Foreshadowed
by his roots and bottle-rocket-like rise, Barack Obama’s legacy is
one of betrayal and what might have been,… From the outset, he
courted and was courted by the pillars of counter-revolution, his
very blackness a cloak for his Manchurian mission.
by
Jon Jeter
Part
7 - A “reasonableness” about him
In a
2006 article for Harper’s Magazine, Ken Silverstein noted that
Craig “liked the fact that Obama was not a racial polarizer on
the model of Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton,” and Williams was
“soothed by Obama’s reassurances that he was not
anti-business.”
“There’s
a reasonableness about him,” Harmala told Silverstein. “I
don’t see him being on the liberal fringe.”
In the
year since he’s left office, Obama has spent his leisure time
“yachting with Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen in Tahiti,
kitesurfing with Richard Branson in the Virgin Islands, rafting in
Indonesia, golfing on the Scottish coast, and biking under the Tuscan
sun,” New York Times columnist Frank Bruni wrote recently, all
of which stands in sharp contrast to the spartan lifestyles of the
previous generation of black political actors.
In a
1992 interview, 12 years before his death at the age of 82, Palmer
spoke of how he purchased most of his clothes on consignment: “I
can buy a suit for $10 [rather than $200 and] see, the way I look at
it that leaves me with $190 I can put back into the struggle.”
Palmer recounted how his father was fired from his job as an
administrator at an all-black high school in Virginia, for no reason
other than that he protested the vastly different pay scales for
black and white teachers.
“I
have given my life, as did my father, to this movement and that’s
why it hurts so much to see our people give this city back to white
folks,” he said. “Bad enough to give it to white folks but
to give it to a Daley.”
“I’m
actually depressed now because everything we fought for between 1981
and 1989 has been wiped away, destroyed, stepped on, stomped on.”
Palmer said. He sighed heavily, and said almost prophetically: “I
don’t know what’ it’s going to take to bring our people back
together.”
***
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