The Charleston Massacre, the Legacy of the Confederacy, and the Ongoing Hegemony of Modern White Supremacy in the United States--FURTHER UPDATES AND ANALYSIS

Jitterbugs
by LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka

The imperfection of the world
is a burden, if you know it, think
about it, at all. Look up in the sky
wishing you were free, placed so terribly
in time, mind out among new stars, working
propositions, and not this planet where you
can’t go anywhere without an awareness of the hurt
the white man has put on the people. Any people. You
can't escape, there's no where to go. They have made
this star unsafe, and this age, primitive, though yr mind is somewhere else, your ass aint.

(Published in Negro Digest, April 1966)

"...And it still is News..." as the late/always Great LadyDay aka Billie Holiday once put it...


Meanwhile check...this...out...Long Live Black Folks Everywhere!...Yes!

THANK YOU SISTER BREE ANN NEWSOME. IF ONLY THERE WERE A MILLION MORE JUST LIKE YOU...

 
http://www.usatoday.com/…/south-carolina-confeder…/29383973/

Pair released on bond after removing Confederate flag at S.C. Capitol
by Tony Santaella, WLTX, and Doug Stanglin
USA TODAY
June 27, 2015



COLUMBIA, S.C. — A black female activist in a helmet and climbing gear scaled a flagpole in front of the South Carolina State Capitol Saturday morning and briefly removed a controversial Confederate battle flag.

The woman, who law enforcement identified as 30-year-old Bree Ann Byuarium Newsome, and a male companion were arrested and released later in the day after posting bond.

In a video of the incident, security officers can be heard yelling, "Ma'am come down off the pole."

Newsome can be heard saying, "You come against me in the name of hatred, repression, and violence. I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today."

After scaling the 30-foot pole and retrieving the flag, she and her companion were arrested by State Capitol police who waited for her at the bottom inside a small, wrought-iron fence.

As she was being led off in handcuffs, Newsome could be heard reciting the 23rd Psalm from the Bible.

The flag, which is protected by state law, was hoisted again about 45 minutes later. A pro-flag rally was previously planned at the site Saturday morning.

"We removed the flag today because we can't wait any longer. We can't continue like this another day," Newsome said in a statement issued around the time of her arrest. "It's time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality."

Sherri Iacobelli, a spokeswoman for the state Department of Public Safety, said that Newsome, and a companion, James Ian Tyson, 30, both from Charlotte, were charged with defacing monuments on state Capitol grounds. The misdemeanor charge carries a fine of up to $5,000 and a prison term of up to three years or both.

A judge gave them each a $3,000 bond and told them they were allowed to leave the state if they wished. Democratic state Rep. Todd Rutherford of Columbia, who also is attorney, will represent Newsome. Rutherford is minority leader of the state House of Representatives.

The activist group known as Ferguson Action released video of the incident on Twitter .

Activist Bree Newsome told police she was "prepared to be arrested" as she removed the Confederate flag flying in front of the South Carolina State House. Newsome scaled the 30-foot pole, retrieved the flag, and was promptly arrested. VPC

"The flag is gone," Ferguson Action said on Twitter, congratulating "local organizers" for the operation. It also tweeted a photo of the woman being taken away by police.

The flag has been at the center of a heated debate following the killing of nine black parishioners at a historic black church in Charleston on June 17.

Gov. Nikki Haley, a Republican, has called for the removal of the flag, and the state General Assembly has agreed to debate the issue next month.

Lonnie Randolph Jr., president of the South Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, said the two activists were apparently "well-intentioned," but he counseled that "(i)mpatience must always be tempered by purpose and prudence."

"This is not yet the time for civil disobedience, but a time for grieving over the tragedy in Charleston and a reflection on symbols and the hatred they fuel," he said in a statement. He also urged that opponents of the flag give the General Assembly the opportunity to address this issue in July "to at last remove this hurtful symbol from the people's State House."

Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old South Carolinian who has been charged with nine counts of murder in the attack on the Emanuel AME Church, was depicted online expressing white supremacist views and posing with the Confederate flag.

"It's time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality."
--Bree Newsome

“You come against me with hatred and oppression and bias,” she cried after she reached the top and unhooked the flag. “I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.”
—Bree Newsome

"Supporters started an Indiegogo page dedicated to raising money to pay Newsome’s bail and hire a defense lawyer. Within nine hours, it had raised nearly $80,000."

TAKE NOTE:  THIS  IS WHAT IS KNOWN AS RESISTANCE!

https://twitter.com/EdgeofSports

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-woman-removes-confederate-flag-20150627-story.html

 
'Bree' Newsome's arrest for removing South Carolina's Confederate flag ignites both sides
by Jenny Jarvie and Katie Shepherd
June 27, 2015
Los Angeles Times 

Brittany "Bree" Newsome of Charlotte, N.C., is taken into custody after she removed the Confederate battle flag from a monument in front of the South Carolina Statehouse in Columbia. (Bruce Smith / Associated Press)

A young black woman scaled a flagpole in front of the South Carolina Statehouse just after dawn Saturday and took down the Confederate battle flag that has become the focus of controversy since a gunman killed nine African Americans inside a historic Charleston church.

The woman, whom authorities identified as Brittany Ann Newsome, refused to descend until she had unhooked the flag.

“Ma'am, come down off the pole,” a police officer called when Newsome, who was wearing a helmet and climbing gear, was midway up the 30-foot flagpole.

“You come against me with hatred and oppression and bias,” she cried after she reached the top and unhooked the flag. “I come against you in the name of God. This flag comes down today.”

“I'm prepared to be arrested,” she told police as she neared the ground. A group of observers cheered.

She was handcuffed along with James Ian Tyson, 30, who allegedly accompanied her inside a prohibited area.

Newsome and Tyson were charged with defacing a monument, a misdemeanor, according to a statement from the South Carolina Department of Public Safety. They were taken to the Alvin S. Green Detention Center. If convicted, they could face fines of up to $5,000 and up to three years in prison.

Both were freed a few hours later after posting $300 bond.

The flag’s position is protected under state law, which legislators have agreed to revisit this summer. Officials put the flag back on the pole soon after Newsome brought it down.

Newsome, who goes by the nickname “Bree” and is from North Carolina, is identified on her Facebook page as a western organizer with Ignite NC, a nonprofit group challenging voting laws that it contends suppress voting and are discriminatory.

In a statement to the TV and radio news program “Democracy Now,” Newsome said she had decided with a group of “concerned citizens” to “do what the S.C. Legislature has thus far neglected to do.”

The social media response to Newsome’s arrest was swift and forceful.

Filmmaker Michael Moore offered to come to her aid. “I will pay her bail money or any legal fees she has. Please let her know this,” he said on Twitter, which lighted up with calls for police to release Newsome under the hashtag #FreeBree.

Comment:

  "Let us not forget that it was the Confederacy that TORE DOWN OUR AMERICAN FLAG and ripped our country apart. Before it was over, more than 600,000 Americans were dead. That anyone still defends this flag of TREASON is shocking." Posted at 7:44 PM June 27, 2015"

Supporters started an Indiegogo page dedicated to raising money to pay Newsome’s bail and hire a defense lawyer. Within nine hours, it had raised nearly $80,000.

The North Carolina chapter of the NAACP lauded Newsome’s protest as “an act of prayerful nonviolent civil disobedience.”

In a statement, Dr. William J. Barber II, the North Carolina NAACP president, likened her to Rosa Parks and urged that the Confederate flag be removed from state property.

The flag’s presence on the grounds of the Statehouse has been a subject of impassioned debate since the shooting attack at Emanuel AME Church on June 17, allegedly at the hands of a white gunman who posed for photos with the Confederate flag and wanted to ignite a race war.

Supporters defend the flag as a symbol of Southern history and culture. Critics decry it as a representation of racism and a reminder of slavery.

“The group took down the symbol of white supremacy that inspired the massacre, continued to fly at full mast in defiance of South Carolina’s grief, and flew in defiance of everyone working to actualize a more equitable Carolinian future,” Newsome said in her statement.

