Black Politics In The Us

Much anticipation heralded the 2008 election of President Barack Hussein Obama. From the posters to the Nobel Peace Prize, the wish fulfillment of a nation wracked by racial politics, a victory for hope, democracy for the rest of us. What is surprising now, after the end of his second term as President, is that we were unable to exercise progressive changes in the description of race through this process of having elected the first Black President. In fact, most indications are now that the election of Barack Obama has instead been used as a pretense to consolidate and improve the extraction of resources through the imprisonment, underemployment, and mis-education of African Americans. The years of Obama's presidency will be seen as those that saw the refinement of the mechanisms by which a Black elite could be identified and required to monitor and control or represent this exploitation as democratic, as the best that the society could do, given the paucity of ambition, the lack of intellectual rigor, the difficulty of living as a Black person in the ghettos scattered across the metropolitan US, the plight of those seemingly neglected in the countryside.