PrintJuly 8, 2009
40 Acres and a President
During the election, despite having been portrayed as America's first post-racial candidate, Barack Obama actually represented the complete opposite. With astonishing cunning and guile, a type that his opponents could have never imagined possible, Obama and his campaign unabashedly and tenaciously used race to goad Americans into believing that voting for him would right the wrongs of America's racial history.
Obama audaciously rode on the coattails of black America's historical circumstances in order to win the presidency. He deceived the nation into believing that he too was a "typical black person" and that a vote for him would offer a (painless) way for paying back all that whites had done to blacks and their ancestors. However, as one writer put it, "[Obama] steps into the benefits of black progress (like Harvard Law School) without having borne any of the burdens". By polluting the election with the foul stench of payback politics, and by dumbing-down the "black experience" for the historically ignorant and apathetic, Barack Obama was able to win what I call the Reparations vote.
But possessing the African coloanial mentality that he does, Barack Obama knew better. Indeed, with all due respect to the late Alex Haley, his national best selling book Roots: The Saga of an American Family does not tell the story of every person of African descent who lives in this country. Obama was perfectly aware of this -- but to win the election, he played the fool.
I speak candidly about all of this because of one very inconvenient truth about myself. I am a direct descendant of West African slave-traders. I come from a long line of people who for centuries made an exorbitant amount of wealth doing one thing particularly well: selling -- especially selling people. My Igbo ancestors, sold slaves to other Africans and to Europeans. Whenever, I travel back to that land of my ancestors I always ask to be taken to the museum that holds the relics of that horrible past. The chains and shackles that once held the ankles and wrists of those waiting to be sold are still there even though the money made from them is long gone.
I finally stopped crying over those relics a few trips ago. Instead, I've learned to just shake my head. Also, know that as a descendant of African slave traders living in this country, I am not unique in any way. To the contrary -- though I am invisible, I am at the same time one of many.
The reality is that Africans traded a great many slaves and there is no way of talking around this. During various epochs of their histories, Africans of all sorts from all across the African continent engaged in the business of owning and selling slaves. The Igbos alone, are said to have sent millions of slaves to the Americas during the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. No matter how many people try to circumvent this issue, it is a historical fact. It is also one of many inconvenient truths that need to be fully exposed and accounted for in order to put America's racial history within a more realistic context.
If America is to ever begin a real move towards racial healing and reconciliation then it must take a resolute stand against those who seek to distort and refashion history for their own gains. It is time to move away from the insipid, one-dimensional, and cherry-picked view of racism in which professional race-baiters continue to engage us. It is time to tell the many other sides of the story of bigotry and racism in America. It is time to stop holding one group of people completely accountable for all of the racial horrors of our nation's past. It is time for a change.
All of that being said, here is another reality: Barack Obama is obsessed with race -- but not in the way that you might think. Like so much else about himself, Obama has worked tirelessly to hide this fundamental truth from the American people. During the election, he was successful in doing this because unlike other well known race babblers (some of whom have also aspired to the presidency), Obama was smart enough not to rebel too forcefully -- in public -- against the racism that once held back millions. Instead, he rebelled against a contrived sense of racism and bigotry that he claimed had the potential to hold him back from his dreams of moving into the White House.
He did a great job of making whites feel guilty if they did not vote for him and blacks feel entitled to having him as their first black president. If this tactic worked to guarantee Obama the presidency, I wouldn't put past him to use it as a means for confiscating and redistributing private wealth.
Obama is clever. When his back has been up against a wall regarding race, he's offered soft platitudes against the injustices of the past while feigning reverence towards what blacks once went through in this country. (For instance, he did this during his race speech in Philadelphia, when the Reverend Wright controversy threatened to derail his chances for the presidency). But Obama couldn't care less about what black people in this country have gone through. What Obama cares about is using race as a means for creating a platform for one of his many wealth redistribution schemes. Reparations are a form of wealth redistribution.
