Obama is a Cracker

"They have a new gimmick every year. They're going to take one of their boys, black boys, and put him in the cabinet so he can walk around Washington with a cigar. Fire on one end and fool on the other end. And because his immediate personal problem will have been solved he will be the one to tell our people: ‘Look how much progress we’re making. I’m in Washington, D.C., I can have tea in the White House. I'm your spokesman, I'm your leader.’ While our people are still living in Harlem in the slums. Still receiving the worst form of education."
--Malcolm X

CEMOTAP organized a debate up in Harlem on whether Obama was good for African People. hmmm..they also organized a celebration for Obama's victory back on November 9th, so we already knew where they stood on the issue, which may have been why they didn't invite me or any other Revolutionaries up to the debate. The participants agreed to a self-imposed ban on the "c" word. I came late so had no choice but to guess what that "c" word was, that the debaters kept hinting at("i'm not gonna use the c word"). At some point I realized the word must have been cracker. As in Obama's better than the 43 crackers that got to be President before him, or Obama is gonna make these crackers respect us now. Nice thought because doesn't everybody hate crackers--I know I do--but false because Obama-is-a-cracker. To borrow a sentiment from my fellow BK native Jay-Z, now I don't mean that in the sense of having pale white skin. But in the sense of being the new face of our oppression. Well, the "c" word might as well have been c.i.a., capitalist, coon which I thought would have all been apt for a discussion on Obama, yet somehow none of these words crossed the lips of any of the "debaters" either.

Instead, we were subjected to some very militant sounding rhetoric signifying nothing, by those who were pro-Obama. Some of them sounded downright confused. As if they were looking for some shred of evidence of "change we can believe in" to hang onto. Somebody said he was giving us winks. It's cool that he don't talk about "black issues" and that he ran a "post-racial" election cuz he's still down. He created a Urban Policy iniative. That's not a token iniative, that's a wink ya'll. One even had the audacity to point to us and say we wouldn't even be here if it wasn't for that great cracker Obama. By the same twisted, confused logic we should thank a cracker for shooting Amadou 41 times because that brought us together. We should thank the cracker slavers for bringing us together in this wonderful country. We should thank the crackers that came up with Jim Crow, man we got a lot a crackers to thank. But the greatest cracker of all time has got to Mr. Obama.

Another one got up and said "I aint gonna intellectualize, I'm gonna go off emotion". Now there's some truth in advertising. If only all the "debaters" could have been this honest, I wouldn't have been so mad and I could have enjoyed it on solely entertainment value, the same way you can enjoy the WWF, or commercial hip-hop. Man, I knew it was gonna be in a church, but nobody told me there was gonna be testifying. "That's right I voted for Obama--this is for my grand daddy and my grandmama who couldn't vote for such a beautiful black (Cracker) man". Well, guess what, yo Granddaddy and grandmama used to have a name for those of us who wanted to go live in the big house. We didn't use to testify about how the cracker was good to us either, we used to say "eat dirt and die you cracker". Those were the days.