Post-racial USA after Obama not happening

By NNPA Columnist Nicole C. Lee

Source: Frost Illustrated

Since the Obama-phenomenon began, some commentators have clamored to declare the U.S. racial problems a thing of the past. Mimicking Francis Fukuyama’s notion of the “end of history,” these pundits claim that now that the U.S. has a black president, the verdict is in: people of color can stop worrying. Racism is finished. The glorious post-racial era has begun.

Huh?

Remember election night? When Obama was declared the projected winner, we cheered and hugged. A few minutes later, we were on the streets celebrating with thousands of other black, white and brown strangers. It was a great moment, a confirmation that change is possible. But unlike a fairy tale, happily ever after in this so-called postracial America is not a foregone conclusion.

As the honeymoon begins to wear off, all too soon because of the financial crisis, experts looking at foreign policy will tell you clearly that post-racial America is still executing policies that are anything but “post-racial.”

The Obama administration has decided not to participate in the World Conference Against Racism. This is a United Nation conference whose purpose is to look at the effects of racism in countries and regions, and to develop progress benchmarks that countries agree to meet. The U.S. attended the conference in 2001 only to pull out before agreeing to the document, disagreeing with language about the Israel- Palestinian conflict as well as language about reparations for slavery. Two weeks ago, the Obama administration sent a team to negotiate terms by which the U.S. would agree to participate but in the end, they determined that the U.S. would not participate in this multilateral event.

The WCAR was not a perfect process; the final document was certainly not perfect. But, this conference is one of the most important processes to globally address the legacy and current realities of racism. Where else can people of Africa and the African Diaspora in places like Europe, the Middle East, all over Latin America and even the U.S. come together to address racism and xenophobia, and have their voices heard?

The Congressional Black Caucus has shown leadership in their dedication to still attend the conference despite the administration’s decision. But, it is extremely detrimental for the first administration led by an African American to not send an official delegation to a conference that needs the leadership that Obama can uniquely provide.

Unfortunately, post-racial America also seems to mean that Haitian immigrants still will be afforded disparate treatment. The government of Haiti has requested Temporary Protected Status, a designation that would suspend deportations to Haiti, because four hurricanes hit last year, but the U.S. has refused to grant the request. Haiti is in the midst of a humanitarian disaster. The storms cost Haiti 15 percent of its total GDP, and Haitian children are eating pies made of mud due to the lack of food.

Even though countries in Central America such as El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua have received TPS in the aftermath of natural disasters, Haiti has never received it. In the first 50 days of Obama’s administration, more than 30,000 Haitians received deportation orders.

Mothers are being deported even though they have husbands and children who are U.S. citizens. Young people without families in Haiti are being deported with no safety net. Some have said the policy towards Haiti is not racially based. But, given this disparate treatment and the legacy of poor treatment of Haitians who come to our shores with legitimate claims, what other conclusion can be found? More HERE

Is this Picture Post Racial?

Possibly?

What seems to be an all white (with one or two Latino or Asian) student body, watching a black man become President, could be considered post-racial. Then again, why is the student body so segregated in 2009.



Students of the Crested Butte Community School, in Crested Butte Colo. sit on the floor in the main hallway of the school and applaud the inaugural address of President Barack Obama while watching the presidential inauguration in Washington, Tuesday, Jan., 20, 2009. (AP Photo/Nathan Bilow)

"Post-Racial" America?

H/T No Bulletin

Pam Spaulding reports on a shocking situation at Algiers Point. Her story is excerpted from an A.C. Thompson article in "The Nation." Is this true, or a spoof? You be the judge:

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply "didn't belong."

...Fellow militia member Wayne Janak, 60, a carpenter and contractor, is more forthcoming with me. "Three people got shot in just one day!" he tells me, laughing. We're sitting in his home, a boxy beige-and-pink structure on a corner about five blocks from Daigle's Grocery. "Three of them got hit right here in this intersection with a riot gun," he says, motioning toward the streets outside his home. Janak tells me he assumed the shooting victims, who were African-American, were looters because they were carrying sneakers and baseball caps with them. He guessed that the property had been stolen from a nearby shopping mall. According to Janak, a neighbor "unloaded a riot gun"--a shotgun--"on them. We chased them down." More HERE

The “Post-Racial” Thing

Black Informat.com says: Yesterday I did a quick post asking what exactly does “Post-Racial” really mean as it applies to America. This is a term that has been kicked around since Obama won and to me sounds very vague.

Today, I happened to come across a Youtube video featuring Tavis Smilely who briefly dealt with this issue.

