely to be the most racist that most of have seen in our life-times. Given this, what are the implications?
It has been striking that many progressives, particularly those who have not only written off
President Obama but also written off all those who offered critical support to the Obama campaign in 2008, have said so little about race, racism, and the discourse of right-wing populism in the context of the upcoming elections.
We have witnessed the first Black president of the United States questioned about his citizenship and birthplace, yet I have seen precious little from many friends on the left side of the aisle (particularly those so critical of Obama) responding to this. If you put your ear to the ground, however, you hear the murmurings of Black Americans furious that Obama was put in a place where he had to file a petition in order to obtain his Hawaii birth certificate. The murmurings do not stop there. When Donald Trump and other opportunists started asking questions about how it was that Obama got into Columbia University and Harvard Law School (i.e., was he REALLY qualified to have gotten into those schools), for most of us enough was enough. Because this was no longer about Obama and it had very little to do with criticisms of Obama and his policies.
The white nationalist backlash is using Obama as the target but they are attempting to create a white united front to, in their minds, take back the United States. Part of this agenda means delegitimizing the democratically elected President, but it also goes towards tampering with election laws and voting processes in state after state.
In case you have not noticed, in many states where there is a Republican majority in control, efforts are underway to restrict voting, whether by further limiting ex-felons from voting, to eliminating same-day voter registration, to the demand for picture identifications at the time of voting, to the shortening of periods of early voting. The objective is to reduce the potential anti-Republican electorate. This is being done by demagogically and inaccurately crowing about alleged voter fraud. But this happens through the Right racializing alleged voter fraud. In other words, as opposed to a discussion about real voter theft, e.g., the Republican theft of the 2000 election, the right-wing uses black and brown characters as the way of convincing segments of the white populace that something needs to be done, otherwise these colored peoples will be taking over.
The racist attacks on Obama, then, fuse with the larger right-wing narrative: the United States of America is being lost to white people. This has been the core of the Birther message, but it has also been the core of the attacks that contributed to the collapse of ACORN, as well as the blitzkrieg effort of the Right to overturn voting rights. In its more extreme version it is the core of the message that comes out of the fascist and semi-fascist movements among white nationalists such as the Sovereign Citizens (the subject of a segment of the May 15th episode of 60 Minutes).
What we are witnessing is disturbingly similar to the period of the overthrow of Reconstruction and the building of the Jim Crow segregationist system in the South. Appealing to fears among whites, and in a frantic effort to destabilize any efforts at unity between the black and white poor in the South at the end of the 19th century, white Southern elites moved an agenda of voter disenfranchisement, hiding behind various coded concerns, such as the literacy of the electorate. African Americans were completely disenfranchised, and quite ironically, so were many poor whites.
Despite our knowledge of history and awareness of the antics of white right-wing populism, few progressives are discussing the implications of any of this for the 2012 elections. The implications, it would seem to me, are quite profound, and range from what does this mean about HOW to criticize the Obama administration, to how to ensure that the elections are not outright stolen by the white Right.
Just to be clear before some of my critics start yelling that “Fletcher is covering for Obama,” this
column is about racial politics in the USA. The particular flashpoint happens to be Obama but what is at stake, as I have attempted to elaborate, is far more than the political future of a corporate liberal president. Silence on the part of progressives in the face of this situation, despite our own legitimate criticisms of Obama, misses the larger picture. Yes, we must criticize Obama; yes, we must push this administration; yes, we must protest any retrograde domestic or foreign policies. But in the end, we need to be discussing how this is done in the context of fighting a white, right-wing populism that is arguing that Obama is an alien and that he [and the changing demographics of the USA] represents the end of the white `American Dream.’ We should have no illusions that the Republican candidate for the Presidency, irrespective of who gets it, will center their campaign on anything but this one, critical message.
I think it is time to talk about strategy and tactics in the fight for power and against the Right, and not only about matters of policy. Politics is dirty, but it is also very complicated, that is, if one exists in the real world rather than in one’s own playpen.
Comments
One response to “White Supremacy and Obama 2012: a response to Bill Fletcher”
Mr. Pinkney is a member of the staff of the Black Commentator. Mr. Larry Pinkney understood and wrote the truth about Obama while most Blacks..and I suspect Mr. Fletcher was included in that number…. were more concerned with the idea of a Black man in the White House.
FROM http://www.theBlackCommentator.com:
This is a man who has enjoyed the fruits of America at the blood and expense of Black Americans and others, but who has paid virtually no dues.
This is a man whose father had also enjoyed the fruits of university schooling in America but subsequently returned to his native Kenya.
This is a man, who also like his father before him, neither served in a branch of the US military nor in any organization in America opposed to US military adventurism.
This is a man who as a deeply corporate military industrial complex US Presidential candidate, has called for “unilateral” US military actions in other nations. [And why not? After-all, his father, himself, or his wife and children were not and will not be the ones killing and being killed.]
This is a man who, in Chicago, pretended to support the human rights of the Palestinian people but who is now known to be a huge supporter of the apartheid Zionists and their powerful and insidious political lobby in America.
This is a man who dares opportunistically to feign admiration for the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., but does not share the collective memory, pain and deep concerns of Black America, other people of color, or even of numerous white Americans for that matter – in the ongoing struggle for equality and justice in this nation.
This is a man who has de facto contempt for the past supreme sacrifices made by thousands of activists from so-called “militant” organizations such the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), the Student National Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Panther Party (BPP), Students For A Democratic Society (SDS), the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM), etc.
This is a man who is silent about the need for reparations for Black American descendants of slaves and the genocide of the indigenous so-called “Indian” peoples on this continent. He is the consummate opportunist who, in reality, cares nothing about the horrors inflicted upon Black, Brown, and Red peoples in this nation, and has repeatedly signaled that he plans to inflict even more “unilateral” military horrors upon various nations and peoples of the world.
This man, Barack Obama, is but a more articulate, younger, and shinier version of the current and infamous US Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, adorning himself dangerously and abundantly in superficiality and double-speak.