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Books by
Barack
Obama
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
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The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the
American Dream
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The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream
By Barack Obama
Book Review by Kam
Williams
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“There’s a school of
thought that sees the Founding Fathers only
as hypocrites and the Constitution only as a
betrayal of the grand ideals set forth by
the Declaration of Independence; that agrees
with early abolitionists that the Great
Compromise between North and South was a
pact with the Devil…
How can I, an American
with the blood of Africa coursing through
his veins, choose sides in such a dispute? I
can’t I love America too much, am too
invested in what this country has become,
too committed to its institutions, its
beauty, and even its ugliness, to focus on
the circumstances of its birth.”
Excerpted from Chapter 3, The
Constitution |
After
Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. delivered the keynote
speech at the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los
Angeles, he was heralded as the future of the party, a
rising black star who might one day ascend to the
presidency. But Ford’s political career appears to have
flamed out prematurely with his recent unsuccessful run
for the Senate in his home State of Tennessee.
Already poised to assume the mantle of the promising
black Messiah is Barack Obama, another up-and-comer who,
like Ford and Barbara Jordan before him, was catapulted
into the limelight courtesy of a charismatic keynote
speech at the convention. And since Obama has hinted
that he might throw his hat into the ring in 2008, some
might want to get a sense of what makes the Junior
Senator from Illinois tick.
You
can find his middle-of-the-road philosophy quite
eloquently explained in The Audacity of Hope:
Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, an
optimistic assessment of the state of the union.
Clintonesque in tone, starting with its title, the book
is evocative of the ex-President’s “I still believe in a
little place called Hope” slogan from both of his
successful presidential campaigns.
This
tame tome, ostensibly carefully crafted with the intent
of being all things to all people, unfortunately ends up
reading like little more than the transparent game plan
of guileful politician. He’s clearly courting both
Republicans and Democrats, here, by praising President
Reagan as much as he does FDR.
When
discussing racism, he comes off as no liberal, but more
in the “content of your character” camp as advocated by
African-American neo-cons like Shelby Steele and John
McWhorter. In this regard, he has no problem putting the
onus on blacks to accommodate themselves to the
mainstream culture, because “members of every minority
group continue to be measured largely by the degree of
our assimilation.”
Obama
goes on to conclude that “the single biggest thing” we
could do to reduce inner-city poverty “is to encourage
teenage girls to finish high school and avoid having
children out of wedlock.” If these sort of simplistic
“blaming the victim” pronouncements are truly Barack’s
best ideas on how to reclaim the American Dream, I
suggest he keep dreaming.
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Other Responses
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Barack Obama articles on
Black Agenda
Report:
Since his days in the Illinois state legislature Barack
Obama's position on health care has consistently
devolved. Once a bold champion of medical care as a
human right, Senator and presidential candidate Obama
has become a timid advocate of failed "market-based"
health care solutions . . .
Hypocrisy on Health Care
by Bruce Dixon
White fears that
Obama will reawaken the tragically unfinished
revolutions of Reconstruction and Civil
Rights are further soothed by his claim that
most black Americans have been "pulled into
the economic mainstream" (pp. 248-49). Never
mind that blacks are afflicted with a
shocking racial wealth gap that keeps their
average |
net worth at one eleventh (!) that
of whites and an income structure starkly and
persistently tilted towards poverty.
Obama's Audacious Deference to Power by
Paul Street /
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Excerpts from Prologue
It’s been almost ten years since I first ran for
political office. I was thirty-five at the time, four
years out of law school, recently married, and generally
impatient with life. A seat in the Illinois legislature
had opened up, and several friends suggested that I run,
thinking that my work as a civil rights lawyer, and
contacts from my days as a community organizer, would
make me a viable candidate. After discussing it with my
wife, I entered the race and proceeded to do what every
first-time candidate does: I talked to anyone who would
listen. I went to block club meetings and church
socials, beauty shops and barbershops. If two guys were
standing on a corner, I would cross the street to hand
them campaign literature. And everywhere I went, I’d get
some version of the same two questions.
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I suspect that some readers may find my presentation of
these issues to be insufficiently balanced. To this
accusation, I stand guilty as charged. I am a Democrat,
after all; my views on most topics correspond more
closely to the editorial pages of the New York Times
than those of the Wall Street Journal. I am angry about
policies that consistently favor the wealthy and
powerful over average Americans, and insist that
government has an important role in opening up
opportunity to all. I believe in evolution, scientific
inquiry, and global warming; I believe in free speech,
whether politically correct or politically incorrect,
and I am suspicious of using government to impose
anybody’s religious beliefs–including my own–on
nonbelievers. Furthermore, I am a prisoner of my own
biography: I can’t help but view the American experience
through the lens of a black man of mixed heritage,
forever mindful of how generations of people who looked
like me were subjugated and stigmatized, and the subtle
and not so subtle ways that race and class continue to
shape our lives.
But that is not all that I am. I also think my party can
be smug, detached, and dogmatic at times. I believe in
the free market, competition, and entrepreneurship, and
think no small number of government programs don’t work
as advertised. I wish the country had fewer lawyers and
more engineers. I think America has more often been a
force for good than for ill in the world; I carry few
illusions about our enemies, and revere the courage and
competence of our military. I reject a politics that is
based solely on racial identity, gender identity, sexual
orientation, or victimhood generally. I think much of
what ails the inner city involves a breakdown in culture
that will not be cured by money alone, and that our
values and spiritual life matter at least as much as our
GDP.
Source:
Random House
posted 2 February 2007* * *
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John
Coltrane, "Alabama" /
Kalamu ya Salaam, "Alabama"
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A Love Supreme
A Blues for the Birmingham Four
/ Eulogy for the Young Victims
/ Six Dead After Church
Bombing
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The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World
By Daniel Yergin
Renowned energy authority Daniel Yergin continues the riveting story begun in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Prize, in this gripping account of the quest for the energy the world needs—and the power and riches that come with it. A master story teller as well as one of the world's great experts, Yergin proves that energy is truly the engine of global political and economic change, as well as central to the battle over climate change. From the jammed streets of Beijing, the shores of the Caspian Sea, and the conflicts in the Mideast, to Capitol Hill and Silicon Valley, Yergin takes us inside the decisions and choices that are shaping our future. Without understanding the realities of energy examined in The Quest, we may surrender our place at the helm of history. One of our great narrative writers, Yergin tells the inside stories—of the oil market, the rise of the "petrostate," the race to control the resources of the former Soviet empire, and the massive corporate mergers that transformed the oil landscape. He shows how the drama of oil—the struggle for access to it, the battle for control, the insecurity of supply, the consequences of its use, its impact on the global economy, and the geopolitics that dominate it—will continue to shape our world. He takes on the toughest questions—will we run out of oil, and are China and the United States destined to conflict over oil? Yergin also reveals the surprising and turbulent history of nuclear, coal, electricity, and natural gas. He investigates the "rebirth of renewables" —biofuels and wind, as well as solar energy, which venture capitalists are betting will be "the next big thing" for meeting the needs of a growing world economy. He makes clear why understanding this greening landscape and its future role are crucial. |
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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