Later Saturday, arguments and scuffles broke out as scores of protesters descended on the Statehouse to applaud and protest Newsome’s feat.

“I’m standing for Bree,” said Bonita Jones, 28, a black activist from Columbia, as she stood below the flag at the base of the Confederate monument. “I’m standing for all the people who died in Charleston. I’m standing for all the people who can’t look after themselves.”

Frank Looper, 50, a white truck driver from Pickens County, drove 2 1/2 hours to the Statehouse to defend the flag after watching the news on CNN. He said he wanted to protect the legacy of his great-great-grandfather, who fought in the 3rd South Carolina Infantry Regiment, and another ancestor who rode in battle with Gen. Wade Hampton in the 2nd Regiment.

“We use the flag to honor our ancestors who died,” he said. “The way it was removed upset me. I don’t hate blacks. I’m not racist. Those poor people who died in Charleston, that’s terrible. … But then politics tried to make out that the flag pulled the trigger. It was a sick individual.”

Although the mood was tense, some demonstrators engaged opponents in friendly discussion on the symbolism of the flag, jobs and inequality.

“I'm just worried that the flag goes to the dust and is forgotten,” said James Green III, 65, a retired computer servicer who brought a large rebel flag to the Statehouse.

“Why not fight for it to be in a museum then?” asked Kimberly Conyers, 25, an insurance representative from Columbia.

Passing cars honked as protesters waved signs saying, “Take it down,” “I can’t believe” and “Evil prevails when good people do nothing!”

A row of pickup trucks and SUVs circled the block, flying Confederate flags on their trailer hitches.

“It's embarrassing to me as a Southerner,” said Tom Clements, 64, director of the environmental group Savannah River Site Watch. His great-great-grandfather fought in the Civil War, he says.

“It's part of my heritage, but I think [the flag] should come down,” he said. “It was all about slavery, and it's a symbol of divisiveness and white supremacy.”

katie.shepherd@latimes.com

Special correspondent Jarvie reported from Columbia and Times staff writer Shepherd from Los Angeles.
Copyright © 2015, Los Angeles Times

UPDATES

7:03 p.m.: This report has been revised throughout for additional details and for clarity.

4:09 p.m.: Updated the money raised on line for Newsome.

2:58 p.m.: Updated with the release of Newsome and Tyson.

2:18 p.m.: Updated with more interviews from protesters at the Statehouse grounds.

1:45 p.m.: Updated with NAACP statement.

1:00 p.m.: This post has been updated with protests at the Statehouse.

11:23 a.m.: This post has been updated with staff reporting.

This post was originally published at 4:44 a.m.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2015/06/27/we-cant-wait-any-longer-activist-removes-confederate-flag-sc-statehouse
 
'We Can't Wait Any Longer': Activist Removes Confederate Flag from SC Statehouse

Saturday, June 27, 2015by Nadia Prupis
Common Dreams

Activist Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole in front of the South Carolina capitol on Saturday to remove the Confederate flag from Statehouse grounds. (Photo: bbond/Twitter)

An activist and youth organizer named Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole in front of the South Carolina capitol in Columbia early Saturday morning and pulled down the Confederate flag still flying on Statehouse grounds, telling media, "we can't wait any longer."

Newsome, 30, of Charlotte, was about halfway up the 30-foot flagpole when police demanded she climb back down, but she kept going until she was able to remove the flag from its perch. Upon returning to the ground, Newsome was arrested along with another activist, James Ian Dyson, and taken to the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center on misdemeanor charges of defacing a monument on state capitol grounds. News of their action spread quickly under the hashtag #FreeBree, sparking a petition to remove the flag and drop the charges against Newsome.

"We removed the flag today because we can't wait any longer," Newsome said in a written statement on Saturday. "We can't continue like this another day. It's time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality."

After Newsome's arrest, officials ordered the banner to be raised again around 8:30am—just in time for a pro-flag rally.

The action came just hours before funeral services continued for the third day for the victims of an attack on Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a gunman shot dead nine black men and women. Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist, has been charged in the murders. The attack is being investigated as a hate crime and has sparked a renewed demand by activists to take down the Confederate flags flying on capitol grounds in numerous states.

Watch video of the action below:

"We could not sit by and watch the victims of the Charleston Massacre be laid to rest while the inspiration for their deaths continue to fly above their caskets," the group which organized the action said in a statement.

"The flag represents white supremacy," another activist, 25-year-old Tamika Lewis, told the Guardian on Saturday.  "The image alone is used to ignite fear and intimidation, especially among people of color and minorities. This was a long time coming."

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley this week called on the state legislature to vote in favor of removing the flag. But, as Lewis told the Guardian, "This was a Confederate symbol that ignited an individual to kill and murder innocent black people in a church, and it was still erected. The legislature was just taking too long to act morally and justly. They’re dragging their feet." 

http://act.colorofchange.org/sign/DropTheFlagDropTheCharges/

‪#‎FreeBree‬

Sign the Petition

Early Saturday morning, a multiracial group of Carolinians led by teachers and activists took down the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol grounds — within an hour the state had raised the hateful banner once again in time for an 11 A.M. white supremacist rally.

Bree Newsome, the Black woman who climbed the pole and cut down the flag, was arrested and taken into custody by Capitol Police. She should be promptly released from jail, any charges should be dropped, and the legislature should immediately vote to permanently remove the flag.

According to a statement from the activists they took down the flag because:

"We could not sit by and watch the victims of the Charleston Massacre be laid to rest while the inspiration for their deaths continue to fly above their caskets."

The confederate flag was born out of a government defending the enslavement of Black people and resurrected as an emblem for whites violently opposing racial integration. Any government that recognizes the flag is declaring that it cherishes a history of racial terror.

Taking down the flag is just one step but a symbolically meaningful one. Make no mistake about it, however, racism isn't just a flag or words it's baked into our economy and inequities in our democracy and criminal justice system.

In Bree's own words:

"It's time for a new chapter where we are sincere about dismantling white supremacy and building toward true racial justice and equality."

South Carolina officials have sided with white supremacists in choosing to restore the flag before a planned rally. The legislature must immediately vote to permanently remove the Confederate flag from the capitol and all state buildings.

ColorOfChange stands with Bree and the courageous activists who took down South Carolina's confederate flag. You can add a comment using the box provided.

UPDATE 10:01 AM: Bree Newsome was arrested along with a white ally, Jimmy Tyson. We will update this page with more information as it becomes available.

UPDATE 3:47 PM: Bail has been posted and Bree Newsome is scheduled to be released in the next few hours.

I demand that Bree Newsome is immediately released and any charges against her are dropped.

All,

RE: the Charleston Massacre and the vicious criminal hegemony and domination of White Supremacy in the United Hates

Forget about all the endless BS empty platitudes, misguided religious rhetoric, presidential celebrity grandstanding, absurd and ultimately self negating appeals to (of all of all things) "forgiveness", the torrential downpour of white media LIES, DISTORTIONS, AND DENIALS, the massive national indifference to and dismissal of black suffering by a substantial majority of American citizens, and the pervasive and utterly contemptible insincerity, dishonesty, and opportunism of politicians in general in the unrelenting mass murder of innocent black people across the country in the 21st century.

Just put all that aside for the moment and consider the following heinous data:

--According to the FBI's most recent statistics, blacks in 2013 were targeted in hate crimes more than all other races COMBINED.

Meanwhile consider the absolutely delusional responses to the calculated racist murder of nine people among a very large number of Americans generally, who out of hatred, indifference, fear, ignorance, and cynicism continue to pretend that these incidents are far from isolated or aberrant events and that much worse is definitely going to continue to happen VERY SOON…Stay tuned…And pass the word...

Kofi 

The Charleston Massacre, the Legacy of the Confederacy, and the Ongoing Hegemony of Modern White Supremacy in the United States--FURTHER UPDATES AND ANALYSIS

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/31530-obama-we-are-not-cured-of-racism

Obama: "We Are Not Cured" of Racism

Tuesday, 23 June 2015
by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now! | Video Interview
 
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/6/23/its_not_just_a_matter_of

 

President Obama spoke openly about racism in the United States during a podcast with comedian Marc Maron. In the interview, recorded two days after the Charleston massacre, Obama said, "Racism, we are not cured of, clearly. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say 'n*****' in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. Societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior." We get a response from the Rev. William Barber, president of the North Carolina NAACP.