“…Obama’s election is not the fulfillment of Dr. King’s dream. It is another down payment on the dream.”

Then he goes on to quote Cornell West: “America, with Obama’s election is now less racist.”

I don’t like the the guilt game he is playing here because it never ends. In other words, in the age where every fart, sneeze and hiccup from White folks can be construed as form of racism, WHO exactly has the ability to declare that all debts have been paid in full? Jesse? Al? NAACP? CBC? More HERE

Post-racial era? Go tell victims of police shootings

By DeWayne Wickham of USA Today

That Oscar Grant didn't live long enough to see Barack Obama sworn in as this nation's first black president is proof that the post-racial era that Obama's election was supposed to usher in has not arrived.

(Grant: Killed on New Year’s Day / AP)

Grant, a 22-year-old black man, was killed on New Year's Day. He was shot in the back as he lay face down on a subway platform in Oakland. His killer was a white transit cop — one of several officers who detained Grant and several other young men for questioning in connection with a fight that occurred on a train.

The shooting was captured on cellphone video cameras by several onlookers. One of them shows officers forcing Grant to the ground before a cop stands up, pulls his gun and fires a single shot into the young man's back. Shortly before he was supposed to be interviewed by investigators, Johannes Mehserle, 27 — the cop who shot Grant — resigned.

Same story, different decade

Later that day, a demonstration in Oakland over the fatal shooting turned violent. Store windows were smashed, police cars were vandalized and some vehicles were set on fire. More than 100 demonstrators were arrested. But so far, no charges have been brought against Mehserle — and that's not surprising.

The wheels of justice have always turned slowly — if at all — in cases in which cops have used deadly force against unarmed blacks. Nothing symbolizes America's long-running era of racial conflict more than these kinds of killings, and the failure of the criminal justice system to do something about them.

In 1966, a Los Angeles cop shot to death Leonard Deadwyler, a black man who was rushing his pregnant wife to the hospital. The officer, who stopped Deadwyler for speeding, leaned inside the car window with his gun drawn and shot him. A coroner's jury ruled the killing accidental.

In 1979, white off-duty policeman Larry Shockley shot 22-year-old Randy Heath in the back of the neck outside a Miami warehouse. The officer first said he caught Heath attempting to burglarize the building and shot the unarmed man after a short struggle. He later admitted there was no struggle and claimed his gun discharged accidentally. Heath's sister said her brother had stopped at the building to urinate. A grand jury refused to indict Shockley.

Seeds of discontent

And then there were the cases of Amadou Diallo and Sean Bell, two unarmed black men who were killed in New York City in separate police shootings. Diallo, an African immigrant, was struck by 19 bullets fired by four white cops in 1999 while standing in the vestibule of his apartment building. The officers said they mistook a wallet in his hand for a gun. A jury acquitted them. More HERE

DeWayne Wickham writes on Tuesdays for USA TODAY.

Post-Racial Inauguration Scam

America's First Post-Racial Inauguration Scam according to AOL News and linked by African American Political Pundit.

By Dylan and Ethan Ris

History will be made this coming Tuesday when, for the first time in our nation's history, con artists will invoke an African-American president as they scam unwitting patriots.

In the past when crooks exploited Inauguration Day, they did so by forging affiliations with a white president-elect. But that's all changed, thanks to post-racial slimeballs like Emmet Cash III, who has raked in untold thousands by pretending to represent Barack Obama.

The aptly named Cash is the founder of Californians for Obama, a phony political charity that solicited donations for the Illinois senator's presidential campaign... with the minor caveat that Cash had no intention of actually forwarding this money to Obama.

For this, the Obama campaign rewarded Cash with a cease-and-desist notice, so Cash changed his organization's name to Californians for Change, as it remains to this day.

Which leads us to his latest scam...

The founder of Californians for Obama - an unauthorized Los Angeles-area group that used Sen. Obama's name to raise thousands of dollars from donors during last year's presidential campaign - has told one five-star Washington hotel [the Ritz-Carlton] he's organizing a "California High Tea" with Rep. Diane Watson, D-Los Angeles, ambassadors and political luminaries for inauguration week.

Problem: Watson's chief of staff, Richard Butcher, said the congresswoman knows nothing about the planned event - and most certainly didn't authorize the use of her name by the self-described political organizer, Emmett Cash III, who had also previously used her name without permission to raise money from Democratic donors.

The last time Cash claimed he'd be selling photo ops with Rep. Watson, he also bizarrely claimed that singer Eartha Kitt would be on hand as well. In fairness to Cash, Eartha was still alive at that point, but she bewilderedly denied any knowledge of the event.

