Cornel west on Barack

Cornel West is legit, but I guess he's getting what he deserves on this board.

If you're gonna come at BHO like that speaking out of turn, you put your own credibility/legitimacy under the microscope.

There's a way to criticize someone without insulting them.

Dr. West should have been smart enough to know this.:smt039

 

HOLY FUCKING JESUS H. CHRIST ON A BISCUIT, I AGREE WITH THE CRAZY MAN!

I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day!!!!!

 

OMG. roflmao. lol

 

[YOUTUBE]o80kIgXlqvw[/YOUTUBE]

 

Wow.:smt042

 

rayer:

 

there is one more thing that every SOTBU did before the ended the whole thing every year. they would say some slick shit about black men. you know...take care of your kids, get an education to get a job, stay out of jail and for goodness sake pull up your pants.

this will be the nail in the coffin to get votes and/or money from BW and soft minded BM.

 

I think there is plenty of room to critique the substance of the president's policies without having to resort to identity-bashing. None of us have been inside his brain, walked in his shoes or have the slightest inkling what his true take on "blackness" is. I have always found him to be highly intelligent, self-confident, a bit self-absorbed and highly capable. To accuse him of some sort of Manchurian candidate-style mental block against independent black people that renders him a shill for covert white interests is ludicrous. If he has any covert interests, I'm sure they are his own.

As for the criticisms from West, Dyson & Smiley, I take them all with a grain of salt. Smiley's hostility toward him has been overt since Obama first passed on attending one of his conferences, which are themselves self-important roundtables where a group of people with inflated self-images sit around and proffer their own "solutions" to the crisis facing black people in this country. He has nowhere near the intellectual heft of West or Dyson (not saying that automatically delegitimizes his opposition to Obama) and serves largely as a vehicle to air the views of his two associates. As actual academics, Dyson and West have little access to the masses and need Smiley's forum to reach larger numbers.

Just take everyone involved with a grain of salt. Including the president.

 

I agree with your ideas. Someone once said that language is a map of the world. You get a sense of where someone has been, and where he has inherited his narratives. The inheritance that might transcend provincial culture, and might show a cross-fertilization of ideas that take root in several cultures; not just an activist culture of resistance, nor a culture of triumphalism; but rather a universality in cultures that feeds and informs on what unites across boundaries that is drawn on racial experience. I suspect that is the intellectual perch Obama muses from.

I think it is just his style and accident of his birth to be lonely, yet be connected by umbilical cords that are so visible that he really can't deny. He has found himself in historic circumstance that several forces outside of him helped make. If the likes of West & Smiley understood this, maybe they would be more understandable.

Martin Luther did not toe the path of violent resistance to nudge people to change. Rather he appealed to a higher human ideal that he borrowed from the example of Ghandi. No one would say that strategy did not work. His appeal to stir in the white men of the day those emotions that managed to swallow the hate was instrumental to change and helped America realise some of his higher ideals.

Obama has to always rise above the provincialism that casts him as a black leader. He is better than that, and I think that is why he chose to run for the presidency of the United States of America and that is how people that trusted him enough to give a shot should remember him. He owes everybody, not just the black community.

 

West has been doing that for the last 3 years. There are only two negative personal issues he's ever mentioned with Obama, and this is the first time he's publicly mentioned anything about Obama having issues with a Black identity.

 

Why are ya'll so protective over a shit eating politician?

Obama doesn't represent your Black asses....he represents the corporate elite that has thrown you under the bus 30 years ago.

WAKE UP.

 

You know those negroes won't watch that....they're too busy celebrating because a fake-ass Corporate owned puppet is in the Big House...after all...."we made history"

 

You should have never brought in the corporate elite.

Affirmative Action began almost 40 years ago. There were all kinds of corporate set asides and quotas for the "minorities". The problem was for ever Thurgood Marshall you had many Clarence Thomas'. The "minorities" who once got into different positions, closed the door behind them so that other "minorities" could not follow.

Before Obama was president, he use to walk through his district in Chicago and connected with the people he represented. This is why many see him as a very personal person, he can connect to the common man. When he became president, one of the things he DIDN'T like was not being able to take a walk out in the community like he use to because of all the security guards.