Unbeknownst to many Americans, Congress has been quietly and diligently working to enact legislation that would study the viability of Reparations for black Americans. In June of this year, the Senate voted to formally apologize to black America for slavery and racial segregation -- but apparently this is not enough for some lawmakers. They want more; given everything that the Obama administration has been pushing on the American people, I would not be surprised if the issue of Reparations soon becomes a real part of the national conversation.
Make no mistake. Though Obama said during his campaign that he did not believe in Reparations outright, he is lying. Americans need to stop taking this man at face value. Obama has reneged on most if not all of his campaign promises; if need be, he will do the same with this one. Obama used payback politics to get the vote and if he can get away with it, he will also use it to financially destroy this country.
In his article, "Barack Obama's Lost Years", Stanley Kurtz writing for the Weekly Standard certainly did his best to expose Americans to the Obama agenda especially as it pertains to race. Though I think that Mr. Kurtz missed the mark regarding the roots of Obama's cultural pedigree, he nevertheless adeptly underscores what those of us who have been paying close attention already know: Obama is a divisive and race-conscious politician who will stop at nothing to "spread the wealth around" in an attempt to equalize and control the citizens of this country.
Kurtz begins with this overview:
Even more revealing are hundreds of articles chronicling Obama's early political and legislative activities in the pages not only of the Hyde Park Herald, but also another South Side fixture, the Chicago Defender...The pages of the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender thus offer entrée into Obama's
In a section of the article subtitled, "The Centrality of Race", Kurtz continues with this:
Yet the question of race plays so large a role in Obama's own thought and action that it is all but impossible to discuss his political trajectory without acknowledging the extent to which it engrosses him. Obama settled in Chicago with the declared intention of "organizing black folks." His first book is subtitled "A story of Race and Inheritance," and his second book contains an important chapter on race...Indeed, race functions for Obama as a kind of master-category, pervading and organizing a wide array of issues that many Americans may not think of as racial at all. Understanding Obama's thinking on race is a prerequisite to grasping his views on spending and taxation.
In addition to Kurtz's article there is also another more troubling piece of information that indirectly but conclusively links Obama to Reparations. Obama donated tens of thousands of dollars to Trinity United Church -- a church that is on record for openly and forcefully supporting Reparations for slavery. In another article, "Obama and the Drive for Slavery Reparations", Cliff Kincaid connects some very interesting dots.
According to Kincaid, Jeremiah Wright, Obama's mentor and pastor not only stood as "the keynote speaker at the 2007 annual conference of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America", but he is also on record for saying the following:
The Biblical principle of true repentance is that the offended party is given compensation to take up for that which has been stolen from them, the losses that have been inflicted upon them and their families.
And...
In 2001, Obama's Trinity United Church of Christ passed a resolution declaring that:WHEREAS: The institution of Slavery is internationally recognized as crime for which there is no statute of limitations,AND WHEREAS: Uncompensated labor was demanded from enslaved Africans and their descendants for more than two centuries on U.S. soil;AND WHEREAS: The principle that reparations is the appropriate remedy whenever government unjustly abrogates the rights of a domestic group or foreign people whose rights such government is obligated to protect or uphold has been internationally recognized...
Kincaid's article also reveals that Trinity United Church had other prominent members that viewed Reparations as the only viable way of dealing with the injustices of slavery. Trinity United Church -- located in Chicago, a city sometimes referred to as the "de facto center of the slavery reparations movement"-is the church that Obama used to build credibility within the black community. I find it impossible to believe that Barack Obama, a politician who before his inauguration as president, was on record as never taking a stand on anything, would take a stand against the black elite establishment on Reparations -- one of their most beloved pet projects.
No matter how the educated and "well meaning" liberal elites try to serve it up, the Reparations debate is not a difficult or complicated issue. Bottom line: just don't do it! Besides being morally outrageous and financially imprudent, a move towards paying Reparations is sure to expose a slew of inconvenient truths about racism and bigotry in America in a way that many will not be prepared to deal with. America's racial history is very complicated -- and using Reparations as the springboard for examining these complications will prove to be risky business.
There are other ways for us to come clean on issues regarding race. I implore Americans to stand together on this one. Don't let Reparations for slavery ever happen.
For comments: leikenga@gmail.com
