If Obama was serious about reducing structural inequality, supporting single-payer medical insurance is the first step he needs to take.

"As someone who studies the racial economic divide — particularly between Blacks and Whites — my strongest criticism of the address is that Obama's policy solutions are not strong enough to overcome the structural inequality suffered by African Americans."

Just about everything Obama has done is not strong enough to overcome the status quo. He's a centrist and is out to please everybody. This is not leadership..it's appeasement of the power structure that put him in the presidency and it's a weak, cowardly approach; betraying those who gave him their vote. He must think this will get him re-elected in 2012. Big mistake....unless of course, they pull off another 2000 with a slightly different twist.

The other buried story is how the NAACP, which was recieving far more RSVP's to the event than they could fit in a large hotel ballroom, wanted instead to use Yankee stadium for Obama's speech. But Obama, in a political calculation to appease white poeple, didn't want to be "seen" delivering his largest-audience speech since the election to a black audience about racism issues, so he told the NAACP he would give the speech only indoors in the hotel ballroom.

What structural inequality? Now that we have a black president, we blacks should know that the sky's the limit for us in this country. We aren't profiled, beaten, murdered, or otherwise harassed by police anymore, nor do we continue to experience the 'last one hired, first one fired' scenarios from our dark (no pun intended) employment past. There's no more 'redlining' to prevent us from living where we want, we make the same amount of average income as our Caucasian counterparts in the same positions, we're not charged any more higher percentage rates of interest on loans anymore than Caucasians, and thanks to strong affirmative action and more than adequate public assistance to our poor, our families are stronger than ever. Brighter days are here!

We no longer represent 60-70% of the average population of U.S. prisons while being only 12% of the total population. Schools in primarily black areas are funded as well and educators educate as well as schools in primarily Caucasian areas. As a matter of fact, things have gotten so good that there are no primarily Caucasian areas anymore. Now that the U.S. Government has stopped their introduction of drugs into this country and have placed the focus on treatment for drug addicts instead of harsher penalties and longer prison sentences has brought new life back to our once shattered communities.

Personally, I love the fact that these things are no more. Especially because I grew tired of hearing from my Caucasian compatriots that, if I didn't like how things were here in America, that going back to Africa and having it 'really hard' was my alternative. Now I can hold my head up high and be proud to be an American! Oh, wait...these things still go on and are part of the structure of American life for AAs. Shit, I really need to put down my crack pipe, grab the straps on my Nike basketball shoes and pull harder. That's the ticket.

I am getting sick and tired of race being brought up. When will society learn to just be colorblind and provide economic equality and opportunities for all regardless of race, gender, religion, or whatever ??

The Obama admin is an equal opportunity provider...
With the bankster bailouts, all of our grandchildren will be paying for it with taxes for years to come...
With the CIA front banks like Leyman Bros, Bear Stearns & Goldman Sachs intentionally gaming the stock market, they have leveled the playing field between the working poor and the middle class, by stealing all the pensions & 401k's and retirement funds of the more caucasian among us...
And with the continued outsourcing of manufacturing and tech jobs, unemployment is reaching racial parity as well... This is good news...! As army recruitment is picking back up with the market down...
This is the beauty of class war... once the banksters pulled the stopper out of the economy to syphon out all of our liquid assets, the ensuing cyclonic race to the bottom will level all ships...!

This article from WSWS provides a critical socialist perspective absent from "progressive" media.

Obama’s speech to the NAACP
18 July 2009
Tom Eley

"The main thrust of president Barack Obama’s speech before the centenary meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Thursday was to blame working class African-Americans for the social crisis engulfing them.

Obama alluded to the dimensions of the social misery confronting black workers. African-Americans are “out of work more than just about anybody else” and are “more likely to suffer from a host of diseases but less likely to own health insurance,” the president said. Obama also made reference to the disproportionately large number of African-Americans incarcerated in the nation’s massive prison system and affected by AIDS."

...
"But what is the cause of this misery? And how does Obama propose to alleviate it?

Here Obama adopted all the right-wing nostrums about “personal responsibility” that have been used to justify the gutting of social programs, exacerbating the crisis confronting broad sections of the working class.

“Government programs alone won’t get our children to the Promised Land,” Obama declared. In other words, black workers can expect no significant social assistance from the Obama administration. Instead, Obama claimed that what is needed is “a new mind set, a new set of attitudes.”
...
The president even offered some parenting tips. “To parents ...You can’t just contract out parenting,” he counseled. “That means putting away the Xbox, putting our kids to bed at a reasonable hour.”

Had a white politician made similar statements, there can be little doubt he or she would have been attacked as racist. But because of the color of his skin, Obama’s words are hailed as “tough love.” Obama recently made a very similar speech in Africa, in which he argued that the continent most ravaged by imperialism is at fault for its own plight. (See “Obama’s neocolonial mission in Africa”)
...
(more)
...

Read the full article here:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jul2009/pers-j18.shtml

The World Socialist Web Site: international, daily, socialist perspectives on current affairs: http://www.wsws.org

The WOD and the prison system--job opportunities for poor blacks and whites, courtesy of conservatives everywhere.

I heard that Obama was going to reach across the aisle and help African-Americans.

A very simple test was run by a group of researchers in Canada.

In reply to a number of advertisements looking for workers they sent in the same application using the same words, diction and educational background.

The only thing tey changed was the NAME wherein foreign sounding names (East Indian\African\Chinese etc) were used instead of European sounding names.

Those with European sounding names were three times more likelybe called in for a Job Interview.

This is INGRAINED inside a society and puts those minorities behind the eight ball from the get go.

We can never be truly color blind unless we are in fact blind. After all our sense of vision by design is intended to seperate. But these people calling folk in for Job Interviews did not even have to SEE the person in question. They saw a name and attached a connotation to that name.

