Shirley Sherrod Thrown Under the Bus

Obama: CEO of Racist American Capitalism

Tea Party: Spearhead of Racist Reaction

Shirley Sherrod’s forced resignation from her USDA (Department of Agriculture) post on July 19 was but the latest slap in the face to America’s black population by the Obama administration. Sherrod’s departure also caused no small amount of distress for Democratic Party liberals, black spokesmen and the reformist left, all of whom had sold the lie that Obama’s ascension to office marked a historic turning point in the struggle of the black masses against their oppression. Based on a phony report of supposedly racist remarks made by Sherrod at an NAACP event in March concerning a 24-year-old incident—a report issued by the notorious con man and Tea Party demagogue Andrew Breitbart—Obama’s administration instantly swung into action, browbeating Sherrod by phone, while she was driving her car, into immediately submitting her resignation with her Blackberry.

The NAACP under its president Ben Jealous promptly endorsed this action. Having been chastised about its complaints of overt Tea Party racism, the NAACP took pains to remove any taint of supposed “reverse racism,” intoning: “Racism is about the abuse of power. Sherrod had it in her position at USDA. According to her remarks, she mistreated a white farmer in need of assistance because of his race. We are appalled by her actions, just as we are with abuses of power against farmers of color and female farmers.” A couple of days later, when the report was revealed to be a Tea Party fraud and the white farmer spoke out in Sherrod’s defense, the administration and the NAACP raced to apologize to the onetime civil rights activist. Sherrod has since accepted their apologies while refusing the administration’s offer of another government job.

The Tea Party is simply the most recent manifestation of good old American racist, nativist reaction. The Tea Party’s roots go back to the racist backlash against the limited gains for blacks and women that resulted from the civil rights movement and other social upheavals of the 1960s. As we wrote in Part One of “Economic Crisis and the Capitalist State” (WV No. 961, 2 July):

“That backlash eventually took the form of opposition to ‘big government’—identified with court-ordered racial integration in the public schools, giving jobs to blacks and women under affirmative action programs and handing out welfare money to poor black women and their children (a demagogic lie since relatively few government funds went to the poor, black or white). This boiled over into the ‘tax revolt’ of the late 1970s…which propelled Ronald Reagan into the White House and began the ascendancy of the Republican right in national politics.”

For some time it has been the norm in bourgeois politics to portray programs offering even the tiniest amelioration of the black masses’ wretched conditions as “reverse discrimination,” with the corollary that blacks are painted as “racist” for protesting discrimination and deprivation. Now, with a black man as president and in the context of the economic woes that are ravaging most Americans (and especially black people), and with no appreciable social struggle to try to offset those woes, racist reactionaries feel less and less constrained to hide behind the fiction of “reverse discrimination.”

Shortly before the March 20 Congressional vote on Obama’s health care bill, Tea Party protesters yelled the “N” word at civil rights veteran John Lewis and other black Congressmen and spat on another while confronting openly gay Congressman Barney Frank with homophobic slurs. Laura Schlessinger’s recent efforts to capture the Guinness record for use of the “N” word on the radio; South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham’s proposal to modify the 14th Amendment, which gave citizenship to black freedmen following the Civil War, so that U.S.-born children of immigrants are excluded from citizenship; the recent Tea Party anti-immigrant mobilization on the Arizona-Mexico border: all are testimony to the exacerbation of open racist/white chauvinism fueled by these types. To take as good coin reports of black “racism” from such sources is not that far from accepting a fascist exposé of bloodless Christian babies found in the basements of synagogues.

It is no less guileless to accept Obama’s pretense that he was unaware of the actions taken to dump Sherrod. He has bent over backward to address each and every complaint from these quarters, ditching the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for excoriating American racism at the beginning of his campaign and firing Van Jones, a black administration official who dared to proclaim the innocence of death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, last year. Nor should one forget Obama’s attempt, over a cold one, to educate Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the cop who rousted him for attempting to enter his own home, in the Miss Manners approach to black-police community relations. That was an attempt to placate the nationwide outrage from law enforcement officials over the president’s initial statement that the cop had acted stupidly. At least the relatives of Oscar Grant—a young black worker killed in cold blood by a white transit cop in Oakland in 2009 —were spared Obama’s revolting pieties.

There were outcries of protest over Sherrod’s firing from those who have promoted Obama. Perhaps none of those were more apologetic for Obama’s rush to judgment than that of black author and political commentator Earl Ofari Hutchinson. “If Obama talked candidly about race and tried to spark a dialogue on race as some clamor for him to do,” Hutchinson wrote in a 22 July Internet posting, “it would turn his administration into a referendum on race. This would turn the GOP and tea party counterinsurgency into a red hot fire. Obama’s rush to judgment on Sherrod had nothing to do with fear and only tangentially with a terrible misread of the information about her purported racial statement. It had everything to do with the price of White House governance. The price is a politically constricted, race neutral presidency.” Thus black people are told that the price they must pay for Obama’s ascendancy to the White House is, simply, to shut up and take it.

