Click here to access article by Bruce A. Dixon from Black Agenda Report.
I hesitate to criticize a website which has frequently exposed the hypocrisy of the Obama administration, however I think it is necessary in order to attain a higher level of political consciousness.
First of all, the article does little to explain why Obama and his wife have supported Wal-Mart other than a brief reference to Wal-Mart's charitable donations in the Chicago area, the political base of Obama. On the other hand, there is frequent mention throughout the article about how Obama deceived working people and people of color. This is a favorite topic on this website, and I think it reflects an unconscious, but in fact a racist perspective that has so pervasively infected the minds of Americans. Let me explain.
Racism is defined as judging, or arriving at preconceived notions about, a person based solely on one's physical characteristics that are attributed to race. Race as a concept is itself very controversial in its meaning. For example, in the US the states legally defined an African-American in various ways by one's African ancestry. Such rules were enforced in legal cases, while in everyday life identification as an African-American was based on outward physical characteristics. Missing from this identification has always been the socialization of individuals. Thus racist concepts are literally only skin deep.
Such racism, of course, obscures the reality of an individual's behavior and beliefs which is a result of their socialization. This directly applies to Obama, and I believe that the directors of the ruling class cleverly groomed Obama for the presidency because of this confusion between racial characteristics and socialization.
Obama was mostly raised by white upper-middle class people, primarily by his grandmother who was a (white) banker in Hawaii. He was educated in an elite private school in Hawaii (Punahou School) and then on to Columbia and Harvard universities. He understandably identifies with the white power structure because he has been socialized entirely in white mainstream values. It is doubtful that he experienced much racism in Hawaii (and definitely not in his early years in Indonesia) given that it is such a multi-racial state, far more so than any other state in the union. I know that from my own experience living there for five years during which time Obama was in his high school years at Punahou H.S.
I remember well that this website endorsed Obama for President back in 2008 (I can't document this because they have no archives on their website), and I think that writers for this website cannot get over their own feelings of being betrayed by Obama by constantly harping on his betrayal. They endorsed him because he looked African-American which is racism, and not so much because of the deceptions he promoted--all Democratic candidates lie before elections.
