William Reed; Who Speaks For African-Americans, Yes You?

by Staff June 6, 2011 7 Comments News Opinion Politics Weekly Columns

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(ThyBlackMan.com) While many questioned whether Barack Obama was “Black enough,” in the 2008 elections 96 percent of African-Americans cast their vote for him.

Today, the question has re-emerged. In a recent critique, African-American scholar Cornel West stated that Obama is “culturally White.” This statement has created new ways to evaluate Obama, has ignited a new debate, and increased the divisions existing among African-Americans.

Does Obama represent Black Americans’ views and issues these days? An even more relevant question might be, “Do Blacks want a Black as their spokesperson?”

McKinney speaks

The leading voices for racial representation and justice in the past now cop another tune. The Rev. Al Sharpton said, “The issue comes down to a misunderstanding of Obama’s role. This is the first time in this country that we have an African-American president. [However], he’s not the president of African-Americans.”

Former U.S. Rep. Cynthia McKinney has used the unpopular war in African countries to take over the role of international spokesperson for Black Americans.

As traditional Black political and religious leaders scamper like mice around the issue, McKinney has taken the position that Obama’s actions and practices are primarily based on his “White conqueror mindset.”

McKinney said that Obama’s practices and policies are “a continuation of George Bush” and “do not represent the views of African-Americans.” On state-sponsored broadcasts in Libya, the 2008 Green Party presidential candidate said, “these policies of war…are not what the people of the United States stand for, and it’s not what African-Americans stand for.”

Aiding the enemy?

Mainstream media carries an imperialist point of view and portrays McKinney as a rube, “lending aid and comfort to America’s enemies” as she “fanned flames of American hatred by telling Muslims in Libya and Iran that the United States is exactly what they believe it is – a fat, bloated nation controlled by Israel that exploits the poor in order to line the pockets of the wealthy.”

McKinney told viewers, “the profile of an African-American is one that advocates for truth, justice, and human dignity.” Despite Western media portrayals of Gaddafi as a crazy madman, to McKinney and other African-oriented activists, he’s “a hero of African rights.”

Benefiting from war

The war in Libya is about increasing the wealth of a few. It cost Americans $4 million a day. In what way does this war benefit Black Americans? It doesn’t matter that Nelson Mandela supports Gaddafi and his works. To Black Americans, who believe Obama is heaven-sent, McKinney’s and Cornel West’s utterances are blasphemy.

In the eyes of “post-racial” Blacks, McKinney and Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan parrot Libyan government propaganda and paint the regime as “a harbinger of peace” on the African continent.

In the eyes of McKinney and Farrakhan, Blacks have bought into an imperialist system and actively glorify America’s militarism and dominance in the name of unlimited personal fortunes of a few.

In the case of whether the U.S. should be allowed to continue assaulting this Black African country, what say you?

Written By William Reed

Mr. Reed William Reed is available for speaking/seminar projects via; BaileyGroup.org.

