![]() After the collapse of the Black Panthers and black power in the ‘70s, assimilation became the black success strategy by default. This strange new fact feels like matter colliding with anti-matter, something that was never supposed to happen black people, to say nothing of the media, don’t quite know how to make sense of it.īut at least West and Harris-Perry are forcing into public consciousness a complex racial reality. Broadly speaking, he is both the oppressor and the oppressed. But the combination of these two truths is hard to grasp: Obama is both the man in charge and the black politician stymied by the system he oversees. Perry is correct about the depth of resistance to Obama himself. West is correct about Obama’s lack of urgency about black issues. ![]() Her defense of Obama also includes a view many blacks share - that the president, while hardly perfect, has been hampered by organized right-wing movements whose reflexive opposition to him is partly rooted in racism. Though she blasted West for his diatribe last month, Harris-Perry doesn’t actually disagree with his view of the social landscape. 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. 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. 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.īlack folks on the blogosphere and elsewhere who were alarmed by the airing of dirty laundry between two of the best-known black scholars in the country weighed in, generally on one side or the other.īut 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. 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. He called Obama a “black mascot” for Wall Street, and at one point accused him of not acting like a “free black man.” Specifically, he called the black president out for what he sees as his complicity with the agenda of white, moneyed elites. ![]() West let it rip with a kind of racially tinged dissatisfaction with Obama that’s been brewing for months. Last month, in an interview with Chris Hedges on, Princeton professor Cornel West gave a scathing assessment of Obama’s presidential performance so far. But thanks to the unprecedented profile of Barack Obama, the most famous black person in modern history, this one got hot. It was the kind of insular, issue-driven, black-on-black debate that ordinarily doesn’t attract the media spotlight, even on the slowest news day. ![]()
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