Imagine Blogs

I just finished reading an opinion on Counterpunch by one Kevin Alexander Gray, an African American political activist. Gray argues that in an attempt to pander to white Americans (here, we go again on ethnic politics), Obama is working overtime to criticise and show what is wrong with Black America.

He wonders why Obama, in his criticism of Black America, makes blanket statements about all Blacks, and especially black men. He wonders if Obama's anger towards black men is because of his own father's abandonement (seriously, Obama Snr was black, but hardly an American).

That would explain why he kicked his father “under the bus” implying he had acted like a “boy” when he and his wife divorced each other. Was she acting like a “girl” at the time? It is as simple as one parent being good or a victim and the other a bad victimizer? And, what of the fact that both his mother and father remarried? Is it his wish that his mom and biological dad had remained unhappily married? Does he wish his half-sister had never been born? Is he against divorce? How does he feel about forced or even loveless marriages? Maybe he believes there should be a required economic declaration before a woman gives birth and that two signatures on paper are required before conception?

Gray particularly takes issue with Obama's Father's Day speech:

"Too many fathers are M.I.A., too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men," [Obama said].

It was no big surprise that after the speech those critical of Obama were dismissed “as out touch” with the new “post-racial” illusion. Bob Herbert of The New York Times appearing on MSNBC’s Hardball went so far as to say that anyone who disagreed with Obama’s Father’s Day admonition to black men was living in a racial “fog” of the past. Newspapers across the county affirmed the smear with headlines like “Obama tells black men to shape up” or “Obama speaks ‘inconvenient truth’ to black men” or “Obama calls black men irresponsible” or “He's saying things people don’t want to hear” - with the inference that truth was flowing from his tongue.

Gray then talks about a conversation he has with an African American woman who needs no prodding in saying what is "wrong with black men."

She’s a former New York State prosecutor but I’ve never consciously deducted points from her humanity for her past employment choice. But in our conversation she threw out all the standard lines, “black men aren’t taking care of their kids,” and “they are sorry.” I countered by saying most social psychologists believe that an adolescent girl is more mature than an adolescent boy, so, who do we pin being the most irresponsible on? I asked her: If we believe that it is a woman’s right to chose whether or not to be a mother, then why should irresponsible black fathers be the sole point of Obama’s attack? And why should any aspect of black male-female relations be grist for the campaign mill?

Gray's daughter had a baby when she was 25. She later parted ways with the child's father and is now married to someone else who has his own children from a previous marriage. Gray demonstrates that it was not easy for the families to blend, but they eventually did. In a conversation with his son-in-law, Gray asks if single parents, single fathers blended families, unmarried people with children are as "irresponsible as Obama infers."

Ex-offender, former unmarried father of three, rap music producer, isn’t he one of those whom Obama is condemning? On paper, anyway. Yet, he has raised three good kids.

Gray concludes that "Obama is not one of us." He knows that Obama will not change the lives of people much, not in the ways they expect changes to happen.

What's your take? Is Obama pandering to white America at the expense of "his own kind".