Barack Obama\u2019s election to the presidency was supposed to usher in a \u201cpost-racial\u201d era in American life.\u00a0 This, at any rate, is what the former Senator and his supporters in the media tried to sell us.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It was nothing short of a lie.<\/em><\/p>\n The President never had the slightest intention of using the visibility of his office to improve race relations between whites and blacks. \u00a0Moreover, if an improvement in race relations is what we were after, then there couldn\u2019t have been a worse person for us to have elected than Obama.<\/p>\n The reason for this is simpler than one may think: Obama is a \u201cBlackist,\u201d an adherent of \u201cBlackism.\u201d<\/p>\n Blackism is a racial ideology.\u00a0 <\/em>In this respect, it is differs sharply from black culture. <\/em>It also has little to do with mere skin color, biology, <\/em>or genetics. <\/em><\/p>\n Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, a black right leaning commentator, once told Sean Hannity in no uncertain terms that there are absolutely no <\/em>substantive differences whatsoever between <\/em>Obama, on the one hand, and such notorious race baiters as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, and Jeremiah Wright, on the other.\u00a0 They are all of one mind when it comes to their view of \u201cwhite <\/em>America\u201d and the place of blacks within it.\u00a0 More specifically, they regard America as a bastion of \u201cwhite racist oppression\u201d and perpetual black suffering. Their commitment, first and foremost, is to extracting reparations of one form or another from whites to give to blacks.<\/p>\n Peterson was correct.\u00a0 Obama\u2019s ever growing list of alliances and appointees\u2014from Wright, Farakhan, and Harvard professor Derrek Bell, to Van Jones and Attorney General Eric Holder\u2014reads like a rogue\u2019s gallery of white America\u2019s enemies.\u00a0<\/p>\n And it is hostility toward whites that we should expect from any proponent of Blackism.<\/p>\n An ideology invariably consists in a small number of abstract concepts systematically linked. Through these few ideas, the ideologue filters every <\/em>conceivable aspect of reality.\u00a0 An ideology isn\u2019t just a theory, mind you. Theories spring from consideration of this or that subject matter.\u00a0 Ideologies, in contrast, are comprehensive.\u00a0 The ideologue lives by his ideology alone.\u00a0 There is nothing to which he will not bring it to bear.<\/p>\n Now, Blackism is an ideology.\u00a0 The Blackist sees the entire world, <\/em>from \u201cthe beginning,\u201d so to speak, to the present, in terms of racial categories, yes, but, more importantly, from the perspective of black deprivation.\u00a0 Race is the organizing principle of his schemata, but \u201cBlackness\u201d is the category to which he ascribes most significance; all others are subordinated to it.<\/p>\n Yet we would be gravely mistaken if we assumed that it is with mere color that the Blackist is preoccupied.\u00a0 Not unlike any other concept, that of Blackness is not <\/em>self-interpreting.\u00a0 For the Blackist, membership in the Negroid race is a necessary condition of Blackness, though it is far from sufficient.\u00a0 Blackness signifies commitment <\/em>to the advancement\u2014\u201cby whichever means necessary,\u201d as the Blackist par excellence, <\/em>Malcolm X, famously stated it\u2014of the ideology of Blackism.\u00a0<\/p>\n In his book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of <\/em>Race and Inheritance, <\/em>Obama references Malcolm X numerous times.\u00a0 There is no person who appears to have more influenced his thinking.\u00a0<\/p>\n Again, the ideology of Blackism is not to be confused with black culture.\u00a0 This, though, isn\u2019t to suggest that there is no relationship between the two.\u00a0 There is: the former is a caricature or abridgment of the latter.\u00a0 That is, like any other ideology, the ideology of Blackism is an abstraction from a complex, concrete, historically-specific tradition.\u00a0 In this case, the tradition in question is that of what we call black culture.<\/p>\n Blackism, like any other ideology, supplies for its adherents a method, <\/em>a relatively few basic principles <\/em>or rules <\/em>to which any black person living in any place and at any time can subscribe.\u00a0 To put it more clearly, unlike so-called black culture, Blackism doesn\u2019t require immersion in a traditional form of life.\u00a0 Fluency in a culture is like fluency in a language; it is a hard won achievement that can be had only after much practice and over an extended period of time.\u00a0 Mastery of an ideology, in glaring contrast, is something that can be gotten within no time, for the rules or principles of an ideology are propositions <\/em>that readily lend themselves to memory.\u00a0<\/p>\n The difference between learning a culture and learning the ideology that is abstracted from it is the difference between, say, devoting time to the study of a literary classic, on the one hand, and, on the other, reading the cliff notes on it.\u00a0 The difference between culture and ideology is the difference between a living faith and a static creed.\u00a0<\/p>\n Those who have mastered a tradition engage in it effortlessly.\u00a0 Whether it is dancing, a martial art, or cooking, the professional dancer, the martial artist, and the chef seem to ply their respective crafts with all of the unselfconsciousness of a bird in flight.<\/p>\n Things are otherwise, however, with those who aspire <\/em>toward a connoisseurship in these areas (or any areas).\u00a0 The aspiring chef relies upon a cookbook (his <\/em>\u201cideology\u201d) and the aspiring martial artist and dancer too may very well consult books delineating \u201cstep-by-step\u201d lessons accompanied by photos and illustrations.\u00a0<\/p>\n The cooking student is to the chef what the Blackist is to the black person who was reared in black culture. The cookbook was written for the amateur cook; the chef has no need of it.\u00a0 Similarly, the ideology of Blackism was written for those blacks, and only those <\/em>blacks, <\/em>for whom black culture is an alien entity.\u00a0<\/p>\n Blacks like Barack Obama are most in need of Blackism.\u00a0 Obama was raised by whites a world away from America\u2019s ghettos.\u00a0 Most of his friends growing up were his white classmates from the prestigious, private institutions that he attended.<\/p>\n The ideology of Blackism was made for people like the President. And he has unapologetically embraced it.<\/p>\n Obama may be only half-black.\u00a0 But he is 100% Blackist.<\/em><\/p>\n Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Barack Obama\u2019s election to the presidency was supposed to usher in a \u201cpost-racial\u201d era in American life.\u00a0 This, at any rate, is what the former Senator and his supporters in the media tried to sell us.\u00a0 It was nothing short of a lie. The President never had the slightest intention of using the visibility of…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n