Obama Plays Tom
John Calvin Jones
www.virtualcitizens.com
2007-03-05

http://www.virtualcitizens.com/articles/Obama_Plays_Tom

House Negro, Field Negro, Old Negro, New Negro

One of the most famous speeches by Malcolm X was that of the House Negro and the Field Negro.  The former was committed to the system of slavery that granted him a few privileges at the expense of the others … in the field.  Malcolm X explained the parable to show that in the later 1950s and 1960s there were plenty of so-called Black leaders in the United States who were preferred by White politicians and White corporate power.  What would he say about Barack Obama today?

For some, Obama practices a standard political/rhetorical game.  He is cautious, critiquing the illegal invasion and occupation of Iraq the right way – not wasting any words and calling the occupation and slaughter a war.  But truth be told, Obama is simply taking from a playbook perfected, in my lifetime, by Pat Buchanan.  It is a strange sort of populism.  What is strange is not the so-called political messages and planks of the candidate (which are of course vacuous), but the filter and veil Team Obama pushes as encouraged by the corporate media and wealthy party financiers.

Years ago, I heard one commentator talk about the “wink” of Buchanan.  Members of the Washington Press Corps were so confused that Buchanan could be competitive or beat someone like G. H. W. Bush in primaries and party caucus meetings in New Hampshire or Iowa.  But it was not surprising.  Buchanan talked about bread and butter issues tied to economic opportunity, then added a bit of chauvinism about immigration and criticized abortion.  For the elite media, they knew that abortion law would not be changed, most Americans, even Republicans favored legal abortion.  As for the immigration and anti-NAFTA stuff, the reporters did not care.  Their editors and owners knew that parochial and peasant-based ideas about matters of global finance would not be left up to the rabble.  So the informed media would talk about Buchanan as some extremist.  And while Pat winked, the comfortable members of the press insisted that Buchanan was not so serious in his political views.  They would trash Buchanan’s run for office, and then embrace him to host programs on CNN, NBC, and so forth.   Everyone knew they were friends, it was the wink.

With Obama we see a similar love fest and or appreciation.  What matters not is public adoration, but the silent nod and wink shared between corporate media, the war-machine, insurance and banking interests and their man, Barack, “Call me Tom” Obama.  In public Obama wows the crowd with Christian references and talk about the civil rights movement giving him an opportunity, but with his smile and avoidance of talk on policy matters of interest to the public (pull the troops out now, end the drug war on marijuana, universal health care, and jobs-jobs-jobs), he tells his financiers that Tom only wants to please them …   He will be a good overseer, adorned with all the privileges that the presidency will give.  So Tom promises not to lead a slave revolt – indeed he will snuff out talk and hope of one before it starts.  He will fight to the death to save the master, the plantation, and a way of life enjoyed by the House Negro in a slave-ocracy.

Winning Over the Field Negroes, Making Sacrifices

This past weekend, Tom and others, including Hillary (who apparently knows what it is like to work on a plantation – she called it Congress run by the Republicans), went to Selma, Alabama.  Selma is an important symbol for many reasons, including the idea that Black people in the United States were beaten and killed, faced state oppression, merely for the crime of wanting to register to vote. 

“and it's because they marched that the next generation hasn't been bloodied so much.”

Barack Hussein Obama, March 2007

That is, people in Alabama and other parts of the South did not get shot while voting – a fate still reserved for Haitians who oppose U.S. puppets.  These American citizens, including my relatives, were not attacked by dogs while waiting in line to fill out a ballot, rather the crazy and bigoted Whites in their citizens councils and police uniforms killed people who had the audacity to try to walk to a court house to register to vote.  The crime was “registering to vote while Black.”  (Are there any parallel crimes today?  Tom won’t say). 

So when Tom was given a chance to speak in Selma, this child of a White woman and an African immigrant went quickly to prove his bona fides to thousands on onlookers and millions more who would see and read about the event on TV, through the news, and internet.  Instead of saying that he had a tangential connection, Tom told the Field Negroes that he had a direct connection to Selma (and hence to them).

