“I would say the first black president has become the first niggerized black president.”
“… of course, if it wasn’t for Al Sharpton and a whole host of other activists, you wouldn’t even have racial profiling as a major issue in national discourse.”
”Al Sharpton is Obama’s house negro.”
“I would like to thank Brother Minister Louis Farrakhan for having the vision and determination to bring us together.”
”Obama is a Rockefeller Republican in blackface.”
[Obama is] “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats. And now he has become head of the American killing machine and is proud of it.”
“He [Obama] posed as if he was a kind of Lincoln. And we ended up with a brown-faced Clinton.”
“Obama, coming out of Kansas influence, white, loving grandparents, coming out of Hawaii and Indonesia, when he meets these independent black folk who have a history of slavery, Jim Crow, Jane Crow and so on, he is very apprehensive. He has a certain rootlessness, a deracination.”
In 2000, West supported Nader. Bush was “very dangerous,” but Gore was “dangerous.” In 2004, he supported Kerry, because, well, he’d learned his lesson. In 2011, he joined with Nader in trying to find a credible politician to primary Obama. Lesson unlearned.
West is a piece of work. Oh, I’m not saying he’s a bad man, because he stands for great things, things that almost everyone reading this supports. But he is a very bad man to be in the position that Bernie has put him in. He’s spent the last seven years levelling brutal, racially-charged attacks at Obama (after aggressively campaigning for him in 2007-08), and is now going to be on a panel full of Obama loyalists shaping the Democratic Party’s platform? It could turn out fine. He’s just one, albeit loud, opinionated, and tactless, voice. And maybe being given some real input will take some of the edge off his anger and bitterness, as it often does. But it could also blow up. Spectacularly. At a time when the Democratic Party is looking to unify itself to defeat what is supposed to be a common opponent.
Putting West there at all, given his record, was another of Bernie’s deliberate, passive-aggressive slaps in the face of the Democratic Party. If West behaves like the West of the past, he could very easily add injury to insult. For Nader, against Nader, for Nader, for Sharpton, against Sharpton, for Sharpton, for Obama, against Obama — nobody knows what this guy is going to be, hardly from one day to the next. The one good thing about this is it’s very likely the last position Bernie is ever to nominate anyone to in the Democratic Party.