Revolution #148, November 23, 2008
On Obama, Redemption and the Need for a Scientific Understanding
The idea that Obama’s election shows something “redemptive” about America—including its ability to “self-correct,” even with regard to what have to be acknowledged as long-standing and profound injustices, such as the whole experience of Black people in this country—will not only be incessantly propagated by the ruling class in this country, including by Obama, but also by “allies” of the U.S. in other parts of the world—and it will have a “spontaneous resonance” with many “ordinary people” in countries throughout the world, who—like the masses of people, of all strata and nationalities, in the U.S.—lack a scientific understanding of the oppression of Black people, of the nature of U.S. society and its role in the world overall, and in general of social and political questions. Many will feel that the fact that so many white people could vote for an African-American for head of state in the U.S. shows that after all, even with many things people do not like about this country, it is “enlightened” and has made remarkable strides in overcoming its whole history with Black people. Here again, the analogy to Nelson Mandela/the ANC in South Africa is very relevant—as is the analogy to countries such as India and Pakistan, both of which have had female heads of state while at the same time the oppression of women has not only persisted—and has remained rooted in the very nature of those societies...as indeed it is in countries such as the U.S.—but has assumed markedly monstrous forms.
Of course, among other things, this spontaneous view (that the election of Obama, and in particular so many white people voting for him, shows something essentially positive about America) reflects, among other things, a fundamental misunderstanding of how decisions actually get made in this society, let alone of the actual nature of the oppression of Black people—and the continuation of this oppression, notwithstanding Obama’s election—in the very foundation, “fabric” and functioning of the capitalist-imperialist system in the U.S. This shows the importance of continuing to emphasize, and to illustrate in living ways, the basic truth that, while of course there has been—and, again, notwithstanding the election of Obama, there remains—deep-seated racism among many white people in the U.S., the oppression of Black people in this country is fundamentally and essentially not a matter of racist ideas—among ordinary white people, or even on the part of the powerful—but is a matter of everything that is gone into in our statement on “The Oppression of Black People, the Crimes of This System, and the Revolution We Need.” And this emphasizes all the more the importance of vigorously and even more widely disseminating this statement—including to an international “audience,” via the internet and through other means.
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