After making the proper platitudes and paying homage to the ancestors (which is what the Field Negroes did, the House Negroes adopted the master’s religion and waited for salvation after death) including current Member of Congress John Lewis (D-GA), calling them giants, Tom told a story about his paternal grandfather, who, living under segregated British rule in Kenya, as a second-class citizen in his own nation, was subject to indignities and always called “boy” by White colonial oppressors.

Tying his family’s history to the political struggles of African peoples in the United States, Tom said that the magnanimity of Africa-Americans who faced dogs, racial oppression, and police brutality (my phraseology) inspired his grandfather to hope and ultimately offered an opportunity for his father to come to the U.S. to study …

(This was the first wink.  As the people in power know, these exchange programs are nothing more than a continuation of the neo-colonial project of a sort long been established by Cecil Rhodes.  Rhodes, a colonizer-racist, sought to institutionalize British Imperial rule by another means – by bringing the best and brightest of the United States to Britain via the Rhodes Scholarship, to train our future leaders about the need to support and aid British monopoly capitalism and the importance of blue-blooded British rule over places like the Malvinas, Northern Ireland, Hong Kong, Iran, Kuwait, etc.   The Rhodes Scholarship, the Fulbright program, and most so-called exchange programs are just tools of political indoctrination, designed to commit elites of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to the infallibility of Western economists, IMF schemes and Western governments that have bled them dry for generations.  And Tom was trying to wow the crowd by claiming that legacy?  Who believed him?  Who liked it?  Who was so ignorant as to not know anything about ideological colonialism?) 

There in Selma, Tom mentioned repeatedly, things like, “It's because they marched that we elected councilmen, Congressmen.  It is because they marched that we have Arthur Davis and Keith Ellison.  It is because they marched that I got the kind of education I got, a law degree, a seat in the Illinois senate and ultimately in the United States senate."

I am sure that Senator Tom forced a few to dab the tears from their eyes when he proclaimed: 

"… My very existence might not have been possible had it not been for some of the folks here today.  … I’m here because somebody marched.  I’m here because you all sacrificed for me.”

That Old Black Nigger … Keeps Rolling Along

Yes.  He spoke of sacrifice.  But what did Tom sacrifice and when?  Thanks to Greg Palast, Bill Fitrakis, Project Censored and thousands of in-person reports, we heard the evidence of voter suppression, vote fraud and theft came out of Ohio, Georgia, Nevada, New Mexico, Florida and various places around the nation in 2004, where young people had registered in record numbers, where millions of new Black and Browns went to vote in our nation’s cities.  Repeating their efforts of January 2001, members of the House stood, once again, to protest the theft of one of the most important aspects of our politics … free, fair and open elections.  In fact every Black member of Congress was outraged at the abuses that their constituents had relayed.  People like Sheila Jackson Lee, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Maxine Waters, and Cynthia McKinney told how elections were stolen and demanded that votes be counted.  But as far as Tom is concerned, perhaps the most important comments came from John Lewis.

The pain of seeing two presidential elections stolen was so great that Congressman John Lewis (D-GA) rose on the floor of the Congress on 5 January 2005 and said the following:

The right to vote and to have every vote counted is precious and sacred.  It is the heart and soul of our democratic process.  We cannot be true to ourselves as a democratic society unless we get it right.   I think … it is fitting … that we have this debate, and that Congress hold further hearings on questions about the Presidential election in Ohio and elsewhere [in 2004].

Our electoral system is broken, and it must be fixed once and for all.  What happened in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004 tends to dramatize the fact that there is something wrong with our democracy.  More and more of our citizens have grown uneasy.  I hear [Republicans] saying “we should forget it,” “we should get over it.”  How can we get over it when people died for the right to vote, where people suffered for the right to vote?  The right of every vote to be counted must be upheld by this body.

