At an Obama “Tax Evading” Foundation (because that is what foundations are in the U.S – they are untaxable), the former U.S president made the following comments:
“If you are really confident about your financial situation, you probably are not going to be wearing an eight pound chain around your neck because you know ‘Oh, I got bank.’ I don’t have to show you how much I got. I feel good. If you are very confident about your sexuality, you don’t have to have eight women around you twerking.”
This is not the first time Obama has engaged in speaking down to people he’s never really had to live with, and know proper! Obama grew up in Hawaii, and Indonesia. Obama’s political marriage to Michelle is also no privilege gained for him to continue to speak down to African American communities that he barely ever mentions otherwise. One political marriage in an African American community is not a real effort to know all African American communities and their suffering under American white supremacism!
So let’s face the facts. Under Obama, African American unemployment got worse. Wealth transfer to Caucasian Americans intensified, and the wealth gap between Blacks and whites got worse. There was zero reform for the mass incarceration of Black men by white men for absolutely no law enforcement reason. Under Obama white men lynched so many black men in broad daylight comparable to periods under US chattel slave history.
Yet, this white man has the bravura to signify blackness, and re-signify blackness, again and again in speeches and pep-talks, and chastise what he perceives to be Black men behavior, as if all that Black men do in America is wear eight pound chains and dance around eight twerking women. What with eight? See how ignorant this Caucasian president is about African Americans? See the nonsense?
How about Obama go to Redneck Pennsylvania and advise his fellow white men that their show of masculinity by enacting utter violence on African American communities is no manhood at all. How about Obama go to Zimmerman nation and tell his fellow white men there that shooting down unarmed Black men for absolutely no human reason is no manhood at all. How about Obama go to country Tennessee and advice his fellow white men there that putting Black men in jail for free labor is not the best show of white manhood. That white men too can farm, labor and dig trenches for themselves. How about that for a change, Obama?
It’s ironic isn’t it? A white man speaking about other people’s finances at his tax evading event!
Really? I think we need to take his criticisms positively too, sometimes we over the cliff with our music displaying too much sexuality and bragging about wealth. He may not be entirely right but he may also not be completely wrong!
The African American musical content in previous decades was astonishingly different having been inspired by the African American intellectual and cultural awakening that started in the 1920s dubbed the “Harlem Renaissance” (although it wasn’t restricted to New York); this Renaissance is what birthed what we now fondly refer to as the pop music culture that has grown and mutated from its original roots in rythm and blues and jazz. More importantly this African American cultural development is acts as the bedrock upon which the American music industry has been built.
But the industry is to a large owned and controlled by the whites who among other reasons have had the privilege of accumulating capital through slavery…it is this clique that strives to portray blacks in a certain way and perhaps by so doing they “put back the blacks in their place”. I would even think it’s no accident in the way the deliberate targeting of drug peddling in black neighborhoods coincided with the denigration of African American music; and after a few decades of this machinations of the narrative has changed to blaming blacks…
But when you peel back the veil of time you see things very differently; there wouldn’t have been American cultural and intellectual advancement in the 20th century without the Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King as critical thinkers and Robert Johnson (the king of rythm and blues), Muddy Waters (the rolling stone), John Coltrane (the jazz “preacher”)…to name just but a few who’s music was the basis upon which white pop stars and boy bands were churned out by the industry in the form of Elvis, Clapton, Rolling Stones etc literary as mimicking artists!
And perhaps, given this emerging white vs black cultural narrative inherited from slavery; we can also not rule out the possibility that the white music industry deliberately undermines and degrades Afrocentric music as way to elevate its white pop star surrogates…
As you describe, this is Cultural Appropriation of African American Culture by whites.
This dude has no right talking this way when he went about bombing African countries and destabilising them; he won’t dare speak like this against Caucasians.
I blame y’all black people for this nonsense.
I blame my self, paramount.
Narmer, I remember you cheered this man on for his first term.
I was naive. I learned. Watching him mature as a man made me grow up as well. He is not African, he is not Black, he is not African American. He is a white man who grew up in Hawaii, who happened to have married an African American woman for political reasons.
We all did and even bought his books ??
I don’t think I understood his answer to the question the same way you did. We may have to make a fair analysis of the white supremacy’s reaction to Obama’s election. It looks like we are blaming Obama for not seizing the terrorist system to free his people. The system is not capable of that.
Yeboah, it is not that I blame Obama. It is simply that I seriously think I got his politics wrong. Obama has no African American experience. I used to think that he did. But he has never lived once as a Black man in America. Obama can be truly understood when we can admit who he really is: a white boy who grew up in Hawaii. Beyond that the fact that he claims his father is Kenyan goes to prove the point even further that he is also an immigrant. Obama has zero African American experiences. There are some of us African immigrants who have lived among the poor, the dead and the destitute in Black America. Not by choice per se, but we’ve lived among them. And some of us have learned, perhaps not quickly, that the plight of Africa America is not well-understood by people who’ve never experienced it. Talk is cheap. Obama talks. He does not act. And there’s the difference. Everything he knows, he’s heard. Not experienced. There’s the difference.
Narmer Amenuti, I understand you, he has not lived the life of African Americans but are you discounting his years as a community organizer among African-Americans? He sacrificed his life after law school to learn. His problem as a president was seeking approval from the white supremacy system to do anything
I am not sure that his resume as a community organizer in Chicago reflects any conscious effort by him to actually engage in the lived experiences of African Americans. I am not sure that that project wasn’t a political move in Chicago, the only way he knew possible to become a senator. The fella is ambitious, that said, it is a far cry from being sincerely engaged with the African American experience proper. I doubt he did. His every move has been ambitious at best, and politically motivated.
I think though he is not a typical African American, he has been involved with the community enough through marriage and social acclimatization to understand. Do you think the system will allow a pure African American with African believe and orientation become president?
The answer to the question is, emphatically no. An African American will not be elected president of the U.S. A true Native Black person in America will not even be allowed to become the DNC candidate. That is the problem of America. The race problem. That is the charge that Africa America is now leveling against America. This idea of a post-racial America is imaginary, especially seeing and admitting that Obama wasn’t Black at all. That he was at heart, white! African Americans have always leveled that America is not beyond race, but the lovers of diversity and post-racial America insist that Obama’s election marked a transition to a post-racial nation. It didn’t. Therefore in order to make America see the point, the idea of Obama as a Black man in America, the very idea of Obama as African American must be deconstructed. That is the crucial way to lay bare the hypocrisy of a post-racial America.
I see. The problem is we are in the minority against the terrorists who are very united in their quest to maintain white supremacy
The least said about him the better.
Obama was my role model. The epitome of hope during his first campaign. But when he invaded Iraq and murdered the African statesman in the guise of establishing “democracy”, I knew this man is anything but African.
Obama failed every single soul that ever supported his ascent to the White House.
He sure did! He revealed to all of us that after all the wolf still often comes to us in sheep’s skin. Obama is a white man in African skin. Obama is an imposter. Obama is a colonial terrorist!
Kefa, is it really even true, is it widespread wisdom, even in Kenya, that Obama is actually the son of Obama Sr.? Some of us see no likeness to Obama Sr. However, we could be wrong, some children bear no likeness at all to one of their parents, ever! Who knows? I would like to know if there’re any conspiracies pervasive in Kenya about this issue?
Knowledge and wisdom is lost on this man. He’s claimed to have praised Michelle who is known to be a huge fun of Beyonce. In fact, Beyonce is her idol. At the same time taking shots at her entire career and what she stand for?
What does it also say about his parade of these singers on his campaign platforms? This man is pitiful