Mumia Abu-Jamal: Is Obama's victory ours?
Jun 19, 2008
With the attainment of the required delegates to claim the Democratic
Party’s nomination for U.S. president, Sen. Barack H. Obama (D-IL) has
written a new page in American history.
For by so doing he succeeds where Channing Phillips, Shirley Chisholm, Jesse
Jackson, Sr., and Al Sharpton could not—by gaining the necessary
delegates to demand nomination.
Of course, there have been numerous Black candidates for president, but
these have been third party efforts designed more to raise issues, to organize
or protest than to actually win elections. Some of the best known have been
Eldridge Cleaver (former Black Panther Minister of Information), Dick Gregory,
Dr. Lenora Fulani, and the former congresswoman, Cynthia McKinney.
But this is a different kettle of fish, for Obama’s candidacy is the
closest to make it to the winner’s circle.
What also distinguishes Obama from his predecessors is he doesn’t come
from civil rights, Black liberation, socialist or anti-war movements. (He often
remarks at speeches, “I’m not against all wars, I’m just
against dumb wars.”)
Indeed, although his detractors may try to paint him as a leftist liberal,
this is hardly true. On issues both foreign and domestic he would’ve been
more at home in the Republican Party of his senatorial forebear, Edward Brooke
of Massachusetts. For though he is Black by dint of his African father, he has
studiously avoided Black political groups in his long, harrowing climb to the
rim of the White House.
He has studiously avoided the very real and long-standing grievances of
Black America. In fact, he tried to run a “post-racial” campaign
until Sen. Hillary R. Clinton (D-NY) and her rambunctious husband, former Pres.
Bill, brought race front and center during the Super Tuesday February
primaries, by trying to pigeonhole him as “the Black
candidate.”
This primary wounded Obama, and as he won in the delegate count, he also
lost a number of primary states, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania, which are
necessary for a win in November.
Politics is the art of making people believe that they are in power when, in
fact, they have none.
It is a measure of how dire is the hour that they’ve passed the keys
to the kingdom to a Black man.
As in many American cities, Black mayors were let in when the treasuries
were almost barren, and tax bases were almost at rock-bottom.
With the nation’s manufacturing base also a thing of history, amidst
the socioeconomic wreckage of globalization, with foreign affairs in shambles,
the rulers reach for a pretty, brown face to front for the Empire.
“Real change that you could believe in” would be an end to
Empire, and an end to wars for corporate greed, not just a change of the shade
of the political managers.
That change, I’m afraid, is still to come.
