Above photo: From Daily Read List.
(Maybe Because Helping Blacks Has Never Made His To-Do List?)
It’s a sin of omission. He doesn’t DO anything so we think he’s not allowed to…or he’s too busy…or he’s doing things behind the scenes. This has been going on for [7] years. Is he the president or not? What could possibly be more important than poisoning kids? He couldn’t give a DAMN about black people. – SusanSunflower, Salon.com commenter
In a textbook case of both total tone deafness and a classic example of adding insult to injury, the Flint, Michigan Department of Water is sending past due water bills to the thousands of city residents it has been poisoning for over a year.
Of course, this zeal to recoup overdue monies “for services rendered” comes in the midst of Flint’s man-made water crisis. That is, as the world is finally aware, the poisoning of Flint’s water supply – whether inadvertent or not – was planned and perpetrated at the behest and approval of “conservative” Republican governor Rick Snyder. Snyder, employed Michigan’s corporate backed, neoliberal and Tea Party-dominated legislature’s “Emergency Financial Manager” law as cover for an especially venal brand of “austerity” against the mostly black citizens of Flint. Flint and every other black-majority Michigan city, has been stripped of any semblance of democracy by replacement of mayors, city councils, school boards, and all other administrative agencies and departments with these governor-appointed so-called Emergency Financial Managers.
And, since the “crisis” has become public, Snyder, has been ducking and dodging, deflecting and misdirecting any real or meaningful responsibility for the outrageous and unspeakable actions of his hand-picked EM. That guy, one Darnell Earley, is himself something of a classic – a classic black token if ever there was one — whose only role is to spread a black patina of legitimacy over the governor’s unconscionable acts in order to keep Flint’s nearly sixty percent black populace from erupting into outright riot and revolution.
These kinds of shenanigans are expected from both open and closeted white racists and white supremacists, of course. Indeed, lately a healthy number of so-called “conservative” Republicans have cleaned and pressed, and easily settled under their white supremacist sheets as they line up in support of Donald Trump’s no-holds-barred, white racist/white supremacist campaign. White poisoning and outright murder of black people has a long history. The forebears of many of today’s “conservative” and neo-conservatives, both “fiscal” and “social” conservatives, Tea Partiers, and self-styled neoliberal Republicans actually rationalize or even justify poisoning a black neighborhood or a whole black town if it means saving money; or, ideally, if such terrorism forces the complete removal of a given black population so that “gentrification” (white re-entry) can begin in earnest. (No? See, just a small sampling of “white race riots” and attempted genocide of black people here and here). And then there was “Katrina” just a decade past.
But we did not expect to see this kind of callousness, this total disregard for black life, from this nation-state’s First Black President.
On the contrary, back in ’07, most black people, myself included, were pleasantly surprised to witness the meteoric rise into the national political firmament of a young, smart, black politician from Chicago. Obama seemed to personify both Dr. King’s “Dream” and Harold Washington’s push for “fairness” as Chicago’s First Black Mayor. Obama was the flesh and blood answer to Malcolm X’s question, “The Ballot or the Bullet?”
But more than anything else, Barack Obama seemed to embody the 500-year-old hope and dream of a yearned for freedom, of a final release from bondage by the great masses of black people throughout the land.
Judging by company kept.
For politically astute observers, Obama’s very first cabinet appointments answered all questions as to just exactly who he was or what he was really all about. Recall that the obvious but often unspoken question at the time was, “Is he black enough?” Those first cabinet picks should have (but didn’t) answer that question for most black folks. Its answer should have (but didn’t) revealed to black people what a monumental mistake we had just made. The man put into the most sensitive and important policy-making positions the very same people who had crashed both the US and very nearly the entire world’s economies; and who had facilitated the theft of billions from every black working family in America. Obama gleefully hired both W. and Clinton re-treads, including Bill’s very own wife as Secretary of State.
But, his pick for Chief of Staff, arguably the most “sensitive” of all cabinet spots, took all of the shiny veneer from the new black Democrat who had come to save us from the evil Republicans – none other than the thoroughly distasteful, incessantly vulgar, always rude, loud and irascible Rahm Emanuel, who at the time was (and remains) perhaps the most hated political hack in Dee Cee.
Was it Rahm or the president – or both – who seemed to delight in dissing the Congressional Black Caucus and every other “progressive” group which even mildly differed with
Obama’s/Rahm’s emphasis on “compromising” with or reaching some mystical “grand bargain” with Congressional Republicans who’d sworn in blood to object to, oppose and obstruct each and every suggestion, bill, idea, deed and utterance this president might propose.
From Trayvon Martin to Laquan McDonald
After each mass shooting by putatively “mentally ill” white guys, President Obama has reflexively stepped forward to mourn the victims and decry “gun violence” throughout these not-so-United States. He recently went so far as to actually shed some very public tears over these now clockwork-like mass murders.
This First Black President’s concern, however, for black victims of police violence and other “extra-judicial” executions of black people has not been so public or pointed. Why not? Apparently because there is no salient political or personal hook or advantage in siding with black families as black people when their suffering is caused by the very government Obama purportedly heads. This First Black President has no tears, let alone policy proposals, for ending police brutality or police harassment against his most loyal and ardent followers and supporters.
The Poisoning of Flint Crystallizes Obama’s Stance Vis-a-Vis Black America.
How could this First Black President travel to the Detroit Auto Show, spitting distance from Flint, and praise those selfsame auto manufacturers (who actually, originally, poisoned the Flint River) and not even mention their decades-long misdeeds against a whole city? Again, he did it because he could. He did it because he knows that there will likely be no discernible, no real blacklash against him for continuing to ignore the plight of black people in this nation-state.
