[R-G] Mumia: Obama's Victory Ours?

[Anthony Fenton]

Obama's Victory Ours?
Jun 12, 2008 By Mumia Abu-Jamal


Mumia Abu-Jamal's ZSpace Page / ZSpace

With the attainment of the required delegates to claim the Democratic  
Party's nomination for U.S. president, Sen. Barack H. Obama (D. ILL.)  
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.N.Y.) (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.

Mumia Abu-Jamal is an acclaimed American journalist and author who has  
been writing from Death Row for more than twenty-five years. Mumia was  
sentenced to death after a trial that was so flagrantly racist that  
Amnesty International dedicated an entire report to describing how the  
trial "failed to meet minimum international standards safeguarding the  
fairness of legal proceedings." Mumia is author of many books,  
including Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners vs. The  
USA, forthcoming from City Lights Books.


From: Z Net - The Spirit Of Resistance Lives
URL: http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/3521