• AcidSmiley [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    From what i've heard, the relationship of some black leftists to Obama can be ... complicated. Some try to square the circle and view him simultaneously as a complete political disappointment for his actions and as an aspirational figure for his presentation. A lot of black people have a hard time operating in a white supremacist society, they feel a pressure to whitewash themselves and always come off as humble, polite and maximally non-threatening (like using the "white voice" in Sorry to Bother You). And according to this view of him, he completely avoided that "thank you for allowing me to be here" energy, found a way to be proudly black and completely unashamed about it and hyper-professional at the same time. These leftists agree to all of our criticisms of Obama as a neolib war criminal, but they find it incredibly important that a black man could pull off getting elected twice with a public presentation like that. They also seem to be fully aware that this was an act, that, for example, he used to call himself Barry to avoid othering himself with his foreign first name when he was younger and had to cultivate this self-assured personality, they also know that he could only get away with it because he fully served the interests of capital, but they still see him as a role model when it comes to being black in public.

    • JoeByeThen [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      That's the dangers of socially left neoliberalism; The way it embraces all of us regardless of our gender, our skin color, our sexual orientation... as it wraps its chains around our throat and squeezes the rebellion out of us.

      Thomas Frank did a good piece for his book Listen, Liberal: Or Whatever Happened the the Party of the People? back in 2015 about neoliberalism, feminism, and Clinton. It's a good read. Here's the excerpt. Nor a Lender Be: Hillary Clinton, liberal virtue, and the cult of the microloan

      • AcidSmiley [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        Thanks for sharing that, actually. If we couldn't unload among our comrades, they'd have to learn to be better comrades. Not wanting to do the typical mayo thing here and make everything about me, but as a trans woman i find a lot of that really relatable. Presentation and authenticity is already such a cursed subject in a society like ours were everything is performance, everyone is on display and everybody is expected to be a brand. And when our true selves are something that's been buried under layers upon layers of ideology and oppression, when the world was made for people unlike you, people unlike me, these contradictions you mention make it that much harder to move beyond all the masquerade and spectacle. It becomes such a long march to learn who we really are and how we want to relate to our fellow human beings.

    • Llituro [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      2 years ago

      This is the magic squared circle of neocolonial oppression. Forget Obama, Clarence Thomas is on the Supreme Court, a wholly unelected body with effectively unlimitable power, and is writing opinions the consequences of which would nullify his own marriage if taken to their logical conclusion. That's the same as Ellen DeGeneres being friends with George Bush. Legal marriage equality, no amount of legal rights actually matter to you materially when you're in the club that almost no one is in.

      In short, more people need to at least skim the first few chapters of Night Vision

    • Lydia [she/her]
      hexagon
      ·
      2 years ago

      Very fair point that I didn't consider.

    • lonedare [none/use name]
      ·
      2 years ago

      Yeah…. No. No black person under 50 gives a fuck about Obama. Don’t know where you “heard” that.