TRANSCRIPT:

AMY GOODMAN: We’re speaking on this day after the Republican governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, reversed her position and said that the Confederate battle flag must come down off the grounds of the South Carolina state Capitol, but she’s putting it to the Legislature first. I want to go back to President Obama’s interview with Marc Maron on his podcast, WTF.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: The legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives, you know, that casts a long shadow, and that’s still part of our DNA. That’s passed on. We’re not cured of it.

MARC MARON: Racism.

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: We are not cured of, clearly. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say "n*****" in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not. It’s not just a matter of overt discrimination. We have—societies don’t overnight completely erase everything that happened 200 to 300 years prior.

AMY GOODMAN: This clip is being played across the country, I dare say in many parts of the world, President Obama using the N-word. And I wanted to get first a response from Reverend Dr. William Barber, head of the state chapter of the NAACP in North Carolina, speaking to us from Raleigh. Your response?

REV. WILLIAM BARBER: Well, first of all, the context of what President Obama is saying is exactly right. He’s saying that to talk about race, we have to move away from just thinking it’s the extreme—i.e. just a flag, or i.e. just saying the N-word. We have to recognize, as I said earlier, what Lee Atwater explained about the Southern strategy, that Kevin Phillips designed in 1968. He said, "I know how to win the South, but we have to move away from talking about race openly. We can’t do like George Wallace or Goldwater. We have to find a way to talk about race without sounding like it." And he listed a number of things—tax cuts, forced busing, states’ rights—as code language for talking about race. Ronald Reagan used it when he started his campaign. He did not—he went—he started his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. And he never said the N-word, but he used all of the code words. And by being in Philadelphia, where Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman were killed, it was clear.

And so, today, what the president is saying, you’ve got to look at structural, systemic racism. That’s what that young man meant when he said, "Somebody’s trying to take over and destroy my country." He had heard politicians and others saying the president is ruining the country; he’s a socialist; he’s a communist; Medicaid, healthcare reform, is destroying the country; if we raise the wages, it’s destroying the country. Only the willfully deaf, said one author that wrote a book called Racism Without Racists, cannot hear the racialized implications of that kind of rhetoric, in that kind of policy, which is why I agree with the president that we have to talk about race in terms of systemic racism and institutional racism. For instance, why is it that of the 24 states that are denying Medicaid expansion, six out of 10 African Americans live in those states? Why is it that we talk about entitlements in a way that suggests that it’s about them? The very programs that lifted up white Americans in the '40s and ’50s, after the ’60s, became an anathema in certain arenas. Why is it that we don't talk about the fact that our schools are resegregating faster now than they were in the 1970s?

We have to talk about wage disparity, both generally for all Americans, but then the disparate impact upon black people and brown people. And we’ve got to get black and brown and poor white people to understand that, in many ways, we are being played by an oligarchy that knows how to use these racialized code words to create wedge issues rather than to create the kind of moral transformative fusion of blacks, whites and browns that need to happen in this country, particularly in the South, to move us forward.

Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on over 1,100 public television and radio stations worldwide. Time Magazine named Democracy Now! its "Pick of the Podcasts," along with NBC's Meet the Press.


http://www.washingtonpost.com/…/charleston-isnt-about-gun-…/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366

"While stories about guns generate clicks and sound-bytes, not every every shooting is a referendum on gun policy. Rather, the gun debate too often hijacks conversations, serving as a stand-in for the discussions we desperately need to be having — and actions we should be taking — about race, violence and inequality. That’s not to say we shouldn’t talk about guns, but when it is the only debate we are capable of having, that is a problem. Calling this incident out as racial terrorism, embedded in a deep, unsavory but persistently relevant history, is a  first step."
--Jennifer Carlson, "Charleston isn’t really about gun control. It’s about racial violence"--Washington Post

All,
 
President Obama has once again shown a profound political and moral cowardice and fear based EVASION OF REALITY in categorically refusing to talk publicly in explicit and unambiguous terms about the real reasons behind the vicious racial terrorism committed by the arch white supremacist ideologue and mass murderer Dylann Roof. By focusing only on gun control concerns (a legislative and political effort that has been a spectacular failure for his administration given the overpowering financial and political opposition to any and all forms of gun control proposals by the national gun lobby led by the NRA and the craven prostrate subservience to its madness by politicians in not only the Republican/Tea party but among many representatives in the Democratic Party as well) Obama has once again shamefully sought to cloak his outright fear of the rhetorical and political white backlash of the national racist rightwing forces in and out of government by making the utterly absurd and cowardly claim that the murders of the nine black members of Emanuel Church in Charleston, SC. last wednesday night was simply the result of a lack of proper gun control and that if this legislation had been in place the event would never have happened or at least could have been averted somehow.

Of course in this instance (and in all instances like this one) NOTHING COULD BE FURTHER FROM THE TRUTH. For the ugly fact is whether Obama or anyone else wants to face it or not is that the .45 handgun that Roof used in the murderous rampage was a gift from his father for his 21st birthday just two months ago and as such the firearm was not only legally registered in this particular case but that it wouldn't have made a difference in any event given the murderer's clearly stated determination to murder black people in Charleston regardless of the nature of the weapons chosen. Keep in mind that in many previous instances of racial terrorism in this country's evil history BOMBS and other weapons of mass destruction have more often been used in effectively engaging in the politics of mass murder. One could take the Oklahoma Federal Building bombing by Timothy McVeigh in April of 1995 and the infamous bombing of the 16th Street Baptist church that murdered four black girls, ages 11-14 in Montgomery, Alabama in September of 1963 as just two notorious examples in what have literally been thousands of bombings of black communities, churches, business centers, as well as the assasinations and attempted assassinations of black political and civic leaders over just the past 200 years in the U.S. alone. The point being that Roof and others like him were not--and I might ominously add here--WILL NOT be deterred by any gun control legislation either now or in the future given what the real motivation was and is in these racist and terrorist acts--which of course is NOT to say of course that national gun control is not desperately needed in a country as bloody and obsessed with guns and both homicide and suicide via gun violence as is the United States.

So given these overwhelming facts and the real historical, social, cultural, ideological, and political CONTEXT of these specific and particular FACTS in this heinous mass murder in South Carolina, what are we make of not only Obama's but far too many other public figures, black and white, COWARDLY REFUSAL to openly and honestly address and publically confront the REAL REASONS why nine innocent black human beings were slaughtered in their own church by an all too typical and extremely familiar white supremacist beast masquerading as a human being (if one knows anything about African American history at all).

Because unless and until the President as well as all the rest of us in this criminally violent and brazenly oppressive white supremacist society begin to face, confront, and actually deal with the horrific reality of who and what we are and have become in this monstrous veil of tears and mass destruction we call "our country" no amount of rhetorical evasion, social posturing, and cowardly denial of what actually exists and why is going to save us.

Kofi


Charleston isn’t really about gun control. It’s about racial violence

The debate about guns ignores the major crisis we're facing
 
by Jennifer Carlson
June 19, 2015
The Washington Post
 
It’s been just a day since a gunman burst into the Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., killing nine. But already, the media is abuzz with its usual response to mass shootings. On the one hand, pro-gun proponents bemoaned “pistol-free zones” like churches, where guns aren’t allowed. If the victims had been armed, they argue, this violence could have been prevented. Gun control advocates, on the other hand, lamented that easy access to guns emboldened criminals to carry out “unthinkable” crimes. Even President Obama linked the shooting to gun violence, saying “at some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.” Now Wayne LaPierre has explicitly blamed the massacre on there being too few guns in the church that night.”

But turning this shooting into a referendum on the gun debate misses the point. It obscures a deeper, more uncomfortable conversation about race that can’t be resolved by passing gun laws or loosening gun restrictions. Too often, the gun debate serves as a powerful device for avoiding explicit challenges to racial violence, whether by adhering to a colorblind narrative of “good guys” and “bad guys” (at best) or playing into racial imagery (at worst). Instead of rehashing a hackneyed gun debate that has never taken us very far in national conversations on race and racism, we should be explicitly addressing the core issue at stake: racial violence.

