A Look Back At The Important Life of Marvin Miller.
Archive for November, 2012
TIME: What’s Behind Cornel West’s Attacks on Obama
It’s becoming less and less fashionable to say it, but I still love Cornel West. We’ve been friends for over 15 years and during most of that time he has been a crucial American voice. But it’s sad how he’s damaged his image as an important thinker because of a series of attacks on President Obama and on other black intellectuals who have not been as critical of Obama such as Michael Eric Dyson and Melissa Harris-Perry and Reverend Sharpton. West’s critique is draped in rhetoric so inflammatory that it almost disqualifies itself from being taken seriously and risks him sounding like a rapper enmeshed in a battle. In his latest salvo earlier this week, he called the President a “Rockefeller Republican in blackface.”
There’s nothing wrong with critiquing the President, but the reference to blackface is a verbal Molotov cocktail. And it doesn’t even make sense: if Obama’s in blackface then he’s performing a grotesque caricature of blackness that is a white fantasy of a harmless, docile black person. Is that what he’s doing? Is Obama not the opposite of that as a calm, dignified, intellectual alpha male? I’m not really sure why blackface was mentioned or what it’s supposed to mean unless it’s a way of calling Obama an Oreo—black on the outside and white on the inside. But that’s just a guess. Earlier this year, West told TruthDig that Obama is “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.” I’m not sure why race is even injected into that critique.