[lbo-talk] BAR: The Peculiar Class Solidarity of Barack Obama and “Skip” Gates

[Alan Rudy]

Surely there's nothing new about this, is there?  Obama is Derek Jeter and
the Ivy's are the Yankees... just ask Gary Sheffield... but isn't there a
danger of reifying race by taking such a tack?
My sense is, particularly after the speech Obama gave in Philadelphia last
year, is that he is a Progressive striver... Progressive in that he sees
science-based policy applied to nature, society and culture by scientific
(read: professional) elites as the best and only way forward... and there is
very little that is democratic or class conscious about such a stance.  In
this realm, Moynihan's culture of poverty is seen as evidenced not only in
its most frequent application - poor urban Blacks - but also among poor
rural whites... witness the coincident development of rural and urban
poverty platforms in the 1960s, the former perceived as about Blacks and the
later understood to be about whites... its actually very interesting
relative to ideas of race, nature and space.
But this kind of Progressivism is little more then the evil twin, Skippy, to
any number of talented-tenth or five-percenter vanguardisms, isn't it?  In
short, whether conservative reactionary, liberal Progressive or left
radical, all varieties of elitism have peculiar modes of class solidarity.
Expecting reaction,
Alan

Joseph Catron <jncatron at gmail.com> wrote:


> "Sean Bell and Oscar Grant were shot down like dogs, but that was none
> of Barack Obama's concern. But when a local cop racially profiled Dr.
> Henry Louis Gates as if he were just another Black man, Obama's world
> shook. 'To be subsumed within the Black mass means class death. No one
> was safe!'"
>
>
> http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/peculiar-class-solidarity-barack-obama-and-%E2%80%9Cskip%E2%80%9D-gates
>
> --
> "Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre, mod sceal þe mare, þe ure
> mægen lytlað."
>
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