To say it differently, this isn’t a story about guns. It’s a story about racial terrorism.

What we know so far is that suspect Dylann Roof targeted the Emanuel AME Church both a place of worship and a historical site of black empowerment. He sat quietly for an hour, then broke out into gunfire, reloading his gun five times. As his victims pleaded with him to stop, he refused.

“I have to do it,” he reportedly said. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” He apparently wanted to spare at least one woman, so she could recount to others what happened in the church. If you substitute a noose for a gun, Roof’s actions are a shockingly unsurprising repetition of a long-standing history of Southern horrors; his desire to punish African Americans for the alleged rape of white women (“our women”), the fears of African Americans “taking over” government institutions, the insistence on using the public spectacle of white-on-black violence not just to victimize individuals but to warn and intimidate entire groups of Americans — all of these are textbook elements of the rampant racial terrorism marking the South (and, in some cases, the North) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Extralegal violence — whether in the form of rope, clubs, guns, fists, knives or other weapons — sustained this racial terrorism in Jim Crow America. According to the Equal Justice Initiative, 4,000 lynchings occurred from 1877 to 1950 in just 12 states. Race riots — such as the “Burning of Black Wall Street” in 1921 — decimated black wealth and destroyed black communities. Meanwhile, “racial cleanings,” as Elliot Jaspin explains in “Buried in Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleaning in America,“ compelled the forced expulsion of African Americans from towns across the South and the North. Each of these served to reinforce segregation and racial subordination.

Against this historical backdrop, the Charleston shooting is far from inexplicable, as South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said.

The FBI keeps a tally on “hate crimes:” Not only do racially motivated crimes constitute roughly half of hate crimes reported to police, but African Americans are by far the largest group of victims — 65 percent in 2012 among race-motivated hate crimes. While a majority of hate  crimes go unreported, the Bureau of Justice Statistics estimates around 200,000 to 300,000 happen every year, the vast majority of which are robberies, sexual assaults, aggravated assaults, simple assaults and murders.

But even as America continues to be haunted by a violent past, there is a key difference: In the past, the state was at best complicit and at worst actively involved. Today, the police chief of Charleston called the massacre as he saw it: a “hate crime” that “no community should have to experience.” Naming these acts as hate crimes is a first step in coming to terms with a violent past that continues to haunt us.

Like racial disparities in violence more generally, racial terrorism is not inevitable, but it can only begin to be addressed if we are willing to first forefront a conversation about the valuation of human life in the United States and how race continues to shape it. We need to have these conversations and use them to direct initiatives that can reduce violence across racial lines. While stories about guns generate clicks and sound-bytes, not every every shooting is a referendum on gun policy. Rather, the gun debate too often hijacks conversations, serving as a stand-in for the discussions we desperately need to be having — and actions we should be taking — about race, violence and inequality. That’s not to say we shouldn’t talk about guns, but when it is the only debate we are capable of having, that is a problem. Calling this incident out as racial terrorism, embedded in a deep, unsavory but persistently relevant history, is a first step.


Jennifer Carlson is author of Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline"


http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/us/south-carolina-confederate-flag-dylann-roof.html?emc=edit_na_20150622&nlid=7352823&ref=cta&_r=0

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366
 

All,

ONLY IN AMERICA (spelled as usual with three Ks):  Take an openly reactionary Republican governor and proud member of the Tea Party right who has always been openly supportive of the confederate flag--as recently as three days ago in fact (Gov. Nikki Haley) along with an equally reactionary and Tea Party endorsed black Republican politician (Senator Tim Scott) who was appointed as senator in 2013 after South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley named him to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Jim DeMint [Scott ran in a special election in 2014 for the final two years of DeMint's second term] and who is and has always been openly reviled as a groveling "Uncle Tom" by a very substantial majority of black voters in South Carolina since his political career began over 20 years ago.  Then take these two notoriously rightwing politicians plus a large and equally shameless group of other Republican/Tea Party leaders and mix them vigorously in with a genuinely progressive/liberal group of other black and white South Carolina politicians and activists. Then add the threat of absolutely certain national demonstrations and economic boycotts that would have ensued if the arch conservative Governor and Senator plus other white state representatives and the general business community in the state had not finally insisted that the confederate flag be finally taken down from flying over the state house.

Finally add the certain political and economic pressure the Bush family dynasty undoubtedly put on Governor Haley, Senator Scott and other major South Carolina Republican political leaders to take down the flag because JEB BUSH fears (rightly as it turns out) that any refusal to do so at this point by his party would absolutely ensure that he would be defeated for the Presidency against Hillary Clinton in 2016 and you have the net result that more than even the hen horrific deaths of nine black human beings at the hands of a 21st century white supremacist who believed fervently in the confederate flag and all it has stood for throughout its notorious history and you have a political compromise regarding the removal of the confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds that is deeply mired in the opportunism, evasion, hypocrisy, dishonesty, bad faith, and moral posturing that defines American politics at its core.

So now the confederate flag will finally be taken down some 150 years after the Civil war of 1861-1865 and the military defeat of the treasonous Confederacy (or a "mere" 53 years late if you count the official decision by the state of South Carolina to publicly demonstrate their intense allegiance to the doctrine and practice of White Supremacy  as well as determined racist opposition to Jim Crow segregation by hoisting the flag over the statehouse in 1962.

It would be 'nice' to think of course that these rancid politicians are finally doing what should have been done nearly two centuries ago or that they're now doing it because they simply believe in the end of Jim Crow/Apartheid policies, values, and behavior, but let's not be coy or delusional about the real reasons why they've chosen to do it  nowand just remind ourselves once again in our history that as Frederick Douglas in 1852 "without struggle there is no progress" and just leave it at that.  Because as any sane person who has ever been oppressed knows THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES/ A LUTA CONTINUA...

AND MOST IMPORTANTLY NEVER FORGET HOW OR WHY THESE NINE PRECIOUS BLACK LIVES WERE SNUFFED OUT OR WHO AND WHAT DID IT TO THEM AND THE REST OF US...

Kofi

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/23/us/south-carolina-confederate-flag-dylann-roof.html?emc=edit_na_20150622&nlid=7352823&ref=cta&_r=0

U.S.

Nikki Haley, South Carolina Governor, Calls for Removal of Confederate Battle Flag
by FRANCES ROBLES, RICHARD FAUSSET and MICHAEL BARBARO
JUNE 22, 2015
New York Times

Gov. Nikki Haley, center, embraced Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, surrounded by Democratic and Republican lawmakers at the State House on Monday. Credit Tim Dominick/The State, via Associated Press

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Gov. Nikki R. Haley called on Monday for South Carolina to do what just a week ago seemed politically impossible — remove the Confederate battle flag from its perch in front of the State House building here. She argued that a symbol long revered by many Southerners was for some, after the church massacre in Charleston, a “deeply offensive symbol of a brutally offensive past.”

“The events of this week call upon us to look at this in a different way,” said Ms. Haley, an Indian-American, who is the first member of an ethnic minority to serve as governor of the state as well as the first woman.

She spoke at an afternoon news conference, surrounded by Democratic and Republican lawmakers including both of the state’s United States senators, Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, an African-American. “Today we are here in a moment of unity in our state, without ill will, to say it’s time to move the flag from the capitol grounds,” she said.

It was a dramatic turnabout for Ms. Haley, a second-term Republican governor who over her five years in the job has displayed little interest in addressing the intensely divisive issue of the flag. But her new position demonstrated the powerful shock that last Wednesday’s killings at Emanuel A.M.E. Church have delivered to the political status quo, mobilizing leaders at the highest levels.

Gov. Nikki R. Haley, Republican of South Carolina, on Monday called for removal of a Confederate battle flag from the State Capitol grounds.

by Reuters on Publish Date June 22, 2015. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images.