So that was the House.  But to challenge the electoral college vote – to decertify it, a petition needs the support of a senator.  We know what Lieberman, Gore, Kerry and others did in 2001 – they told Black members of Congress, Black people in America, and the entire nation, “Screw you.  We would rather have an illegitimate White guy in charge than admit that Black votes don’t count.”  But how did fellow Americans, and fellow Democrats in the U.S. Senate respond in 2005? 

One Senator, Barbara Boxer (D-CA) agreed to challenge the electoral college vote, but her move was simply pro forma, not for real.  I know because when the spotlight hit a young, Senator from Illinois, when he had the chance to sacrifice his House Negro credentials in the eyes of an elite media unconcerned with actual voting or actual counting of votes, Tom turned his sword outward.  After hearing the plea of one who was on the bridge at Selma, who told the world that Black people in the United States died for the right to vote, our newly self-anointed child of Selma, this Tom, sacrificed American principles, the Constitution, the votes of millions, the Democratic party, and the presidency of John Kerry. 

How Else Could Tom Become President?

In the eyes of many, such a move was indeed a sacrifice.  Without posing a roadblock, Tom and his fellow passive members of an impotent Congress, the illegal, immoral and lost wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would continue as the Rovians, neo-cons and Diebold stockholders would announce, “mission accomplished.”  Without an objection, thousands of American lives and families would be wasted – along with billions that could go to housing, clean energy, public and local radio and television, and universal health care – on par with nations like Cuba, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Venezuela.  All this was sacrificed in a most callous manner.

But where commonsense would tell one that when Tom and his partisan Senators decided to abandon their party, much less their voters, Tom would not and could not be a serious presidential candidate in the near future, Tom’s Machiavellian calculus was revealed.  “The enemy of my base, is my friend.”  Without Kerry being chosen by the Congress or without the Democratic Congress exposing to theft, 2008 would be wide-open for Tom … who does not see African-Americans, but only Americans.  No House Negro could say it better.  I guess Tom has not investigated the American criminal (in)justice system or visited any prisons lately – it would be hard not to notice the color lines and rule of White Supremacy there. 

Instead of rocking the boat by being so daft as to expect legal, open, free, public, and reviewable elections and election records (i.e. not held by Choice Point or other private firms, sequestered on the grounds that outsourced election systems and data are trade secrets), dependable Tom is now rewarded by a media and elite politics that cares more about going along with corporate power, expanding military budgets, downsizing the middle class, gutting mass education, continuing the petroleum economy, letting the drug war run wild and paying homage to usurious insurance and banking industries.

The Best Man for the Cotton-Picking Job

As a Senator who stands on the shoulders of Black people who struggled, were beaten, jailed, tortured and killed by the government of the United States, Obama cannot claim just to represent the people of Illinois.  His stewardship must reach wider and he must address more than just the price of gas in Chicago or farm subsidies down-state.  But instead, the corporate Obama has not mentioned the crimes against humanity suffered by Black people like Sean Bell, when delusional cops assassinated him and tried to kill his friends in New York City.  Obama has not talked about the need to eliminate the death penalty – like a White? Republican Governor of Illinois did.  Now on the campaign trail, Obama does not bother to explain the obvious, that if Congress appropriated all the money that it currently gives for the corporate mercenaries and war criminals in Iraq and redirected it to American needs we could develop the best train system, most efficient solar and wind farms, promote local/organic, non-petroleum based agriculture and pay the best and brightest to teach our children math and science. 

No, Tom did not bother to say any of that in Selma.  That is what a Field Negro would do, and this Senator of Illinois is no Field Negro.  He likes eating in the big house.  He got his.  He smiles in the face of Congressman Lewis, a real hero, thanks Lewis for his service, and tells him to sit at the back of the bus. 

For all his talk about Christian imagery and mythology, I wonder if Obama believes in salvation or conversion.  I know that he is a shill for corporate power, but I should hold out for the possibility that the Holy Spirit will move him.  Until then, most Americans should realize that Tom’s talk is but a wink, showing his contempt for America.  He is not on our side.  And if you have no show at living in Massa’s big house, you should not be on his.

John Calvin Jones
www.virtualcitizens.com