(ThyBlackMan.com) The other day, a friend of mine called to tell me that the Congressional Black Caucus was finally getting a chance to meet with President Obama. I think that he was excited, as if this meeting actually meant something.
I looked at my friend with an empty stare and said, “Please help me to understand why I should give a d*amn.”
Of course, there is the obvious implication that the president choosing to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus could be a good thing for black America. But the saddest truth that we’re all having to confront these days is that there is very little evidence that any politician, black or white, is positioned to care very much about what happens to black people, especially if they are poor.
Mind you, my goal here is not to be entirely cynical. Nor is it to offend the sensitivities of those who hold onto the fantasy that President Obama is one day going to throw off his Clark Kent suit and do as much for black people as he’s done for gays, whites, women and Latinos. My intuition says that even the strongest supporters of President Obama are emotionally exhausted and unable to come up with much of anything that proves that this administration has represented little more than a darker version of what Bill Clinton gave us over a decade ago. Hope is hard to hold onto without much tangible evidence.
But Barack is a president and he’s effectively doing what president’s do: Giving lip service to those who don’t demand real action and accountability. His evil sidekick, Senior Adviser Valerie Jarrett, appears to go even further when it comes to reminding the president that paying attention to black people is not part of his job description. Even worse, there is the implicit understanding that he can pay less attention to black people than previous presidents, because he communicates his loyalty via skin color and symbolism rather than actual policy.
One very serious question I have for the Congressional Black Caucus, Valerie Jarrett and President Obama is this: Why in the h*ell did it take two years for you to have a meeting? Was the CBC busy on all the other days that the president cleared off of his schedule in order to meet with them? Did you not realize that we are in the midst of the worst black economic crisis in the last 30 years? Were these meetings scheduled and then canceled at the last minute, which I hear is a typical tactic of the White House when it comes to people that they don’t want to deal with? I really need to know.
My second question I have is this: Why wasn’t the War on Drugs part of the discussion during this meeting? When I reviewed notes from the meeting sent to me by the White House, I didn’t see a single mention of the impact that prisons are having on the destruction of the black family. Are the president and the Congressional Black Caucus unaware of how many millions of families have been decimated by the War on Drugs, racial profiling, disparate sentencing and felon marginalization? Do you know anything about the mental health crisis in the black community resulting from the impact of the prison industrial complex and the spread of STDs? Are we unaware that a multitude of experts on both sides of the aisle have concluded that the War on Drugs has been an utter failure and has only resulted in a sickening degree of incarceration of American citizens?
Am I the crazy one here?
I write my words with as much sincerity as I can muster, as well as the lasting hope that someone can prove me wrong. I openly wonder if our politicians have become so co-opted by corporate interests that our nation is doomed to failure. I wonder how my community is ever going to recover from a set of incarceration policies over the last 40 years that are so corrupt that their impact has been compared to the N*azi holocaust. I just can’t take it anymore, and I hope you can’t either.
It’s time to let go of politicians selling false hope and work on finding real solutions. These meetings might just be a waste of time.
Staff Writer; Dr. Boyce Watkins
Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition. For more information, please visit http://BoyceWatkins.com.