We have a long ways to go to get past that.

As far as what Predident Obama said or did not say about the racial divide across the United States, talk is cheap when you don't intend to do anything and this President has shown over the past 6 months that he really does not intend to do much of anything except what is already status-quo.

That is why he is a Beige Bush.

Poet

"I'm sick and tired of bringing it up. I will refrain from doing so when that economic equality and opportunity that you mention is a reality. We all know that racism was basically instituted by the richfilth capitalists to prevent poor people, of all races, from coming together and destroying the capitalists. However, at this point in our shared history, it has gained a life of its own and needs to be destroyed, in toto, before we can move ahead with visions that benefit our common humanity. Refusing to discuss and highlight obvious inequality will not help to get rid of it. Refusing to even discuss racism only exacerbates the current situation and allows most people to pretend that there is no racism issue."

I totally agree Black Anarch. We cannot afford to ignore racism, but we also cannot afford to ignore classism as well. Too many people are guilty of ignoring or both of them as well as sexism, homophobia, religious intolerance, etc.

My problem is that too many people on the left can't discuss certain issues without demonizing and indicting entire groups.

The 99% is vulnerable. But we can't ignore that some of the 99% are more vulnerable than others.

Yeah we have a racial divide, we also have a class divide along with a gender divide.

We're all getting screwed here, and I laugh at those people who would suggest the old white guys who run the show are looking out for me as a young white guy. They'd let me drown also.

When people only focus on race, they assume that whites really aren't being disenfranchised, and that when their quality of life isn't up to par, that it's their fault entirely. That line of thinking also plays into Horatio Alger myths about a meritocracy. It assumes that working hard in America will get you somewhere, but it's just that some people are being held back by their race alone. Most whites aren't supreme and aren't living high on the hog either. Only a handful of them are, and those few really couldn't care less about anyone who isn't in their clique.

When people only focus on class, they ignore discrimination, redlining, the funneling of drugs into black communities, being left out of the New Deal, and the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow among other things. Yes, there is a class war, which I do think overrides everything else, but there has been a race war too. The regressive, repressive policies and schemes of the elites have been specifically trained on non-whites in a number of ways. That's not something that we can just let drop off of our collective radar.

However, we can call attention to it in a way that is inclusive, in a way that doesn't scapegoat, that doesn't inflame entire groups or involve divisive identity politics.

No racial group is made up of bogeymen. The only bogeymen are at the very top, and they would terrorize us all. Very few people in general are safe from their machinations. Know that.

I have said countless times here on CD that I cannot shield my eyes and ears from racism. I deal with racists everyday. They hate me because I'm not racist. That's one reason why it angers me (and I'm not saying everyone here is like this) when certain lefties make white men all out to be ogres. It makes me as angry when people on the right make black people out to be predators that are just dying to fuck someone like me up.

On the other hand, people in general need to stop blaming the black community entirely for its own troubles, hell we need to stop blaming workers and poor people of all races for their own troubles.

Inner city black people aren't poor because of what they wear or what music they listen to.

Rural white folk aren't poor because they like NASCAR.

Red people in the reservations aren't poor because they supposedly drink too much booze.

Poverty's no one's fault but the elites.

And yeah, some black people are in gangs, murder and rape people. I work with at least a dozen white guys that would be holding up convenience stores if they didn't have a job. The lowlifes of all stripes piss me off immensely. White men have no monopoly on regressivism either. If nothing else the rainbow of lowlifes help fracture solidarity and act as fodder for the ruling class.

I'm rambling and losing my way here (long, aggravating, slog of a day, my hands are still dirty), but just keep in mind that we need to zoom out as much as we need to zoom in.

The thing is though it that the people who perpetuate white supremacy are a select few people. The majority of whites don't have the power to keep anyone down. They're being kept down themselves.

"ultimate purpose of white genetic survival and to prevent white genetic annihilation on planet Earth."

But what the powerbrokers are doing is actually quite the opposite. They're condemning the entire human family by their environmental policies alone.

And is "white genetic annihilation" really a threat? Is it really imminent? I would say that the annihilation of the human race in a general is a real threat. It assumes that whites are destined to die without a military/industrial complex to hold everyone down, even though it keeps them down too. It assumes that in an equal, peaceful world where everyone has a decent quality of life, whites wouldn't exist.

"In other words, your noticing the extreme minority of white athletes in the NFL, or white American athletes in the NBA, there are pretty many white athletes in the NBA, but most of the are European, is a cultural factor. It is due to African American males who choose to focus on basketball and football. It is due to you only paying attention to football and basketball."

I thought I read somewhere that many years ago, most pro basketball players were Jewish.

Bottom line, Barack Obama nor the Democrats, let alone Republicans, are addressing what needs to be done to turn this country or the world around. While some groups may be disproportionately affected, millions and millions of people in this country are unemployed and without health insurance, and they come in all colors. Give EVERYONE a job at a decent, liveable wage and free all-inclusive healthcare, and you've already solved a couple of problems. Reparations would fix another. Obama doesn't seem to want to do any of that.

Poverty is a societal ill that really doesn't have a color. Most of us are a paycheck or two away from living at the Salvation Army, and it's not our fault if we end up there.

"I am getting sick and tired of race being brought up. When will society learn to just be colorblind and provide economic equality and opportunities for all regardless of race, gender, religion, or whatever ??"

I agree and disagree. The issue of race gets tiresome to me too because it obscures class issues among other things. And you're right about providing opportunity and security to all people. But we're not going to stop hearing about race until we fix the problem of race first. And there are ways to go about doing that. Affirmative Action and "apologies" for slavery 'aint gonna go far enough either. Restitution needs to be made if for no other reason that it's the moral thing to do.