On Monday, the White House announced that President Obama will travel to Charleston on Friday and deliver the eulogy for the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the slain pastor of the Emanuel Church and a state senator. The political aftershocks from the shootings were also felt in Mississippi, where the House speaker, a Republican, unexpectedly declared in a statement Monday night that the Mississippi state flag, which includes the Confederate banner, “has become a point of offense that needs to be removed.”

Interviews suggested that Ms. Haley’s rapidly evolving position on the flag was shaped by several factors: the horror of seeing the unsmiling gunman posing with it in photos; her conversations with congregants at the church; intensifying pressure from South Carolina business leaders to remove a controversial vestige of the state’s past; and calls from leaders of her own party, including its leading presidential contenders, urging her to take it down once and for all.

The result on Monday was a moment of political and racial drama, and a signature moment for Ms. Haley, who blended the traditional values of the South — faith, family, empathy — into a powerful call for taking down the flag as a gesture of unity, healing and renewal.

She acknowledged that some South Carolinians respect and revere the flag not as a racist symbol but as “a way to honor ancestors.” However, she added, the flag, “while an integral part of our past, does not represent the future of our great state.”

The suspect in the Wednesday massacre, a 21-year-old itinerant landscaper named Dylann Roof, had posed for numerous photos with the Confederate battle flag. In the aftermath of the shootings, protesters on the streets and on social media demanded that the flag — which was unfurled over the State House in 1962, largely as a symbol of defiance of efforts to expand the civil rights of black Americans — finally be removed.

Divisive Symbolism of a Southern Flag
 
“Ms. Haley,” declared one prominent sign outside the church, where mourners had piled thousands of flowers. “Tear down that flag!”

The sentiment, over the years, was held by African-Americans and most liberal South Carolinians. The N.A.A.C.P. declared an “economic boycott” of the state in 1999 that remains in effect. But some white Southern voters consider the flag to be a symbol of the sacrifice of their Civil War ancestors, not of racism. As a rule, white Southerners tend to vote Republican, and over the years they have helped defeat Republicans who have tried to diminish the flag’s prominence.

In the days since the shooting, the Republican presidential hopefuls Jeb Bush and Senator Marco Rubio of Florida have issued vague or equivocal statements, perhaps wary of losing support in the crucial South Carolina primary. (Mr. Bush, who ordered the removal of the flag from the Florida statehouse while governor, said he was confident that South Carolina would “do the right thing,” while Mr. Rubio said the state would “make the right choice for the people of South Carolina.”)

But inside the governor’s office, Ms. Haley’s phone line lit up with messages from national Republican officials offering words of condolence, among them Mr. Bush, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Mitt Romney, all current, likely or former candidates for president, and Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee. In some cases, there was also something else: subtle encouragement to dispatch the flag.

Mr. Romney, a financial backer of Ms. Haley’s campaigns, was explicit, according to an adviser: The flag, he believed, had to come down, a message he delivered Saturday morning on Twitter to an extraordinary response. Thousands of people, including Mr. Obama, retweeted the message, many of them heralding his stand.Photo


Jennice Barr, 10, wrote on a board in front of Emanuel A.M.E. Church, where nine were killed. Credit Joe Raedle/Getty Images
 

Mr. Romney was taken aback by the reaction and told an aide he was glad he had spoken out. Ms. Haley, a rising star in the Republican Party, had her own political future to consider. The flag would inevitably complicate her selection as a cabinet member or even vice-presidential nominee, if she wanted either.

Over the weekend, Ms. Haley and her staff reached out to top officials like Representative James E. Clyburn, the ranking African-American member of Congress, sounding them out on the issue, and on Monday, she summoned officials to her office and told them of her decision: It was time for the Confederate flag to stop flying over the historic building’s grounds. Every leading South Carolina politician — stunned by the massacre, moved by the church’s demonstration of grace and fearful of the repercussions from inaction — agreed.

“If you want to credit anybody here, credit the families of the victims and the church members who displayed Christianity and love,” Mr. Graham said. “The politicians followed their moral authority.”

The repercussions from the church attack went beyond politics. Walmart said Monday that it would remove all Confederate battle flag merchandise from its stores.

Some opposition remains within the legislature. State Senator Lee Bright, a conservative lawmaker from Spartanburg, said it was unfortunate that the flag issue was being taken up in the midst of so much grief. He said supports the flag as a symbol of the state’s history.

The Confederate battle flag outside the State Capitol in Columbia, S.C., on Saturday. Credit Jason Miczek/Reuters
“There are those of us who have ancestors that fought and spilled blood on the side of the South when they were fighting for states’ rights, and we don’t want our ancestors relegated to the ash heaps of history,” he said. “Through the years, the heroes of the South have been slandered, maligned and misrepresented, and this is a further activity in that.”

However, a leader of the Sons of Confederate Veterans group in South Carolina, while signaling his disappointment in the governor’s recommendation, said the organization — which prominently features the battle flag at the State House on its website — said he expected his group’s members would go along with whatever decision was made.

“With the winds that started blowing last week, I figured it would just be a matter of time,” said Ken Thrasher, the lieutenant commander of the group’s South Carolina division. “Whatever the legislature decides to do, we will accept it graciously.”

Mr. Thrasher said he and others in his organization were “saddened, but we’re going to move forward.”

“We’re not a racist group,” he added.

Graphic

The Shootings in a Charleston Church

Where the attack happened, some statistics behind hate crimes, and maps of Charleston’s shifting population.

OPEN Graphic

Cornell William Brooks, president and chief executive of the national N.A.A.C.P., who hails from South Carolina, said Monday that the governor “had done what was needed. She, as a governor of a Southern state, has done a very Southern thing,” he said. “And here’s what I mean: The South is known for its hospitality, and what could be more hospitable than to be inclusive? Bringing that flag down is a symbol to the rest of the country. It’s a symbol that South Carolina stands with inclusiveness.”

The fate of the recommendation in the Republican-dominated General Assembly is far from certain. Some senior Republicans in the state were concerned about the scope of the eventual bill. And others were frustrated that Mr. Scott, the only black Republican in the United States Senate and a popular figure among conservatives, did not speak at the news conference.

The governor made her announcement nearly 15 years after a delicate compromise took effect in South Carolina: The American and state flags remained above the State House, but the Confederate battle flag was moved to a position in front of the building. In a reflection of the sensitivity of the debate, the agreement was detailed — it called, for instance, for the battle flag to be flown 30 feet in the air from a flagpole set 10 feet from the base of the Confederate Soldier Monument — and it sharply restricted when war memorials across the state could be “relocated, removed, disturbed or altered.”

The agreement also required that any changes be subject to two-thirds votes in each chamber of the legislature.

On Monday, a number of state legislators, including some Republicans, said the two-thirds requirement may not be legally binding. But Ms. Haley said she would like the legislature to act soon. State Senator Tom Davis, a Republican who supports the proposal, said there were a number of potential procedural complications.

The General Assembly is currently in session by virtue of a “sine die” resolution that allows lawmakers to take up specifically enumerated issues. To address the flag issue, Mr. Davis said, the resolution would have to be amended — and that, he said, would take a two-thirds vote in each house.

As a candidate in 2010, Ms. Haley said the issue had been “resolved to the best of its ability” by the compromise a decade earlier. As a candidate in 2014, she said that when she was trying to recruit business to the state, “not a single C.E.O.” had mentioned the flag as a potential sticking point.

On Monday, Ms. Haley mentioned her ethnicity, and that of Mr. Scott — who also called for the removal of the flag in a statement Monday — as part of an argument that the state had changed for the better.

Shortly after the governor’s announcement, drivers honked their horns as they drove past the State House, in apparent support of her decision.

Jayne Williams stood beside the Confederate flag, with small American flags assembled in tiny flower pots — one for each of the Emanuel victims. She held a sign that said, #Its ComingDown.

