The Left’s meltdown is delightfully entertaining.
……Last month, in an interview with Chris Hedges on Truthdig.com, Princeton professor Cornel West gave a scathing assessment of Obama’s presidential performance so far. West let it rip with a kind of racially tinged dissatisfaction with Obama that’s been brewing for months. Specifically, he called the black president out for what he sees as his complicity with the agenda of white, moneyed elites. He called Obama a “black mascot” for Wall Street, and at one point accused him of not acting like a “free black man.”
The outburst prompted a swift and contemptuous rebuttal from West’s fellow Princeton scholar and Nation columnist Melissa Harris-Perry, who described West’s complaints as chiefly personal, not political, sparked by such things as Obama not returning the prof’s phone calls promptly or giving him choice tickets to the inauguration. She went further, characterizing West’s attack as “a self-aggrandizing, victimology sermon deceptively wrapped in the discourse of prophetic witness,” and questioned whether his life of privilege (like her own) as a professor at an Ivy League university was any more authentic than Obama’s.
……But the real divide is not between West and Obama or West and Harris-Perry, it’s between two age-old, unresolved strategies black leaders have adopted throughout history to ensure black survival in America: nationalism and assimilation. Assimilation holds that blacks must claim their place in the mainstream to be successful; nationalism maintains that black success starts — and perhaps ends — with building and sustaining group unity. Fueling the latest image anxiety is a taboo question that animated the comments of an increasingly irate West: What good is Obama to us? By ‘us’ I mean black masses who are a crucial and historical part of the American working class and poor for whom West has always advocated.
When it comes to debating the culture war, nothing says hypocrisy better than a rich black professor bitching over the hypocrisy of a rich black president. The “white moneyed elites” on Wall Street are comprised of public companies, Mom and Pop investors, wealthy investors, shareholders and traders; a wide variety of people who want to see their money earn capital.
As for Obama’s “authenticity”, his law career qualifications are shaky at best. And his success in obtaining the White House is thanks to a leftwing media cabal, ACORN and SEIU voter fraud, and a plethora of Jewish, white, female, and black liberal voters who were in love with his smile, his pecs, his skin color, and his socialist smooth talk. Those who chose pigment over substance got a rude awakening.
‘Nationalism’ as in what, their African roots? If that’s the case, then they’d better remember that the majority of them and their parents were born here. Anti-discrimination and civil rights laws date back to 1866. Major strides in the enforcement of civil rights have been made in the last 40 years. It’s 2011. Assimilation should have already occurred.
In the 1970’s, “group unity” took the shape of exploiting and glamorizing black ghetto life. The “Blacksploitation” films were chock full of it.
The victimology crap doesn’t cut it anymore. Most people are sick to death of the “troof ta powa” and the racist “whitey is evil” shit.
If it makes West and Harris-Perry feel any better, there are a hell of a lot more working class and poor whites than rich ones.
Related post:
http://sfcmac.wordpress.com/2011/06/18/leftwing-internutters-obama-not-our-boyfriend-anymore/