Barack Obama is the result of a political vetting process conducted by what Paul Street and others describe as a “hidden primary” by those comprising Edward Bernays’ “invisible government.”  His selection for the presidency was international, not domestic, in scope and meant to offer an alternate and more preferred projection of empire.  He is not a culmination of grassroots organization but an imposition delivered to us by the “higher circles” of C. Wright Mills; the Wall Street, banking and military elite who funded him more so than any other candidate in history.  And while some argue this is irrelevant in the face of so many millions donating their money (and votes) their contributions are like the phenomenon described by a friend as “pissing in the ocean and claiming credit for having risen the tides.”

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Remarks delivered by Jared Ball at DePaul University as part of the The Center for Black Diaspora series on “Barack Obama and the African Diaspora,” April 21, 2010.

Good afternoon,

It is an honor to be here.  Thank you.  And thank you to Dr. Jackson and Ms. Daley for the invitation and assistance.  I especially appreciate being invited to spaces such as these where the particular focus of study is the African world and having just returned from the 40^th anniversary conference at the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University I know full well the important struggles engaged by these academic communities.  So, again, thank you.

And though it has been some time I’d feel uncomfortable not at least acknowledging the turmoil that existed at DePaul and which led to the departure of Norman Finkelstein.  I’ve come to truly appreciate his approach to what are often seen as controversial issues and as a small shout out or tribute to him I’d like to develop this talk along lines similar to his.  By that I mean, I intend to be relatively brief in outlining and defining my concerns; to be consistent in the application of certain principles; and to do my best, in that brevity, to demonstrate some equal measure of intellectual rigor in outlining my conclusions.  Finally, upon the conclusion of my remarks I intend to allow my detractors to be given first opportunity to raise their critiques.

Now also similar to Finkelstein, I usually disassociate my own background from discussions of my political analysis or conclusions.  That is, who I am is ultimately irrelevant to the observable or demonstrable conditions from which I draw conclusions regarding, in this case, the relationship of media to the material conditions of Black people in the United States and around the world.  However, given my status as guest and the nature of the topic I think that today demands some exception.  To that end, and immediately relevant to today’s topic, let me briefly explain that my own background is importantly similar and dissimilar to that of Barack Obama.  I was born in Washington, D.C. to and raised by a European-descended Jewish mother and an African-descended Black man.   I am also a member of the Green Party and ran for that party’s presidential nomination in 2008 before dropping out to support the ticket of Cynthia McKinney and rosa Clemente.  Therein lies some similarity and difference to the current president.  In each case our fathers, for reasons likely dissimilar, were absent or not immediately involved in our upbringing.  My mother, as a New York Jew, with her tendencies away from Zionism and towards communism, atheism and a deep abiding concern for the plight of working people, is perhaps another key area of difference.  Though it appears that both of our fathers, though not immediately present, did impact us indirectly – even politically.  Both of our fathers seem to have had a tendency toward pan-African politics, socialism and political activism though our application of these tendencies are quite different.  Though Obama and I are both, what Ali Mazrui has described as “Africans of the blood” versus “Africans of the soil,” again, our application of that relationship to Africa and African people is quite different.

In short, I am in support of the kinds of grassroots political organization whose goals include a radical break with the currently established “evil triplets,” as described by Dr. King, of “white supremacy, capitalism and militarism.”  On the other hand, by word and deed president Obama; defends white supremacy, in part by blaming Africans for their conditions and denying any public attention to a domestic Black agenda; he defends capitalism by employing and bailing out the creators and actors in this most recent economic crisis – one which, returning to the issue of a Black agenda, has been defined as “permanent” for Black America –; and he has, since coming into office, expanded the military budget beyond that of any previous president while extending wars we are still supposed to believe he “inherited.”

Barack Obama is the result of a political vetting process conducted by what Paul Street and others describe as a “hidden primary” by those comprising Edward Bernays’ “invisible government.”  His selection for the presidency was international, not domestic, in scope and meant to offer an alternate and more preferred projection of empire.  He is not a culmination of grassroots organization but an imposition delivered to us by the “higher circles” of C. Wright Mills; the Wall Street, banking and military elite who funded him more so than any other candidate in history.  And while some argue this is irrelevant in the face of so many millions donating their money (and votes) their contributions are like the phenomenon described by a friend as “pissing in the ocean and claiming credit for having risen the tides.”