Frances Robles reported from Columbia, Richard Fausset from Charleston, S.C., and Michael Barbaro from New York. Reporting was contributed by Richard Pérez-Peña from New York, Alan Blinder from Hilton Head Island, S.C., and Jonathan Martin and Ashley Parker from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on June 23, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Governor Joins the Call to Take Down Rebel Flag.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2015/06/22/president-obama-to-deliver-slain-pastors-eulogy-in-charleston/

https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Panopticon-Review/342702882479366

All,

Let's see now...How does one properly respond to this?...O yeah, I know. The phrase "Do miracles never cease?..." comes to mind.  But in fact this gesture is in my view far too little far too late for a truly lame and self serving President who has never possessed the fundamental courage and commitment to do what is either necessary or right with respect to serious questions of social and economic justice—and especially with regard to those issues and concerns dealing directly with black people as citizens or human beings in this country.  But as we say "it is what it is", right?   BTW I really hate that phrase...
Kofi

 Red Light

(by Amiri Baraka, 1966)

The only thing we know is the thing

we turn out to be.  I don’t care what

you think, it’s true, now you think

your way out of this

Post Politics

President Obama to deliver slain pastor’s eulogy in Charleston
by Juliet Eilperin
June 22, 2015 
The Washington Post

President Obama, with Vice President Biden, pauses while speaking in the White House briefing room Thursday. (Susan Walsh/AP)

This story has been updated.
 

President Obama, first lady Michelle Obama and Vice President Biden will travel to Charleston, S.C., on Friday to attend the funeral services of Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, the White House said Monday.

The president will deliver the eulogy for Pinckney, a state senator and pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where he was killed.

Pinckney, 41, was leading a Bible group when a white gunman opened fire inside the historic African American church on Wednesday, killing nine.

In a statement last week, Biden decried "the senseless actions of a coward" and recalled that he last saw Pinckney at a 2014 prayer breakfast in Columbia.

"He was a good man, a man of faith, a man of service who carried forward Mother Emanuel’s legacy as a sacred place promoting freedom, equality, and justice for all," Biden said.

The president also noted that he and first lady Michelle Obama knew Pinckney.

The pastor's funeral is scheduled for 11 a.m. Friday at TD Arena on the College of Charleston campus.

Speaking on the South Carolina Senate floor just weeks before his death, Pinckney said that his faith required forgiveness, even of those who kill.

"The Lord teaches us to love all," he said, "and we pray that over time, justice will be done."

READ MORE: Clementa Pinckney, preacher and legislator, spoke out for justice

The pastor killed in Charleston gave a chilling speech on racism a few weeks ago


Juliet Eilperin is The Washington Post's White House bureau chief, covering domestic and foreign policy as well as the culture of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She is the author of two books—one on sharks, and another on Congress, not to be confused with each other—and has worked for the Post since 1998. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/22/us/campaign-donations-linked-to-white-supremacist.html?_r=0
 
Politics
Campaign Donations Linked to White Supremacist
by ERIC LICHTBLAU
JUNE 22, 2015
New York Times

The leader of a white supremacist group that has been linked to Dylann Roof, the suspect in the murder of nine African-Americans in a Charleston, S.C., church last week, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to Republican campaigns, including those of 2016 presidential contenders such as Ted Cruz, Rick Santorum and Rand Paul, records show.

Mr. Cruz, a Texas senator, said Sunday night that he would be returning about $8,500 in donations that he had received from the Texas donor, Earl Holt III, who lists himself as president of the Council of Conservative Citizens.

“We just learned this evening that Mr. Holt had contributed to the campaign,” a spokesman for the Cruz campaign said in an email to The New York Times. “We will be immediately refunding all those donations.”

The Guardian first reported on Mr. Holt’s donations to the Republican contenders.
A manifesto that appeared on a website registered to Mr. Roof said that the manifesto’s author had first learned of “brutal black-on-white murders” from the Council of Conservative Citizens’ website.

Mr. Holt, in a statement posted online in his name, said he was not surprised to learn that Mr. Roof had found out about “black-on-white violent crime” from his group because, he said, it was one of the few that had the courage to disclose “the seemingly endless incidents involving black-on-white murder.” But he said his group does not advocate violence and should not be held responsible for the shootings.

The group is regarded by the Southern Poverty Law Center, a leading authority on hate crimes, as a white supremacist extremist organization that opposes “race mixing” as a religious affront and that vilifies blacks as an inferior race.

Spokesmen for Mr. Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, and Mr. Paul, a senator from Kentucky, did not respond to requests for comment on the donations.

Mr. Holt, who identified himself in some donation records as a Texas “slumlord,” has also given money to a number of other current and former Republican members of Congress, including Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, Senator Rob Portman of Ohio, former Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, Representative Steve King of Iowa, and former Representative Todd Akin of Missouri.

A version of this article appears in print on June 22, 2015, on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Campaign Donations Linked to White Supremacist. 

The Political Failures of the Obama Administration And Our Collective Complicity In Them: A General Analysis by David Bromwich

How Obama Became a Publicist for His Presidency (Rather Than the President)
10 March 2014

By David Bromwich, TomDispatch | News Analysis
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/22356-how-obama-became-a-publicist-for-his-presidency-rather-than-the-president

 President Barack Obama gives a statement on the situation in Ukraine, at the White House in Washington, March 6, 2014. (Photo: Gabriella Demczuk / The New York Times)

All,

This is hands down one of the best and most insightful articles I have ever read from a progressive perspective of what's really wrong with President Obama (leaving aside entirely the silly and rhetorically gratuitous nonsense by the author about Obama seeming to be more like a "king" than the President) and why he is in a much wider, more realistic, and thus far more significant context such an empty, superficial, and woefully ineffectual leader. This piece is definitive in so many ways and for so many reasons that it's hard to know where to begin. Please read this right on target article, think very carefully about its rather ominous and truly disturbing implications (and most importantly its clear and decisive indictment of our own collective co-dependent and ultimately enabling relationship with this President and the politically debilitating and paralyzing effects of the groupie mania that it created)...and pass the word...Stay tuned...

Kofi

Like many days, March 3rd saw the delivery of a stern opinion by President Obama. To judge by recent developments in Ukraine, he said, Russia was putting itself “on the wrong side of history.” This might seem a surprising thing for an American president to say. The fate of Soviet Communism taught many people to be wary of invoking History as if it were one’s special friend or teammate. But Obama doubtless felt comfortable because he was quoting himself. “To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent,” he said in his 2009 inaugural address, “know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” In January 2009 and again in March 2014, Obama was speaking to the world as its uncrowned leader.

For some time now, observers -- a surprisingly wide range of them -- have been saying that Barack Obama seems more like a king than a president. Leave aside the fanatics who think he is a “tyrant” of unparalleled powers and malignant purpose. Notions of that sort come easily to those who look for them; they are predigested and can safely be dismissed. But the germ of a similar conclusion may be found in a perception shared by many others. Obama, it is said, takes himself to be something like a benevolent monarch -- a king in a mixed constitutional system, where the duties of the crown are largely ceremonial. He sees himself, in short, as the holder of a dignified office to whom Americans and others may feel naturally attuned.

A large portion of his experience of the presidency should have discouraged that idea. Obama’s approval ratings for several months have been hovering just above 40%. But whatever people may actually think of him, the evidence suggests that this has indeed been his vision of the presidential office -- or rather, his idea of his function as a holder of that office. It is a subtle and powerful fantasy, and it has evidently driven his demeanor and actions, as far as reality permitted, for most of his five years in office.

What could have given Obama such a strange perspective on how the American political system was meant to work? Let us not ignore one obvious and pertinent fact. He came to the race for president in 2007 with less practice in governing than any previous candidate. At Harvard Law School, Obama had been admired by his professors and liked by his fellow students with one reservation: in an institution notorious for displays of youthful pomposity, Obama stood out for the self-importance of his “interventions” in class. His singularity showed in a different lightwhen he was elected editor of the Harvard Law Review -- the firstlaw student ever to hold that position without having published an article in a law journal. He kept his editorial colleagues happy by insisting that the stance of the Review need not be marked by bias or partisanship. It did not have to be liberal or conservative, libertarian or statist. It could be “all of the above.”

