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Glen Ford Interview Big Think (video) /
Glen Ford:
Breaking the Obama Spell (video)
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Obama No—He's a vacuous
opportunist. I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since
the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for
the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a
vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white
liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political
center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new
directions, is neoliberal. His political repertoire has always included
the repugnant stratagem of using connection with black audiences in
exactly the same way Bill Clinton did—i.e., getting props both for
emoting with the black crowd and talking through them to affirm a
victim-blaming “tough love” message that focuses on alleged behavioral
pathologies in poor black communities. Because he’s able to claim racial
insider standing, he actually goes beyond Clinton and rehearses the
scurrilous and ridiculous sort of narrative Bill Cosby has made
infamous.—Adolph
Reed Jr. 2008
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Obama and the Criminal Justice System
Barack
Obama delivered another
masterful speech Sunday. The news report I saw made it seem like he
merely did an impersonation of Bill Cosby, but he was more subtle and
sophisticated than that. Nonetheless, it was a speech that Cosby would
be proud of since it did endorse Cosby’s arguments.
Obama said that yes black communities needed more jobs and better
schools and that past injustices did play a role in the absence of
fathers in black homes, but that black people could not use those things
as excuses. He said that black men should not be languishing in prison
when they should be out looking for a job.
There are too many issues here that should be unpacked and discussed for
me to deal with all of them at this point, but I’ll tackle a few.
The injustices are not only in the past. Our current criminal justice
system is biased by race and class as I illustrated last week in
“Whites, Blacks and
Illicit Drugs”. If we had different criminal justice policies
there would be fewer black men in prison. We need to work to eliminate
the race and class biases in the criminal justice system. We need to
expand opportunities for drug treatment. We need to use alternative,
community-based sentencing for certain non-violent offenders. If we had
elected officials who were committed to reforms of this sort, there
would be more black men available to be the fathers that Obama and Cosby
would like to see.
This is a very real issue for black women in the poorest black
communities. Even the conservative (by my standards) scholar Isabel
Sawhill admits that “for certain subgroups of African-American women”
she “did find a shortage of eligible men” for them to marry.
We simply can’t improve the rate of two-parent families in the poorest
black communities without dealing with the present racial injustices in
our criminal justice system.
Obama argues that blacks should not use issues like the lack of jobs,
the high rate of poverty, the high degree of economic inequality as
excuses for the absence of men in black families. But there is a growing
body of research that identifies the lack of jobs, poverty and economic
inequality as important causes of the higher rates of crime in black
communities.2
If we want to keep black men out of prison, we will also need economic
policies to address these issues.
The economic development of poor black communities is also important
because black men who are unemployed are probably less likely to marry.
Poor black women are probably not interested in marrying unemployed
black men. Unemployed black men are probably reluctant to marry if they
cannot contribute financially to the household.
The more education one has the more likely one is to marry.
The issue of the separate and unequal education that black students
receive is, again, not simply an excuse. If we improve the educational
attainment of blacks, we will likely increase marriage rates.
If Obama wishes to increase the marriage rates in black communities, he
needs to (1) recognize the racial disparities in our criminal justice
system as one of the current injustices facing black America, (2)
institute policies that lead to good jobs for blacks, and (3) improve
the quality of black schools. Is Obama able to recognize the importance
of these policies? Will Obama be willing and able to deliver them, if he
does?—Thora
Institute
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