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Obama Needs a Black Agenda
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Candidate
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| Contributor | Scott³ |
| Last Edited | Scott³ Dec 11, 2008 10:15pm |
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| Category | Opinion |
| Media | Analysis Magazine - In These Times |
| News Date | Friday, December 12, 2008 04:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | In These Times.
"The first black president of the U.S. cannot credibly govern without a national black agenda. But don’t depend on him to front it.
For the last 22 months, Sen. Barack Obama had one priority: getting elected.
Black progressives have a different, urgent mission: to put meat on the bones of a black economic and social compact.
It’s payback time.
Obama surged into the White House because he is one of the New Blacks — coalition-minded progressives who eschew tradition and piecemeal, narrow agendas. The New Blacks don’t take their cues from the Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons and Tavis Smileys.
Obama knows that if black people allow parochial and self-interested operators to nibble away at his ankles, black America will be the biggest loser.
But the conversation is long overdue.
Obama’s dodge around race was exquisitely choreographed. Practically the only black concerns he has addressed are his weak nod to affirmative action and his stump-speech admonishments to wayward black fathers and that trifling “Cousin Pookie” — a name he often referenced in his speeches to black audiences. In a March 2007 sermon at Brown Chapel in Selma, Ala., Obama declared: “If Cousin Pookie would vote, if Uncle Jethro would get off the couch and stop watching ‘SportsCenter’ and go register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.”
Since his landmark speech in 2004 in Boston, Obama dismissed the red-state, blue-state paradigm and argued that “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and a white America and a Latino America — there’s the United States of America.” It was lame, but it worked.
Still, that notion is an aspiration, not an accomplishment. Come Jan. 20, Inauguration Day, pressure groups will be tearing up the playing field to score points with the man. Black folks will be no different." |
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