Loving this Obama tea.
This is perhaps the most brilliant takedown of Obama (from a leftist perspective of course, because fuck what the Tea Party thinks) and foundation-funded politics I've ever read.
The kicker? It was written in 1996. Yep, nineteen fucking ninety-six:
"In Chicago, for instance, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds.
His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program-the point where identity politics converges with old fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn't been up to the challenge. We have to do better."
(Written by Adolph Reed, Jr., professor of political science, and published in the Village Voice, 16 January 1996.)
The kicker? It was written in 1996. Yep, nineteen fucking ninety-six:
"In Chicago, for instance, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds.
His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program-the point where identity politics converges with old fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics here as in Haiti and wherever the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black activist response hasn't been up to the challenge. We have to do better."
(Written by Adolph Reed, Jr., professor of political science, and published in the Village Voice, 16 January 1996.)