This pattern -- the ascent to become presider-in-chief over large projects without any encumbering record of commitments -- followed Obama into a short and uneventful legal career, from which no remarkable brief has ever been cited. In an adjacent career as a professor of constitutional law, he was well liked again, though his views on the most important constitutional questions were never clear to his students. The same was true of his service as a four-term Illinois state senator, during which he cast a remarkable number of votes in the noncommittal category of “present” rather than “yea” or “nay.” Finally, the same pattern held during his service in the U.S. Senate, where, from his first days on the floor, he was observed to be restless for a kind of distinction and power normally denied to a junior senator.

Extreme caution marked all of Obama’s early actions in public life. Rare departures from this progress-without-a-trail -- such as his pledge to filibuster granting immunity to the giants of the telecommunications industry in order to expose them to possible prosecution for warrantless surveillance -- appear in retrospect wholly tactical. The law journal editor without a published article, the lawyer without a well-known case to his credit, the law professor whose learning was agreeably presented without a distinctive sense of his position on the large issues, the state senator with a minimal record of yes or no votes, and the U.S. senator who between 2005 and 2008 refrained from committing himself as the author of a single piece of significant legislation: this was the candidate who became president in January 2009.

The Man Without a Record

Many of these facts were rehearsed in the 2008 primaries by Hillary Clinton. More was said by the Republicans in the general election. Yet the accusations were thrown onto a combustible pile of so much rubbish -- so much that was violent, racist, and untrue, and spoken by persons manifestly compromised or unbalanced -- that the likely inference was tempting to ignore. One could hope that, whatever the gaps in his record, they would not matter greatly once Obama reached the presidency.

His performance in the campaign indicated that he had a coherent mind, did not appeal to the baser passions, and was a fluent synthesizer of other people’s facts and opinions. He commanded a mellow baritone whose effects he enjoyed watching only a little too much, and he addressed Americans in just the way a dignified and yet passionate president might address us. The contrast with George W. Bush could not have been sharper. And the decisiveness of that contrast was the largest false clue to the political character of Obama.

He was elected to govern when little was known about his approach to the practical business of leading people. The unexplored possibility was, of course, that little was known because there was not much to know. Of the Chicago organizers trained in Saul Alinsky’s methods of community agitation, he had been considered among the most averse to conflict. Incongruously, as Jeffrey Stout has pointed out in Blessed Are the Organized, Obama shunned “polarization” as a valuable weapon of the weak. His tendency, instead, was to begin a protestby depolarizing. His goal was always to bring the most powerful interests to the table. This should not be dismissed as a temperamental anomaly, for temperament may matter far more in politics than the promulgation of sound opinions. The significance of his theoretical expertise and practical distaste for confrontation would emerge in the salient event of his career as an organizer.

As Obama acknowledged in a revealing chapter of his memoir, Dreams from My Father, the event in question had begun as a protest with the warmest of hopes. He was aiming to draw the attention of the Chicago housing authority to the dangers of asbestos at Altgeld Gardens, the housing project where he worked. After a false start and the usual set of evasions by a city agency, a public meeting was finally arranged at a local gymnasium. Obama gave instructions to two female tenants, charged with running the meeting, not to let the big man from the city do too much of the talking. He then retired to the back of the gym.

The women, as it turned out, lacked the necessary skill. They taunted and teased the city official. One of them dangled the microphone in front of him, snatched it away, and then repeated the trick. He walked out insulted and the meeting ended in chaos. And where was Obama? By his own account, he remained at the back of the room, waving his arms -- too far away for anyone to read his signals. In recounting the incident, he says compassionately that the women blamed themselves even though the blame was not all theirs. He does not say that another kind of organizer, seeing things go so wrong, would have stepped forward and taken charge.

"I Can't Hear You"

“Leading from behind” was a motto coined by the Obama White House to describe the president’s posture of cooperation with NATO, when, after a long and characteristic hesitation, he took the advice of Hillary Clinton’s State Department against Robert Gates’s Defense Department and ordered the bombing of Libya. Something like that description had been formulated earlier by reporters covering his distant and self-protective negotiations with Congress in the progress of his health-care law. When the phrase got picked up and used in unexpected ways, his handlers tried to withdraw it. Leading from behind, they insisted, did not reflect the president’s real attitude or the intensity of his engagement.
 

In Libya, all the world knew that the planning for the intervention was largely done by Americans, and that the missiles and air cover were supplied by the United States. Obama was the leader of the nation that was bringing down yet another government in the Greater Middle East. After Afghanistan and Iraq, this marked the third such American act of leadership since 2001. Obama, however, played down his own importance at the time; his energies went into avoiding congressional demands that he explain what sort of enterprise he was leading.

By the terms of the 1973 War Powers Resolution, a president needs congressional approval before he can legally commit American armed forces in “hostilities” abroad. But according to the argument offered by Obama’s lawyers, hostilities were only hostilities if an American was killed; mere wars, on the other hand, the president can fight as he pleases -- without the approval of Congress. No American soldier having been killed in Libya, it followed that Obama could lead the country from behind without congressional approval. This delicate legal sophistry served its temporary purpose and the bombing went forward. Yet the awkward description, “leading from behind,” would not go away. These days, the phrase is mostly used as a taunt by war-brokers whose idea of a true leader runs a remarkably narrow gamut from former president George W. Bush to Senator John McCain. These people would have no trouble with Obama if only he gave us more wars.
 

The curious fact remains that, in Obama’s conception of the presidency, leading from behind had a concrete meaning long before the Libyan intervention. When approached before the 2008 election by labor leaders, community organizers, foreign policy dissenters, and groups concerned with minority rights and environmental protection, each of which sought assurance that he intended to assist their cause, Obama would invariably cup his ear and say, “I can’t hear you.”

The I-can't-hear-you anecdote has been conveyed both in print and informally; and it is plain that the gesture and the phrase had been rehearsed. Obama was, in fact, alluding to a gesture President Franklin Roosevelt is said to have made when the great civil rights organizer A. Philip Randolph put a similar request to him around 1940. Roosevelt, in effect, was saying to Randolph: You command a movement with influence, and there are other movements you can call on. Raise a cry so loud it can’t be mistaken. Make me do what you want me to do; I’m sympathetic to your cause, but the initiative can’t come from me.

It was clever of Obama to quote the gesture. At the same time, it was oddly irresponsible. After all, in the post-New Deal years, the union and civil rights movements had tremendous clout in America. They could make real noise. No such combination of movements existed in 2008.

And yet, in 2008 there had been a swell of popular opinion and a convergence of smaller movements around a cause. That cause was the candidacy of Barack Obama. The problem was that “Obama for America” drank up and swept away the energy of all those other causes, just as Obama’s chief strategist David Plouffe had designed it to do. Even in 2009, with the election long past, “Obama for America” (renamed “Organizing for America”) was being kept alive under the fantastical conceit that a sitting president could remain a movement leader-from-behind, even while he governed as the ecumenical voice of all Americans. If any cause could have pulled the various movements back together and incited them to action after a year of electioneering activity on Obama’s behalf, that cause would have been a massive jobs-creation program and a set of policy moves to rouse the environmental movement and address the catastrophe of climate change.

Civil Dissociation

By the middle of 2009, Barack Obama was no longer listening. He had already picked an economic team from among the Wall Street protégés of the Goldman Sachs executive and former economic adviser to the Clinton administration, Robert Rubin. For such a team, job creation and environmental regulation were scarcely attractive ideas. When the new president chose health care as the first “big thing” he looked to achieve, and announced that, for the sake of bipartisan consensus, he was leaving the details of the legislation to five committees of Congress, his “I can’t hear you” had become a transparent absurdity.

The movements had never been consulted. Yet Obama presumed an intimacy with their concerns and a reliance on their loyalty -- as if a telepathic link with them persisted. There was a ludicrous moment in the late summer of 2009 when the president, in a message to followers of "Obama for America," told us to be ready to knock on doors and light a fire under the campaign for health-care reform. But what exactly were we to say when those doors opened? The law -- still being hammered out in congressional committees in consultation with insurance lobbyists -- had not yet reached his desk. In the end, Obama did ask for help from the movements, but it was too late. He had left them hanging while he himself waited for the single Republican vote that would make his "signature law" bipartisan. That vote never came.