Few commentaries were more poignant than that of black New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, who wrote in a 23 July op-ed piece titled “Thrown to the Wolves”: “Black people are in a terrible condition right now—economically, socially, educationally and otherwise—and there is no effective champion fighting for their interests. Mr. Jealous and the new edition of the N.A.A.C.P. have shown in this episode that they are not ready for prime time, and President Obama seems reluctant to even utter the word black. Or poor, for that matter.” The answer posed by Herbert was considerably less than inspiring: “There is no way we’ll overcome those divisions if people who should know better keep bowing before and kowtowing to the toxic agenda of those on the right whose overriding goal is to foment hostility and hate.”

The liberals who promoted Obama for the presidency wish he would pay them more attention and hang with them, perhaps while shooting some hoops. The fake socialists, who touted him as an agent of positive change, want to force him to do the right thing. The International Socialist Organization (ISO) and other reformists are publicizing the “One Nation” march on Washington on October 2, a mobilization being heavily built by the pro-capitalist AFL-CIO union bureaucracy. The call for that action pompously proclaims that the march will “charge up an army of tens of thousands of activists who will return to their neighborhoods, churches, schools and, especially, voting booths, with new energy to enact our common agenda. And on the same day, the labor movement will walk door-to-door in targeted states around the country, bringing the same message to union members exactly one month before the fall elections.”

The ISO, in an article by Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor in Socialist Worker (28 July), intones: “Without a politically independent, activist challenge to the right-wing lies and distortions about racism—and the liberal acquiescence to them—the right will continue to shape and dominate the debates and discussions about racism. And that will make it impossible to have ‘civil and human rights in this country’.” These fight-the-right sentiments were expressed in the same fashion by the same liberals and leftish groups two years ago during Obama’s campaign. This political stutter is no accident. The bourgeois liberals and their left hangers-on are the apostles of reforming the racist, blood-soaked American imperialist order, and they display the persistence of Pepe Le Pew in their pursuit of this fantasy.

To be sure, there seems to be no compromise or concession this president will not consider. But it is not his lack of spine that renders him bankrupt in dealing with the agonies faced by working and black people. Obama, America’s first black president, was elected after decades during which social struggle withered and militant strike activity all but disappeared. According to him, the racial oppression of black people has been all but completely put to rest by the changes conceded to the civil rights movement during the Lyndon Johnson presidency. The only change Obama has offered in U.S. imperialism’s wars of conquest has been to select a different one to focus on. Meanwhile those facing the vicissitudes of the grinding depression are offered nothing, while the bankers are assured of salvation.

Obama may compare poorly to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, although in reality the immediate impact of their respective anti-depression measures is comparable. Neither significantly addressed the plight of America’s toiling and poor people, although Roosevelt’s occasional demagogic critiques of the fat cats gave some solace to capitalism’s unfortunate victims. Obama simply is what he is, his skin color notwithstanding: the overseer of the most deadly and exploitative imperialist order on the planet.

Following his election, we wrote in “Obama: CEO of Bankrupt American Capitalism” (WV No. 930, 13 February 2009): “The bourgeoisie will hardly spend money on improving the condition of the masses unless it is forced to do so. Especially since the counterrevolution in the former Soviet Union in 1991-92, capitalists internationally have sought to increase their competitiveness against their rivals by taking an ax to whatever gains workers have been able to achieve.” Shortly before, Obama had given an interview to the Washington Post (16 January 2009), which reported his intention “to rein in health-care costs, stabilize Social Security and prevent the Medicare program from bankrupting the government.”

It is Obama’s job as chief executive of the U.S. capitalist state to administer the race/caste oppression of black people that is built into this country’s economy and is invaluable to the rulers as an obstacle to unified struggle against the predatory capitalist order. That order must be combated by working-class and social struggle. It must be overthrown through proletarian socialist revolution. But it must be remembered that during the massive strikes of the 1930s and the social struggles of the 1950s and ’60s, the predecessors of today’s liberals and reformists no less than now plied their trade: the binding of the outraged masses to the reform pretenses and candidates of the Democratic Party, then and now the other main party of the bosses’ rule.

It requires the forging of an internationalist, revolutionary Trotskyist working-class party to relentlessly expose the treachery of the would-be reformers of capitalist anarchy and to lead the working class and dispossessed to consign imperialism to the graveyard of history. And in this country, the main banner of such a party must be: Finish the Civil War! For black freedom through socialist revolution!