More HERE

From DuBois to post-racial Obama

By Prof. Ali A. Mazrui

DuBois died at about the time Obama was born in the early 1960s. But this was not a case of the torch being passed to a younger generation of African-Americans or a case of reincarnation. The two historic figures turned out to symbolise entirely different paradigms of inter-group relations in American history.

DuBois and Obama were both products of inter-racial marriages. They both carried names that betrayed their bi-cultural descent. Barack Obama’s name betrayed his Luo ancestry from his Kenyan father. William Edward Burghardt DuBois’ name echoed his French legacy. Both leaders suffered from identity crises in their early years.

DuBois was much fairer in skin-color than Obama. However, overtime, DuBois came to associate himself with Black identity more passionately that did Obama. Indeed, DuBois finally saw himself as an African first and ultimately naturalised as a citizen of Ghana.

Conversely, Obama saw himself as less of an African, despite his Kenyan fatherhood. In terms of preferred policy, W.E.B. DuBois was a Black Atlanticist. He dreamt of unification of Global Africa as a new racial Commonwealth in the world system. In contrast, Obama sees himself as fundamentally American, forever a citizen of the United States.

DuBois became the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1895. His pre-doctoral degree was from Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1990 Obama became the first African-American to be elected President of the Harvard Law Review. His pre-law degree was from Columbia University in New York.

In his younger years, DuBois was often regarded as ‘not-Negro-enough’ partly because he was fair-skinned, and partly because of his upper class demeanor. In his early political career, Obama was similarly demeaned as ‘not-Black-enough’ more because he was brought up in a white family than because his mother was white. In later years, Obama’s brilliant academic performance at Harvard earned him the stigma of ‘elitist.’

DuBois’s vision for African-Americans had two contemporary rivals. Booker T. Washington preferred African-Americans to temporarily forego political power, civil liberties and higher education in the liberal arts and the liberal professions. His ‘Tuskegee Machine’ put an accent on ‘industrial education’ for Black youth instead, at least for a while. Washington’s influence peaked from 1895 to 1910.

In contrast, DuBois’s vision of education for the Black youth focused on cultivating what he called the ‘talented tenth’ in preparation for Black entry into ‘modern civilisation.’ The major rival vision in DuBois’s era was that championed by Marcus Garvey. Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant, mobilised a large following of African-Americans in the 1920s to pursue private enterprise, and aspired to emigrate to Africa en masse. DuBois and Garvey disliked each other; they debated abusively and even exchanged racial epithets.

In different ways, both DuBois and Marcus Garvey were Black Atlanticists. While DuBois aspired to send to Africa some members of his ‘talented tenth’ of the Black Diaspora to help uplift Africa, Garvey believed in a kind of Black Zionism. To Garveyism, returning to Africa was an entitlement of all African descendants in the Diaspora. But since most of Africa was still colonised during Garvey’s time, his dream was even more remote than DuBois’ sending of the ‘talented tenth.’

Barack Obama’s dream of a post-racial America also has had rival paradigms among African-Americans. As disciples of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young believed in the integration of African-Americans into mainstream US culture. Yet, they retained and defended Black race-consciousness. They promoted a multi-racial America; Obama championed a non-racial America.

Another Black school of thought in Obama’s life was manifested by his Pastor of 28 years, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Wright’s ideal America was far from non-racial like Obama’s dream. Nor was Wright’s preferred America multi-racial like that of Andrew Young and Jesse Jackson. Ultimately, Jeremiah Wright was racially a separatist, although his own church preached multi-racialism and racial integration. But a more fundamental shift that took place from the world of DuBois and the era of Obama was a tilt from colour prejudice to cultural prejudice.

Prof. Mazrui teaches political science and African studies at State University New York
amazrui@binghamton.edu

Roland Martin on Post-Racial

Roland Martin

Source: Essence

Post-racial America? Three police shootings of black suspects shatters that.

It has been interesting to watch so many people talk about how America has moved from a nation fixated on race to one where we are now living in a post-racial world, courtesy of the election of President-elect Barack Obama.

There is no doubt that we crossed a huge hurdle with the election of Obama to the highest office in the land. But that doesn’t mean that the realities of race are not being played out in our communities each day. In Oakland, a semi-riot took place last night after the funeral of Oscar Juliuss Grant III, who was gunned down during a scuffle with Bay Area Rapid Transit officers. Click here to read the Oakland Tribune story on the semi-riot. More HERE