You can't lump a black man like Obama with that of a Clarence Thomas who truly is a part of the corporate elite, at least he try his hardest to be looked as one.

You are correct, the corporate elite has thrown blacks under the bus for many, many years, a lot longer than 30. But the corporate elite is both black and white, male and female. There is no way you could put Obama as one of them.

 

rofl i dont wheather to be ashamed or surprised because just because a darker skinned person is in the white house anything is really gonna change hell no, not with these corrupt corporations and their lobbists, the tea party, fox news, the republicans etc etc, running everyting. smh

 

The U.S. government is a well oiled machine, it takes many spokes in that wheel to make it turn. It isn't a one man dictatorship, not by a long shot. That isn't what this discussion is about.

 

I know I am one of the biggest Bama critic on the board and around here in real life. But I’ve promised a lady friend of mine today that I am going to suspend it for a bit, lol. So in any event.....

Clearance Thomas is Uncle Tom in a true sense, he used affirmative action to get in Yale law school and now he wants to eradicate it so other deserving inner city minority kids won't benefit from it. He is a type of BM that prolly get a daily dose of self-hate when he sees a reflection of his skin while brushing his teeth.

Obama- I'm not sure if he used affirmative action or not to get in Harvard Law (Probably as he is paying millions to seal his academic work ???)- Anyhoo, Bama is much better than Uncle Thomas & there is no comparison between the two. BO does want success for blacks but in a sense his hands are tied as the majority of whites are watching his every move, so he is in a rough position.

But to think Obama is the 2nd coming of Jesus Christ is silly. I am gonna paraphrase Dr. West here "Barack Obama Is NOT the Fulfillment of Martin Luther King's Dream!”. Also to think BO does not work close with corporate elites & major Wall Street bankers is being naive.

At the end, with all BO's short comings, he is much better than the other candidates out there. Additionally, I have a feeling Obama prolly will do much more for blk community when he is out of the white house than when he is in (I could be wrong but just a gut feeling).

Alright, enough Bama bashing, lol.

 

No one has stated Obama as being the 2nd coming of Jesus Christ. And we all know, black men like Cornell West aren't even on the same planet.

What is he, an African American studies professor at Princeton, an Ivy League school. Be honest, how many blacks do you know goes to Princeton??? Of the blacks who are able to get into Princeton, how many consider themselves black???

Having an African American studies class at Princeton is like having a gay male stripper at a titty bar. The people who attend Princeton, black or white, are not even thinking of taking a black studies course. Yet, this professor believes he has the credentials to determine who is "black"???

........NO !!!!

 

What would be significant credentials to determine Blackness? I'm guessing they require more credentials than determining the worthiness of someones Academic profession.

 

I'm not the biggest Obama fan myself, because I think many of his policies simply perpetuate the status quo and existing power relations. However, I was just trying to address the issue of West and Smiley and the gripes they have leveled at him. I don't think any of us has a handy "black-o-meter" with which to measure his 'negritude'. That being said, I respect Dr. West's intellect, I just thought that read like a cheap shot.

 

Sure.

I was just accounting for Cornel. This is only the second time he's mentioned a personal issue with the president, the rest have been policy issues.

I take issue with a number of Cornel's expressed opinions and the general sentiments of the Black body politic. This is the context of the Blackness issue.

Short hand version: The person is political. Being Black one is assumed to have a particular identity politic. When someone like Clarence Thomas goes against the norm, he is branded a sellout. Barack Obama is analyzed within this same milieu, but his deviation from the norm is explained away by his parentage (Obama has also expressed issues dealing with being culturally or authentically Black in his bio; it's awful if West is trying to exploit that). There are numerous problems with this formulation of Black political identity, the obsolescence of the "old guard", or it's mere existence is often called into question.

I'm guessing many like West assumed he was just pacifying White folks to get elected, they thought he was winking and nodding at them, that because he had a Black wife and a occasional swag in his step, he was of a particular mindset.

If West would have listened carefully, he would have seen Barack was a pragmatic moderate and not very progressive, or maybe West did know and wanted to be "part of history" anyway, thinking he could somehow influence or mentor Barack.

If the plutocrats/oligarchs are in control of the economy and political duopoly, then he needs to speak about those who are really in power. Calling out Obama is pointless at this juncture if he truly believes in the power of this overclass.