To Be Black and Head of the U.S. Empire: A Contradiction in Terms

Published in Issue 323 of The Black Commentator on May 7, 2009
Republished in russelmeansfreedom.com on May 13, 2009
Republished in republicoflakotah.com on May 13, 2009
Posted on care2.com on May 15, 2009

By Larry Pinkney

The inescapable but deliberately ignored irony about Barack Obama being installed as this nation’s first so-called black president is that being Black in ‘America’ has in reality always meant so much more than mere color pigmentation.

To be the head of the most aggressive, violent, and hypocritical empire on this planet is not to be Black. It is to be opportunistically and cynically hypocritical while serving the interests of continued U.S. Empire. Those who choose to wrap themselves in the security blanket of the supposed wonderfulness of Obama’s so-called Blackness while ignoring the ongoing horrors that this person supports, are deeply complicitous in perpetrating the misery that this empire is heaping upon Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow peoples both inside and outside of its physical borders.

In April of 2007, this writer unapologetically wrote that: “Beyond mere color, being Black is first and foremost a conscious political, social, and economic commitment to the struggle for the collective betterment of the descendants of the Black slavery holocaust in what has now become the United States of America, in conjunction with other people of color and humanity as a whole.” (Reference The Black Commentator, April 19, 2007, issue 226, article entitled, To Be Black In America: An Unflinching Necessity.) In that same aforementioned article, your writer further wrote: “Blackness is, in fact, not only a rainbow of color but also a rainbow of active consciousness and commitment.”

Negrodian misleaders and their so-called “progressive” and “liberal” white counterparts have put forth and pontificated virtually every imaginable sorry excuse as to why Barack Obama and his current regime of the U.S. Empire should be supported. It is truly pathetic for all conscious people of conscience of all colors to witness.

As the bloody U.S. wars of aggression rage on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as the war drums of U.S. Empire intensify and deepen into Pakistan under the Obama regime; the peace movement in the United States has been castrated (i.e. made null and void), roaring overwhelmingly with a deafening silence.

As the bankers, the insurance companies, and the other gluttonous barons of Wall Street gorge themselves with trillions of dollars of the people’s money; as more and more people lose their jobs; and as every conceivable action is engaged in to crush the labor movement and the economic and political rights of working people in this nation; the Barack Obama regime, like clever rhetorical sorcerers of the system, keep pouring and passing around the poisonous Kool-Aid of rhetoric for the masses to gulp and ultimately die upon.

Be we Black, Brown, White, Red, or Yellow there is absolutely no legitimate excuse for wrapping ourselves in the hypocrisy of U.S. Empire. We all know, or certainly should know, that the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan are wrong and unacceptable.

Had George W. Bush boycotted and attempted to sabotage the recent United Nations Conference on Racism (in Durban) as did the Barack Obama administration, there would have been enormous outcry from the so-called Black and White left in the U.S. Had George W. Bush continued and even expanded upon the so-called “extraordinary rendition” program (i.e. the illegal kidnapping of persons in other nations by the U.S. Government) as has Barack Obama, there would have been unquenchable outrage! Why the virtual silence and hypocrisy now? It’s time to stop being hypocrites and apologists for yet another administration of U.S. Empire and hegemony.

To be Black has increasingly become clearly less and less about mere color and increasingly about the commitment to political, economic, and social justice.

Onward…