Obama’s image was crafted and developed as a brand so much so that the advertising community named him “Brand of the Year” in 2008.  More recently his Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel openly described their media strategy in terms of brand ubiquity where his seeming media omnipresence is designed to weaken the ability of critics to latch on and raise substantive questions or criticism.  Being everywhere all the time has made him the epitome of “hiding in plain sight.”  And as in all cases, brands belie that which they claim to represent.  Nike is no more a swoosh or a shoe than it is an Indonesian sweatshop worker being paid $1 a day.  Obama is no more “change” than he is a neocolonial representation of empire dressed in the phenotype of the world’s colonized majority.

He is an expanded manifestation of Frantz Fanon’s notion of a “fixed” colonized cultural expression or symbol which “testifies against” its own in very much the way that Obama symbolizes the exception that proves the rule of Black inferiority.  He is proof of this nation’s claims of potential meritorious rises to the top, if only more Black savages were worthy they would too have been, or in the future be, able to similarly ascend to the highest positions of power.  In each case the point is to establish the legitimacy of the settler or colonizer and, therefore, the legitimacy of the colonized as such.  Contrary to some popular discussion of Obama as a symbol of hope, uplift and progress – unless the perspective behind these terms is redefined out of their popular conceptions – he is a symbol of defeat, of the might of colonial dominance and the rightfulness of empire.

Here I am intentionally evoking an analogy of colonialism.  If, as many say with little focused attention, that the United States is an empire than it stands to reason that, as Dr. Huey Newton said – developing what are Our Newton’s Laws –  that in the face of a single empire all concepts of nation-state sovereignty are false.  In the face of a single empire the entire world is in, as he said, a “reactionary intercommunal” relationship as all exist only to serve empire.  If, as Noam Chomsky has described, the U.S. has for decades sought to develop models of neocolonialism throughout its immediate sphere of influence, and as such by definition does not send its armies as “foreign occupiers” because as an empire its troops are “always on home soil” then we can extend that external model internally to find not U.S.-born citizens but internally-colonized citizen subjects policed in very much the same way.  Malcolm X remains correct that the police to locally what the military does internationally.  And, as we can discuss later, I am not saying anything that the very “founding fathers” did not in their own descriptions of this nation’s origins or purpose.  Ultimately, the point is that, as Tim Lake has said, what have developed during this country’s own evolution are “White attitudes toward Blacks {which constitute} an international discourse among European peoples.”  White supremacy as practiced in the United States is the local or national application of an external imperial policy, or set of policies.

So, by employing a model of internal colonialism, I am intentionally seeking to conceptually reconnect African America to a broader context of African people and all so-called “Third World” colonized people.  Understanding Obama’s selection and impact continues to be stifled to the extent that the dynamics of African history in the United States are disconnected from their African and international origins.  Similarly, misreading this nation’s history as itself being distinct from a broader European imperial project or attaching to it false notions of freedom or “democracy” equally confuse popular interpretation of Obama’s selection and impact.

By colonialism, again following Fanon, I simply mean the “complete conquering of land and people.  Period.”  I mean to describe a relationship of distinction, spatial and otherwise, where the land, labor and cultural expression of a community is used to enrich another and to maintain the former in a permanent state of colonization which, in turn, of necessity creates and maintains a permanent state of the settler as colonizer.  One cannot exist without the other.   Kwame Nkrumah described this in terms of economic models and their origins.  For capitalism the origins are slavery and socialism is contemporary African communalism.  And for him, capitalism practiced at home is internal or “domestic colonialism.”

And within a colony media function, not as defined by their “organized technologies,” but as defined by their ideological content.  In fact, media are disseminated ideology, which in this country have always been decidedly militaristic, a “fourth arm” of the military whose function, as described by Chris Simpson, are to “secure ideological victories.” The particular ideological character of U.S. mass media can be described in terms of: 1) Marx’s concept of commodity-formation as capitalism’s “original sin;” 2)  Greg Tate’s concept that America’s original “commodity-fetish” was African people; 3) Charles Husband and John Downing’s concept that “racism” is this nation’s “conceptual original sin;” and 4) that as Amos Wilson and Marimba Ani describe this requires an assault on African consciousness as a “political necessity… we must be kept out of our minds.”

