Deep-in-the-Valley, Wade-in-the-Water Side-Eye for President Obama
— President Barack Obama
Honestly, a lot of us black folks are prone to giving our first black president a pass because of the racist opposition he faced from the moment his announced his run for the office.
Even when he makes simplistic, pat, ultimately anti-black statements, our first instinct is to defend him by any means necessary.
One of those ways is that we rationalize Obama’s anti-black sentiments and behavior by telling ourselves he’s under duress that he doesn’t really feel this way; that he’s being forced to say these things by (white) people who will harm him and his family if he doesn’t.
We ignore that Obama’s centrist, conservative-leaning, conciliatory respectability politics started long before he was president, long before he was a senator, long before he was a politician, long before he was a community organizer, back to at least while he was being educated in the finest schools in the country.
Even if it were true that Obama is making these statement under threat of death, which I don’t believe, he has told countless crowds of black people that racism is never an excuse, even when our own lives are in danger. So I’m not allowing it to be an excuse for him either.
Regarding what is essentially his “#NotAllCops” statements, the president should have a discussion with historian Professor Gerald Horne on the matter.
And, as I’ve said previously:
When we, as a society, talk about “police reform,” that we believe that reform is possible indicates how deeply we are speaking from a profound deficit of historical knowledge and spectacular disconnection from material reality.
Conversations about police reform have to begin at the beginning. That is to say, we must start understanding that the baseline genetic character of American policing is oppression. And this is by design.
American police forces–and anyone who knows their history knows this–emerge out of the antebellum slavery plantation system. Modern-day policing is indistinguishable from the plantation overseer, slave catcher, and lynch mob apparatuses of yesteryear.
It involves using the same lower-class populations to protect the same upper-class populations from the same “undesirable” classes of people. It employs the same methods of brutality, intimidation, murder, propaganda, and terrorism that characterized the antebellum, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow eras of the United States’ perpetual infancy.
The dreadful reality of the situation, the truth that politicians and citizens alike have avoided with all of their might, is that there is a greater chance of pulling the sun out of the sky with our bare hands than there is of changing the intrinsically deceitful and wicked nature of American policing.
Discussions about “one bad apple,” “not all cops,” and “what about the good cops” are small-minded distractions meant to intentionally expand social inertia and halt social justice.
The questions we should actually be asking of ourselves–and demanding of our representatives–are: How can we abolish American police forces and what more fundamentally humane mechanisms of public safety can we replace them with?
(H/T Rima Regas)
