On Feb 13, 2008, at 10:18 AM, shag at cleandraws.com wrote:
> you know what bothered me Obama's speech last night. The way he
> emphasizes
> how much you have to work hard to have the american dream.
Yup - this is one of the points of that wonderful quote from Adolph Reed I posted earlier. Now I've got a conclusin and a source: his column from the Village Voice in 1995 or 1996, reprinted in his book Class Notes with the title "The Curse of Community."
> In Chicago, for instance, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed
> of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a
> smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and
> vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate
> seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development
> worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina
> of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in
> kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the
> predictable elevation of process over program -- the point where
> identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform
> in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave
> of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever else
> the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist
> response hasn't been up to the challenge. We have to do better.