[Marxism] Anti-Obama Attacks Divert Attention From Institutional Racism

[Dbachmozart@xxxxxxx]

Bigoted Anti-Obama Attacks Divert Attention From  Pervasive Institutional 
Racism  
by Black Agenda Report  Managing Editor Bruce Dixon  
The mainstream corporate news media, upon whom we can  always count to help 
us know what's really important and why, have recently  discovered that 
campaign workers for Barack Obama are sometimes greeted with  anything from 
snide 
racist asides to full-blown hateful screeds. When a  Republican governor makes 
jokes about Obama ducking a bullet, and a Georgia  restaurant owner sells 
T-shirts depicting Obama as a monkey, these occurrences  dominate the news 
cycle for 
more than a week.  
Corporate media's breathless focus on manifestations of  individual racism 
feed a narrative long popular in white America, a narrative  central to the 
Obama campaign. This narrative holds that racism is nothing more  nor less than 
an 
anti-social habit practiced by backward individuals, like bad  table manners 
or public flatulence. This narrative is of course, false and  misleading.  
In  the real world, American racism diminishes the quality of millions of 
lives  every day, not through up close, personal slights and bigotry, but via 
the 
 impersonal everyday functioning of society's core institutions. Black 
mothers  and babies in the US sicken and die at third world rates not because 
of 
racist  insults, but as an outcome of the ânormalâ way that insurance and 
health 
care  markets function. Black children still get inferior educations in large 
part due  to the dependence of public education funding on local property 
taxes, and No  Child Left Behind, both of which are race-neutral. From 
employment 
and  underemployment to credit and housing markets to policing and sentencing 
 practices, to the siting of toxic waste dumps, our nation's ostensibly  
color-blind laws and institutions consistently bring forth racially stratified  
results.  
The real racism which degrades millions of nonwhite  American lives, 
including many who seldom encounter a white person bigoted or  otherwise is 
institutional racism, as it was first named by Charles Hamilton and  Kwame 
Toure more 
than 40 years ago. Institutional racism is something quite  apart from the 
individual words and acts of bigots. But drawing attention to,  let alone 
ending 
institutional racism has seldom been on the agenda of corporate  media. 
Likewise 
the Obama campaign's strategy on race toward whites is to  carefully avoid 
telling white people anything other than what they imagine they  already know. 
With frank discussions of race, power and privilege off the table,  talk on the 
subject is limited to the terrain of racism as bad  manners.  
The toxic eruptions of bigots have also been extremely  useful to the Obama 
campaign in rallying support among African Americans.  Constantly recirculated 
in the black community, these racist attacks convey to  Obama's candidacy a 
kind of black âauthenticityâ on the cheap, without the  bother of his 
having to 
do, say or promise to do anything that might challenge  pervasive 
institutional racism. The racist attacks then, enable black and brown  voters 
to hunker 
down in solidarity around a substance-free black candidate,  while they allow 
Obama's white supporters to wag their fingers disapprovingly at  ignorant white 
bigots, and congratulate themselves, celebrate the evidence that  their 
nation --- most of it anyway â has risen above and transcended  race.  
<_http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6
29&Itemid=1_ 
(http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=629&Itemid=1)
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