Obama, race and class 22 July 2013

The statement Friday by President Obama, during a carefully staged
“surprise” appearance in the White House briefing room, was a calculated
effort to exploit, for definite political ends, popular anger over last
week’s acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer. Martin, a 17-year-old African
American, was shot and killed by neighborhood watch volunteer George
Zimmerman in February of 2012.

Obama sought to accomplish a number of related goals. His remarks were
coordinated with nationwide protests over the verdict, with the aim of
associating himself with the victim’s family. At the same time, he
attempted to shore up dwindling public faith in a criminal justice system
that virtually guaranteed a not-guilty verdict. He vouched for the trial
and verdict, while signaling there would be no further federal action on
the case.

Above all, Obama sought to divert public attention away from any
consideration of the underlying social and class issues—rising poverty and
social inequality, the systematic promotion of individual violence and
right-wing vigilantism—in favor of an exclusive focus on the racial aspects
of the tragedy.

The commander in chief of the most powerful and aggressive military in the
world began by dressing himself in the garb of the victim. “Trayvon Martin
could have been me 35 years ago,” he said.

He made repeated references to the “African American community” in the
course of his 18-minute-long remarks. The presentation of America as an
aggregate of “communities” based on ethnicity is fundamentally reactionary.
Its main purpose is to cover over the deep class divisions that cut across
all ethnic and racial lines in America.

It lumps together privileged multimillionaires such as Al Sharpton, Jesse
Jackson and Obama himself with the masses of African American workers and
youth who have been the hardest hit by the crisis of American capitalism
and the policies of the Obama administration.

Obama does not speak for Trayvon Martin. He speaks for a different social
class, one whose interests are deeply antagonistic to those of the Martin
family and the broad mass of working people and youth of all races and
ethnicities.

The same day that Obama gave his remarks, the White House flatly rebuffed
suggestions that the federal government should come to the assistance of
the city of Detroit, forced into bankruptcy last week. Hundreds of
thousands of working people in the city, most of them African Americans,
face further punitive cuts in public services, jobs and living standards.
The Obama administration, which supplied trillions to the Wall Street banks
and tens of billions for the auto bosses, offers nothing at all to the
people of Detroit.

There is another reactionary dimension to Obama’s harping on race. He cited
the dismay of “the African American community” over the acquittal of
Zimmerman, as though only African Americans would be outraged at the
prospect of a black youth, guilty of nothing, being stalked and killed, and
the perpetrator going scot-free. The truth is that the outcome of the trial
was deeply unsettling to wide layers of the population.

Obama’s intervention in the Trayvon Martin case was hailed by the
corporate-controlled media as an event of transcendent political
importance. The president supposedly gave a glimpse of his innermost
feelings, demonstrating political “courage” and “moral leadership,”
according to the pundits on the Sunday morning television talk shows.

What cynicism! This is a government that has repeatedly asserted the
“right” to kill its political antagonists overseas, including American
citizens, using drone-fired missiles. It is engaged in systematic spying on
the communications of the population of the entire world. The American
government is, as Martin Luther King Jr. once observed, the greatest
purveyor of violence on the planet.

In its domestic policies, the Obama administration has systematically
defended the interests of the super-rich against the working class and
middle class population of all races and ethnic origins. Black, white,
Hispanic, Asian, immigrant—all sections of the working class have borne the
brunt of the economic crisis that followed the 2008 financial crash. While
Wall Street profits and CEO bonuses have been fully restored, the jobs and
living standards of working people have never recovered.

The Obama administration and the corporate-controlled media are pushing for
a “national discussion on race.” This is nothing more than an effort to
prevent any discussion of the class issues, in a country where the
socioeconomic divisions are more acute than at any time in a century.

In his remarks, Obama made no mention of unemployment or the social crisis
in America. Nor did he offer any policies. There were no proposals to
mitigate poverty and social misery, to provide jobs for the unemployed, or
to remedy the disproportionate impact of the economic crisis on the most
oppressed sections of the working class, including African American workers.

There is a tremendous amount of cynicism, self-interest and hypocrisy in
the official reaction to the killing of Trayvon Martin, including from
groups like the National Action Network, the pro-Democratic Party
organization run by Sharpton that organized the demonstrations over the
weekend. A whole layer of fake “progressives” whose stock-in-trade is
identity politics, including well-off African American politicians, pundits
and professionals, is using the tragic killing of Martin to promote the
politics of race—upon which their salaries and sinecures depend.

The aim is to advance the interests of more privileged layers of the
upper-middle class. Under conditions where millions of people are coming to
an understanding that there is something deeply rotten and dysfunctional
about the existing economic and political system, and the class chasm
separating the financial aristocracy from the broad masses of the people is
emerging ever more clearly, these forces harp on the issue of race in order
to sow divisions within the working class and channel social opposition
back behind the Democratic Party.

The central task of the working class is to free itself from the political
influence of these pro-capitalist elements and build an independent mass
political movement that will unite working people of all races and ethnic
backgrounds in a common struggle against the profit system.

Patrick Martin....
New Today

   - Detroit bankruptcy sets stage for national assault on public-sector
   pensions <http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/07/22/detr-j22.html>
   - Obama, race and
class<http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/07/22/pers-j22.html>
   - Detroit workers speak on city’s
bankruptcy<http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/07/22/inte-j22.html>
   - Court of Appeals rules Obama administration can force journalist to
   testify against alleged
leaker<http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/07/22/rise-j22.html>
   - US congressmen, complicit in NSA spying, posture as
critics<http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/07/22/cong-j22.html>

more articles » <http://www.wsws.org/en/>

<http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2012/10/lect-o04.html>


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