The proposal, the handoff to Congress, and the final synthesis of the Affordable Care Act took up an astounding proportion of Obama’s first year in office. If one looks back at the rest of those early months, they contained large promises -- the closing of Guantanamo being the earliest and the soonest to be shelved. The most seductive promise went by the generic name “transparency.” But Obama’s has turned out to be the most secretive administration since that of Richard Nixon; and in its discouragement of press freedom by the prosecution of whistleblowers, it has surpassed all of its predecessors combined.

In the absence of a performance to match his promises, how did Obama seek to define his presidency? The compensation for “I can’t hear you” turned out to be that all Americans would now have plenty of chances to hear him. His first months in office were staged as a relaxed but careful exercise in, as was said at the time, “letting the country get to know him.” To what end? The hope seemed to be that if people could see how truly earnest, temperate, patient, thoughtful, and bipartisan Obama was, they would come to accept policies that sheer ideology or ignorance might otherwise have led them to doubt or reject.

It was magical thinking of course -- that Americans would follow if only we heard him often enough; that people of the most divergent tempers and ideas would gradually come to approve of him so visibly that he could afford to show the country that he heard the call for reform. But one can see why his presidency was infused with such magical thinking from the start. His ascent to the Oval Office had itself been magical.

To be known as the voice of the country, Obama believed, meant that he should be heard to speak on all subjects. This misconception, evident early, has never lost its hold on the Obama White House. The CBS reporter Mark Knoller crunched the first-term numbers, and some of them are staggering. Between January 2009 and January 2013 Obama visited 44 states, led 58 town hall meetings, granted 591 media interviews (including 104 on the major networks), and delivered 1,852 separate speeches, comments, or scheduled public remarks. From all those planned interactions with the American public, remarkably few conversions ever materialized.

By following the compulsion (which he mistook for a strategy) of coming to be recognized as the tribune of all the people, Obama squandered indefinite energies in pursuit of a finite opportunity. For there is an economy of gesture in politics, just as there is in sports. Show all your moves too early and there will be no surprise when the pressure is on. Talk steadily on all subjects and a necessary intensity will desert you when you need it.

In Confidence Men, the most valuable study so far of the character and performance of Obama as president, the journalist Ron Suskind noticed the tenacity of the new president’s belief that he enjoyed a special connection to the American people. When his poll numbers were going down in late 2009, or when his “pivot to jobs” had become a topic of humor because he repeated the phrase so often without ever seeming to pivot, Obama would always ask his handlers to send him out on the road. He was convinced: the people would hear him and he would make them understand.

He sustained this free-floating confidence even though he knew that his town halls, from their arranged format to their pre-screened audiences, were as thoroughly stage-managed as any other politician’s. But Obama told Suskind in early 2011 that he had come to believe “symbols and gestures... are at least as important as the policies we put forward.”

The road trips have proved never-ending. In 2014, a run of three or four days typically included stops at a supermarket outlet, a small factory, and a steel mill, as the president comforted the unemployed with sayings such as “America needs a raise” and repeated phrases from his State of the Union address such as “Let’s make this a year of action” and “Opportunity is who we are.”

In discussions about Obama, one occasionally hears it said -- in a mood between bewilderment and forbearance -- that we have not yet known the man. After all, he has been up against the enormous obstacle of racism, an insensate Republican party, and a legacy of bad wars. It is true that he has faced enormous obstacles. It is no less true that by postponement and indecision, by silence and by speaking on both sides, he has allowed the obstacles to grow larger. Consider his “all of the above” energy policy, which impartially embraces deep-sea drilling, wind farms, solar panels, Arctic drilling, nuclear plants, fracking for natural gas, and “clean coal.”

Obama’s practice of recessive management to the point of neglect has also thrown up obstacles entirely of his devising. He chose to entrust the execution and “rollout” of his health-care policy to the Department of Health and Human Services. That was an elective plan which he himself picked from all the alternatives. The extreme paucity of his meetings with his secretary of health and human services, Kathleen Sebelius, in the three years that elapsed between his signing of the law and the rollout of the policy makes a fair epitome of negligence. Indeed, the revelation of his lack of contact with Sebelius left an impression -- which the recent provocative actions of the State Department in Ukraine have reinforced -- that the president is not much interested in what the officials in his departments and agencies are up to.

The Preferential President

Obama entered the presidency at 47 -- an age at which people as a rule are pretty much what they are going to be. It is a piece of mystification to suppose that we have been denied a rescue that this man, under happier circumstances, would have been well equipped to perform. There have been a few genuine shocks: on domestic issues he has proven a more complacent technocrat than anyone could have imagined -- a facet of his character that has emerged in his support for the foundation-driven testing regimen “Race to the Top,” with its reliance on outsourcing education to private firms and charter schools. But the truth is that Obama’s convictions were never strong. He did not find this out until his convictions were tested, and they were not tested until he became president.

Perhaps the thin connection between Obama’s words and his actions does not support the use of the word “conviction” at all. Let us say instead that he mistook his preferences for convictions -- and he can still be trusted to tell us what he would prefer to do. Review the record and it will show that his first statement on a given issue generally lays out what he would prefer. Later on, he resigns himself to supporting a lesser evil, which he tells us is temporary and necessary. The creation of a category of permanent prisoners in “this war we’re in” (which he declines to call “the war on terror”) was an early and characteristic instance. Such is Obama’s belief in the power and significance of his own words that, as he judges his own case, saying the right thing is a decent second-best to doing the right thing.

More than most people, Obama has been a creature of his successive environments. He talked like Hyde Park when in Hyde Park. He talks like Citigroup when at the table with Citigroup. And in either milieu, he likes the company well enough and enjoys blending in. He has a horror of unsuccess. Hence, in part, his extraordinary aversion to the name, presence, or precedent of former president Jimmy Carter: the one politician of obvious distinction whom he has declined to consult on any matter. At some level, Obama must realize that Carter actually earned his Nobel Prize and was a hard-working leader of the country. Yet of all the living presidents, Carter is the one whom the political establishment wrote off long ago; and so it is Carter whom he must not touch.

As an adapter to the thinking of men of power, Obama was a quick study. It took him less than half a year as president to subscribe to Dick Cheney’s view on the need for the constant surveillance of all Americans. This had to be done for the sake of our own safety in a war without a visible end. The leading consideration here is that Obama, quite as much as George W. Bush, wants to be seen as having done everything possible to avoid the “next 9/11.” He cares far less about doing everything possible to uphold the Constitution (a word that seldom occurs in his speeches or writings). Nevertheless, if you ask him, he will be happy to declare his preference for a return to the state of civil liberties we enjoyed in the pre-2001 era. In the same way, he will order drone killings in secret and then give a speech in which he informs us that eventually this kind of killing must stop.

What, then, of Obama’s commitment in 2008 to make the fight against global warming a primary concern of his presidency? He has come to think American global dominance -- helped by American capital investment in foreign countries, “democracy promotion,” secret missions by Special Operations forces, and the control of cyberspace and outer space -- as the best state of things for the United States and for the world. We are, as he has told us often, the exceptional country. And time that is spent helping America to dominate the world is time that cannot be given to a cooperative venture like the fight against global warming. The Keystone XL pipeline, if it is built, will bring carbon-dense tar sands from Canada to the Gulf Coast, and probably Obama would prefer not to see the pipeline built. Yet it would be entirely in character for him to approve and justify its construction, whether in the name of temporary jobs, oil industry profits, trade relations with Canada, or all of the above.

He has already softened the appearance of surrender by a device that is in equal parts real and rhetorical. It is called the Climate Resilience Fund: a euphemism with all the Obama markings, since resilience is just another name for disaster relief. The hard judgment of posterity may be that in addressing the greatest threat of the age, Barack Obama taught America dimly, worked part time at half-measures, was silent for years at a stretch, and never tried to lead. His hope must be that his reiterated preference will count more heavily than his positive acts.


DAVID BROMWICH

David Bromwich writes on civil liberties and America's wars for theHuffington Post. A TomDispatch regular, as well as contributor to the New York Review of Books, his latest essay, "How Lincoln Explained Democracy," appeared recently in the Yale Review.

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