Extending from this then is Obama’s relationship to the history of and need for  pan-Africanism.  It remains today, as said years ago by John Henrik Clarke, “pan-Africanism or perish.” By pan-Africanism we mean what Kwame Ture described as; the dissolution of continental borders and the unification of African people under scientific socialism.  This concept extends, obviously, beyond the continent itself to mean, as Peter Tosh said, “whether your complexion is high or low, if you’re Black you’re an African.”  This, as alluded to already, is absolutely antithetical to the role Africa has been targeted to continuously play in service to empire.  It shatters all concepts of coloniality and disturbs if not destroys the necessary outward flow of wealth, resources, and cultural expression to the West and, of course, destroys empire itself.  This explains, given the previously described origins of Barack Obama, and in sum, his selection of Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense; his selection of Goldman Sachs executives Lawrence Summers and Bob Reuben as his economic advisers; or the seeking of foreign policy advice from Zbigniew Brzezinski who as longtime council to power has described the ability of the U.S. to maintain itself as an empire unlike all others precisely because of its control of mass communication and popular entertainment which gives it an ability to apply the technology of mass communication as mechanisms of global order, or the application of such technology for the purposes of “cultural domination.”  It is as simple as they had selected him so it stands to reason that he would select them.

Racially, Obama’s connected distance to Blackness, or Africanness, was initially described by white pundits as his “not having the baggage of slavery.”  Thus, accordingly, he was safe, he was not one of this nation’s own Black people who whites know intrinsically are morally obligated and justified in being untrustworthy.  In a twisted and similar fashion, in a recent discussion of a conference on Obama and African identity at George Mason University it was noted how among many Black Americans Obama’s awkward distance from them was largely corrected by his selection of an African American wife.  She made him acceptably Black.  We must take this into consideration when also considering a point made by Glen Ford that this was the first election in post-World War II history that African Americans made no demands on the president pressing a Black agenda.  This has set us up for a tremendous confusion.  For as two recent polls suggest, that while Black unemployment and poverty are reaching all-time modern-era highs (17+% official unemployment) more Black people assume that we are making progress as compared to prior to Obama’s election.  This represents mass delusion which is frighteningly dangerous.  This is even worse when considering James Cones’ recent assessment that the very persistence of ghettoes and an expanding prison industrial complex demonstrate a modern-day mass “lynching” specifically designed to instill mass “terror” on the entire population.

Obama’s connected distance from this “baggage” made his distancing from the radical elements of African American anti-colonial, human rights struggle and political radicalism seem authentically Black, acceptable and sober-minded.  This, of course, was played out in his rejection of Reverend Wright and Minister Farrakhan, then again with his anti-historical declarations to Arabs during his speech in Egypt that violence has never assisted anyone’s liberation struggles.  And of course we know this to be foolishly false.  From Queen Nzingha to Nat Turner to Simon Bolivar to Nanny we know this is an absurd statement.  But his connected distancing was at play, at once a part of a people’s freedom struggle and able to denounce it.  In Ghana he was the same.  Neo-colonialism is not the issue, nor is it anything to do with Western imperialism.  Africa’s many crises are the fault of African corruption.  What has he said in light of the recent Guardian report which showed quite the opposite.  In fact, only 3% of the one trillion pounds stolen from the continent over the last 40 years and expropriated to the West could be attributed to any African corruption.  This was his Fanonian presence testifying against his own but with requisite authenticity.  It is his presence as Black but not Civil Rights Black which allows him to deny the need to address the concerns of African people with little if any public condemnation from African leadership here or abroad.

I’d like to close by putting a slight twist to a recent piece by Ralina Joseph in which she discussed the politics and application of multiracialism and identity.  She references the work also of Homi Bhabha who describes “hybridity” as “not a third term that resolves the tension between two cultures.”  Instead, “hybridity… is a peculiar replication which terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery.”  But, she continues, “while Bhabha argues that multiple, hybridized subject positions threaten, deform and displace US racial ideologies {Obama} affirms them.”  In this sense I must conclude, Obama’s bi-raciality, rather than terrorizing a system of categorization born out of a white supremacist imperial need for divide and rule, terrorizes the very communities in whose defense his racial positioning should be employed.  Thank you and as Fred Hampton, a great son of Chicago, used to say, “to you I say peace if you are willing to fight for it.”

*Q&A the begins.