[img]583|left|||no_popup[/img]Many critics are pointing their finger at President Obama for failing to address various issues in the Black community. But that is not his job.
The Black community is going to have to stop sitting around waiting for a messiah to solve our problems. It’s the Black community’s responsibility to address Black issues.
We are the second largest consumer group in America. We don’t need anybody to help us turn our community around.
Of course we should fight to get our piece of America’s pie.
First, though, we must change our way of thinking. The primary problem is we have allowed self-serving poverty pimps to convince us we need them to come to our rescue and twist political arms.
We don’t need one voice speaking for millions; we need millions speaking with one voice. Their motive is obvious. Spokesman for the Black community is one of the best paying gigs in town. But only children wait for their daddies to get home.
Is it Obama’s fault that instead of becoming involved in our children’s education we’d rather let them be corrupted by the values of hip hop videos? Knowledge is free. There’s just as much knowledge in the corner library as there is at Harvard University, even more on the internet. How is our aversion to knowledge anyone else’s fault?
We Don’t Vote
It is not Obama’s fault we refuse to vote. We can’t get attention from politicians because they can depend on one thing, voters. Instead, the majority of us would rather sit home and admire Kobe’s jump shot. That is why we have potholes in the ‘hood. Why should politicians waste effort on us when they can spend resources across town on people who vote?
It is not Obama’s fault that we let jackleg preachers come in every Sunday and take badly needed revenue out of the community and into the suburbs, while during the week their “houses of God” are vacant. Society can’t make them open up those churches during the week and hire unemployed mothers to provide affordable childcare for working mothers. Neither society nor Obama can make them do that.
Look West, Young Man
Now, with regard to Prof. Cornel West. I’ve lost respect for that man ever since it became obvious he is sitting on Tavis Smiley’s knee. They didn’t even wait for Obama to be sworn into office before they started criticizing him. Tavis’s criticism was ego-driven. West, with all of his alleged intellect, chose to settle into his role of Tavis’s trusty sidekick.
Smiley and West took their show on the road right after Obama refused to appear on Tavis’s corporate-sponsored dog-and-pony show to kiss Tavis’s ring.
Tavis seemed to have been suffering from the delusion that he was a self-appointed representative of the Black people, and that Obama had an obligation to go through him to gain access to the Black community. Like a lapdog, Cornel fell right in line, faithfully caressing Tavis’s delusion of grandeur.
That’s when I began to recognize that Cornel’s intellectual competence couldn’t be commensurate with the hype in the corporate media.
The fact that I initially bought into that hype taught me an important lesson, to keep my ego in check. Obviously I didn’t corner the market on wisdom. I’d bought into the hype. Like the rest of the Black community, I allowed others to do that for me.
Take a look at the two gentlemen. Tavis has been going all over the country talking about accountability, making snide allusions that President Obama was lacking in that area. Cornel West was doing the same, but he liked to talk about corporate plutocracies and oligarchies. Even as Smiley was holding court in his “State of the Black Union” dog-and-pony show, the logos of some of the worst abusers of Black people —abusers of all poor and middle class people — were emblazoned on a wall in the background.
Tavis was active in trying to get the people of Inglewood to let Walmart come into the community, right along, I might add, with their anti-union, anti-medical benefits and promotion of foreign products business philosophy.
Walmart would have put many small and minority entrepreneurs out of business.
Ignore the Shallow Externals
Where’s the accountability in that? Why didn’t “Brother” West discuss this issue with his buddy? He’s an intellectual, so certainly he saw the long-term impact on the community of what Tavis was advocating. West’s personal interest was in conflict with the interest of the community, and the community lost.
Just because someone wears a natural, and is running around saying, “Brother this and Brother that” doesn’t mean his interest coincides with the community’s.
The same is true of people who are embraced by the same media that is dragging the community through the mud or who go around saying “folk” instead of “folks”— for effect.
Many like this tend to be more self-serving than servants of the community. These are the last people we should listen to because they tell us what we want to hear.
Obama’s shortcomings have nothing to do with any failings on his part in the Black community. He is failing to aggressively confront the most insidious enemy of the American people since the Civil War, the modern GOP leadership.
His tendency to think that “compromise” is the solution to every problem is allowing the GOP to drag America back into a corpo/fascist-inspired dark age. While his speech on the budget indicated he was beginning to recognize that, it was short on details, which is where the devil resides.
It is important we remain focused, not distracted by politicians or poverty pimps. Race was the last war. The current war is about class. The GOP is coming after us all this time, and they’re not taking prisoners. That’s what we should focus on.
While Cornel West often speaks to this issue, remember he has an agenda. His close association with Tavis Smiley gives him the credibility of a man ranting about fascism after lunch with Mussolini.
Eric L. Wattree is a writer, poet and musician, born in Los Angeles. A columnist for the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Black Star News, a staff writer for Veterans Today, he is a contributing writer to Your Black World, the Huffington Post, ePluribus Media and other online sites and publications. He also is the author of “A Message From the Hood.”
Mr. Wattree may be contacted at wattree.blogspot.com or Ewattree@Gmail.com
Religious bigotry: It’s not that I hate everyone who doesn’t look, think, and act like me – it’s just that God does.