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Francis says:
July 1, 2013 at 8:00 am
Hello friends, pleasant piece of writing and nice urging commented here,
I am really enjoying by these.
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Pingback: From Cynthia McKinney: Tripoli Day Four – This weblog is for sounding DIVINE TRUTH in the ears of the dead!
Todd says:
June 9, 2011 at 12:24 am
Wow David- I try to speak openly and plainly about my view on the matter and all you do is call me names? Amazing.
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David McDonald says:
June 8, 2011 at 3:37 pm
Just finished googling “Todd” to see if I could figure out who the opinionated know-it-all American patriot is. Bummer… came up with 159,000 “Todd”s to have to choose from. Guess this Todd doesn’t have the courage to come out from his thickly veiled curtain, to show us who he REALLY is. Probably because he knows that talking s**t only works when you get to be anonymous, and have no one to answer to beside all those little racist voices whispering in your little brain.
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Courtenay Barnett says:
June 8, 2011 at 12:14 pm
Surely one cannot escape from the stark reality of the disparities in mean income distribution between Whites and Blacks. Beyond that observation is the question of whether a system such as the US economic system is, with defence and war expenditures consistently increasing while social domestic provisions and infratructual needs relatively declinebe deemed to be in accordance with the wishes and best interest of the majority citizens and electorate? Can this patter of politico-economic processes be sustained for much longer – with tusnami like impacts in the social and economic realms of America? But there are bigger issues as well:-
THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS ON THE USE OF MILITARY POWER BY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
What is evident to me is that the politics of the world increasingly has to be viewed in terms of the raw use of military power. The US, at this juncture of human history, is the nation state with the greatest amount of military power in the world and there is serious cause for concern about how that power is used and projected into the world.
I will explain what I mean.
When the Wall Street mafia raped private funds and brought the world to global economic crisis, the response by Bush was to inject trillions back to the same gangsters, thieves and “banksters” who caused the crisis. Then, when Obama was elected, he did not reverse the process but continued and gave many trillions more back to the same “banksters”. At the same time for decades before, the United States defence budget has increased constantly year after year. At a time when clearly, many citizens of the US are in need in the midst of a serious economic slump, when there is no ‘cold war’ and the wars in which the US are engaged are not in the least wars of defence in response to any nation having attacked the US, it stretches the bounds of credulity to justify the on-going wars and bombardments of other weaker nations by US military forces and attacks by their troops supported by the NATO nations. In this sense, the traditional political ideas of divisions between Democrat and Republican, right and left, become meaningless.
Again, post 9/11, the Bush administration used this event as the casus belli for bombing an already impoverished and war destroyed nation ( i.e. post the Soviet invasion and defeat). How does one catch Bin Laden by bombing carpet bombing Afghanistan is a logical question to ask. How does one target combatants who are not uniformed and do not comprise a standing army in their own country is the next question. How does one legitimize having trained the Taliban, Bin Laden and armed the Muslim combatants at a time when the US/CIA ( read: “Charlie Wilson’s war”) wanted to defeat the Soviets, then post war speak of trying to defeat the so-called Al-Qaeda fighters ( i.e. the very ones who had been trained by the CIA and the US is sacrificing young service persons lives for ) – and so justify this foreign incursion with an iota of credibility? How can it be justified to sacrifice young American lives to run an oil pipeline across Afghanistan and shed US blood on foreign soil in a war that supports a man whose brother along with the CIA has seen heroin production reach its zenith simultaneously while American troops have occupied Afghanistan? How can one legitimately speak of “freedom” when since 2003 the US government knowingly lied to the American people and the world about WMDs and clearly is faced with an unyielding resistance( because the Iraqis do not want illegal US occupation) and continue to sacrifice to a number of one million dead Iraqis and over 4,700 American lives ( officially acknowledged by the US) in a depleted uranium infested nation, due to this unyielding American aggression?
How can there be any conceivable decency of US foreign policy when for eight years the US supported in turn Iraq under Saddam and Iran in a war that cost significant numbers of human life, during the longest conventional war of the twentieth century?:-
(http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/arming_iraq.php)
Today the illegality persists with the irony of the first US President of direct African descent setting out along with his European/NATO partners to destroy Libya, Africa’s most prosperous country measured on social indicies and the per capita income yardstick? This last question is supported, strange as it may seem, from the figures and information available on the CIA factbook ( assuming that post bombing the CIA has not deleted or altered the facts that were posted prior to the NATO bombardment).
