Obama has taken a knife and stabbed blacks and other marginalized minorities in the back for the first time in his presidency. Today, Amy Goodman from Democracy Now reported on the mischievous and disingenuous way that The Obama Administration avoided the World Conference against Racism in the following piece:
http://www.democracynow.org/...
The piece was surrounded around the following work of Naomi Klein about the original World Conference in 2001: http://harpers.org/...
Before people read another word of my diary, I strongly urge you watch the piece by Ms Goodman and read Ms. Klein's work.
The details that are offered in the piece are quite disturbing, especially if you are a minority who supports Obama. Obama is a coward and a trickster - a political hustler of the worse kind. Obama essentially used the president of Iran as a scapegoat along with false accusations about the Conference’s perceived antipathy towards Israel to sidestep the intellectual discussion about reparations and World Wide racism altogether. The piece details how the Congressional Black Caucus –with Barbara Lee leading the charge- went through extraordinary measures to get the UN to exclude inflammatory rhetoric about Israel from the declaration of the conference in order to encourage the US to attend. The Obama administration, despite the very difficult efforts of the Congressional Black Caucus, decided not to attend using many falsehoods peddled about the conference as the reason.
The reporting done by Amy Goodman, along with the piece discussed by Naomi Klein, chronicles how Obama shrewdly sidesteps dealing with the very real and increasing problem of racism in The US and the world in general. It’s suggested that Obama sidesteps dealing with this problem because right wing extremist have already painted him as some sort of left wing black radical and that mere discussion of race will validate that false perception. Because of this racial misinformation campaign from the far right, Obama has cowardly and dishonestly avoided a genuine discussion about the perils of racism, even when it is partly because of racism (Townhalls!) that one of his biggest policy proposals has been derailed: Health Care Reform. What’s most disturbing about the reporting done by Ms. Goodman is how Obama undercut the very efforts of the Black Americans in Congress to run from an issue that affects millions of people globally everyday- this is why I called him a coward and a trickster. The piece speaks for itself. I know the knee jerk reaction by the Obama cult supporters will be to excuse his behavior because of the many agenda items on his list. Those who feel this way obvious don’t have a full understanding of how bad racism is for minorities or how race in general, affects the very agenda items that Obama is dealing with on the daily.
I would be lying if I said that as an African American, I am not more offended by these dishonest and cowardly actions by the "first black president". This is a huge shame on president Obama, not just because he didn’t attend the conference, but because of the dishonest way he sidestepped an issue that affects the lives of millions worldwide.