It is these kinds of questions that I find troubling, for that the answers that are to be given take any sentient, perceptive, decent and honest human being to a point of some doubt about why America is projecting its power into the world not so much as the “land of the free and the home of the brave”, but as the “land of thieves and home of slaves”. Pardon my apparent rudeness in so observing, but personally I yet have respect for the document termed the American Constitution for reasons of its innovative construct and genuine attempts to balance the forces and use of power within the nation. For peace-loving American individuals I bear no ill will. Unfortunately, the American government has diverged significantly from the founding fathers nobly expressed aspirations. Sadly, as Eisenhower warned of:-
“the military industrial complex”
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=206082
17th January, 1961
his concerns have proven overwhelmingly justified.
Conclusion
I end on that note, because if it were merely me who alerted world denizens to beware of the use of the words “security” , “liberty” and “freedom” in the abstract, when justification is sought for US foreign policy, then no one would give any serious thought to merely my observations as made above about US/NATO hegemonic conduct. In actuality, it was a prescient Republican president who made the observations that increasingly in our world today are proving him brutally, bloodily and frighteningly – correct in his expressed insightful concerns.
You may not be in agreement with me – but do share these thoughts with your friends, for that we have the power of the internet, our own minds, our basic concepts of human decency, justice and fairness to question these wars and to resist in whatever ways we can the advancing extended militarism of our times.
Interestingly, George Kennan, the US architect of the cold war made these four observations:-
“World communism is like [a] malignant parasite which feeds on diseased tissue” (1946).
And
“It may be true, and I suspect it is, that the mass of people everywhere are normally peace-loving and would accept many restraints and sacrifices in preference to the monstrous calamities of war.”
(N.B.The humane ones amongst us ought not to embrace bellicosity as if it were the normal and natural state of conduct in human affairs. There is indeed a pathology of power, and it is manifest around us.)
And
“We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.”
And
“Were the Soviet Union to sink tomorrow under the waters of the ocean, the American military establishment would have to go on, substantially unchanged, until some other adversary could be invented. Anything else would be an unacceptable shock to the American economy.”
What was deemed to be potentially an unacceptable shock to the American economy, in this post Soviet collapse world of ours, viewing the various manifestations of American military power here and now, is an actual shock of horrendous proportions for the non-European and non-American peoples of the world ( some half million Asian lives and about 60,000 dead US service persons from the Vietnam war, to a million dead in the Iraq war and counting upwards). And if we, the people, are not hampered in our thoughts by the belief that the US and NATO really are projecting democratization, human rights and the quest for rising living standards into the world by way of its/their increasing militarism and aggression, the better we are able to appreciate what Kennan had in mind when he wrote the words quoted above. If communism is/was as Kennan stated, and his was an option of capitalism, which now has unchallenged dominance in the world, what must we, the many humans inhabiting our world, make of the conduct of the unbridled option which remains as it gains expression through the projection of military force into the world?
Think again – peace!
Courtenay Barnett – 4th June, 2011 ( http://www.globaljusticeonline)
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Todd says:
June 8, 2011 at 7:08 am
“The war in Libya is about increasing the wealth of a few. It cost Americans $4 million a day. In what way does this war benefit Black Americans?”
Why does the author think his question applies to just black Americans? In what way does this war benefit all Americans?
Cynthia McKinney also needs a reality check. What country in world history has ever existed that the small ruling class did not make money (exploited in Cynthia speak) off of the common folk? None. There is and never will be a utopia where wealth is shared evenly – it was attempted somewhat in various communist regimes and has failed in every instance. In fact in McKinney’s Libya money is less evenly distributed than it is in the US.
What is going on in Libya in my view has everything to do with keeping status quo in the mideast that was the result of the anglo-american petroleum imperialist measures of the 20th century. We benefit, as does the rest of the world, by keeping relative stability in an area of the world that controls the lifeblood of our daily lives. I don’t want us involved anywhere in the mideast whatsoever. However the fact remains that if the tenuous order of this area is heavily disrupted the entire industrialized world would collapse. Oil is everything today. It is the in food we eat, the products that we create, and of course fuels almost all transportation. I don’t want our mideast policies extended but I also don’t want to see widespread famine and war while a major power shift occurs (leaving the US much weaker no doubt).
Furthermore, why does McKinney champion Gaddafi’s Libya? What stellar human rights record have they achieved? Gaddafi paid to set up the African Union with oil money so he could extend his dictatorial regime further than his borders, at the same time looking the other way while tens of thousands of Sudanese slaves are traded into bondage in his country, many of them children. Why to McKinney are his dictatorial imperialist aspirations good and America’s bad? Is it simply because is a man of color? Is it simply to go somewhere where she feels accepted and embraced because she touts their political views? I’m not sure why if she favors one regime over another she continues to live and benefit in the one she appears to despise.
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Herb In Chicago says:
June 7, 2011 at 11:56 am
As Professor Michael Eric Dyson says, Obama runs from even the notion of “race” or “blackness” faster than a Black man runs from the police.
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