It’s criminal to ask someone to give up identity, their cultural heritage. It’s not right for anyone to be that - being whatever is necessary. Worse, it’s criminal for people to expect that others will accept the denigration of their own identity or cultural heritage.  Yet, this pattern of behavior is increasingly becoming the normal. Black Americans are expected to acquiesce to success at all cost, profit, corporatization, greed, IMPERIALISM.

So while the American public, at once, awaited the new season of American Idol and worried about their pocketbooks (who knows which first), Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton called on them to remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., even while they couldn’t recall what, specifically, was important to remember about King.  The “greatest purveyor of violence” - that is what King said of America - brought death and destruction to the Vietnamese abroad and to the Black, poor and working class people at home. Black men “crippled by our society” were sent “eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem” (“Beyond Vietnam”). The “greatest purveyor of violence” deals in weaponry and the manufacturing of bombs. The “greatest purveyor of violence” leaves behind the dead and maimed, contaminated water and food supply, contaminated soil, orphans and deformed children. The “coalition of the willing” consists of politicians willingly enslaved by corporations. American politicians have become walking billboards for corporate capitalism.

King recognized that there’s no good way to relate to imperialism except to stand in opposition to it. Imperialism is violence. It employs “Manichaean racism” in which the other is denied “his or her human status” (Patrick Taylor). In the era of Pax Americana, the face of American imperialism is white. The implementers and beneficiaries of imperialism have been white Americans. The world has come to know of white American might in places like Wilmington, North Carolina and Tulsa, Oklahoma as well as Hiroshima, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and Iraq.  

White citizens, invested with racial, political, economic clout, nod with approval at concocted narratives of internal and external terrorism. Someone or something is always “coming to get” their “freedom” (RED ALERT!) while the Black communities endure police harassment and surveillance and more democratic nations are subject to pre-emptive wars. These citizens can’t face contemplating the criminality of imperialism - and worse, they refuse to consider the sacrificial measures needed to realize a true democracy.

But what is the occupation of Iraq? What is Gitmo? What is doing business with South Africa while Mandela sat imprisoned in Robbens Island? What is the killing of George Jackson and Steve Biko? What is the spirit-killings of Black children in Chicago, where “test-based grade retention and takeovers” (Monty Neill: “Chicago School Reform: Lessons for the Nation”) have closed four public schools and re-opened them as military academies? What is the displacement of Black residents from New Orleans, the forced removal of South Africans from Sophiatown, or the removal of Palestinians from their homeland, if not a crime? Is there any correlation between splitting the pregnant belly of a Black woman in the 19th Century French Caribbean and raping and shooting an Iraqi woman in cold blood now? Aren’t the children who burned that September day in a Birmingham church and those who burned in Hiroshima, Japan victims of a crime? What is the dropping of 1,400 bombs over women and children in Baghdad, if not a crime?

Isn’t it criminal to fund and arm the undemocratic regimes of Pinochet, Battista, BeBe Doc and Papa Doc? To kill duly elected Patrice Lumumba and to kidnap duly elected Aristide isn’t a crime? The killing of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Denmark Vesey aren't crimes? Passes and white only signs over there and ID cards and white only signs here are not crimes? Embargoes against babies of Cuba and the support of Ethiopia in a proxy war against its neighbors in Somalia aren’t the agenda of criminals? LA, Chicago, New York, Cleveland and Baghdad live with gentrification, the corporate term for ethnic cleansing. Isn’t this a crimina,l like that of implementing the fascist removal of civil liberties? What of contracts to corporate friends of Darth Vader at millions of dollars, to build swimming pools and install generators and water treatment plants in the Green Zone while bombs, at the rate of four a day, fall on thirsty, staving Baghdad residents?  Wouldn’t this be considered criminal? Or what of the rainforest in Ecuador where the Cofan children are dying from cancer caused, they believe, by the crude oil waste of Chevron Inc. Isn't this criminal?

Millions upon millions of dead bodies, massacred, bombed, shot, tortured, rotting away in Black site prisons, drowned in flood waters, diseased by toxic waste, and contaminated water. Millions killed by the indifference of an American public concerned more with their own pocketbooks and receiving the latest news bulletin about Lindsey Lohan, Brittany Spears, and Nicole Ritchie on HD big screen televisions. So we don’t see the flag-draped coffins of young men and women who sacrificed for the imperialist ambitions of corporations that control the broadcast airwaves and the air itself?!

The face of imperialism is white.

Is this face about to change color?

They educate Babamukuru and his offspring not to question the masters!

Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton defecate on the terrain in which neither contributed sweat or blood. They call on the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and place his very name within the vile language of imperialism. They ignore King’s people in Mississippi and New Orleans who are living daily with the Empire’s domestic, ethnic cleansing agenda, called gentrification. They ignore the Detroit auto workers whose livelihoods, stolen from them and shipped overseas, will bring them to join the returning Iraqi veterans on streets. Homelessness for the homeless Black American means the government will not come to take them back in!

Senator Clinton speaks of her thirty-five years as the wife of power. She deserves to sit in the White House - built by slave labor. She tells the world: King’s dreams have been “realized!” Look at her career as a woman! Clinton doesn’t understand that King wouldn’t approve of her climb above the repression of Black Americans. Her shuffling between Republican and Democratic corporate clout isn’t a sign that injustice and inequality is over! It’s evidence of the aggressive effacement of Black Americans’ lived experiences.

Senator Obama’s reading of his own ascendancy in King’s dream of justice and equality dangerously confuses economic equality for Black Americans with the economic policies of imperialism. Obama’s advisor, Joseph Stiglitz, prophesizes about a new world if and when Europe takes the “lead in achieving it”! He’s surround himself with the old guard of American Empire with the likes of Brzezinsky (Carter).  Obama has no problem evoking the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan! Former Reagan aide, Lawrence Korb, a supporter of Obama, said that he believed Obama “is trying to get us back to that pleasantness.” Yes, Reagan was so very, very “pleasant” for Black Americans! Please, more Reaganomics! More Reaganomics - to clear away the “excesses” of the 60’s and 70’s like maybe those nagging Black youths not killed in the Vietnam War or by COINTELPRO. Or the excesses of Nicaraguans or workers’ unions. Or Affirmative Action? Everywhere Obama looks, he should see the blood of Africans and their Black American descendents in the old castles of white power, in the monuments to aggressive might. He hasn’t learned to listen to the moans of Black American’s ancestors - from Kingston to Mississippi, from Kassana and Elmina to Jamestown - a far, far longer history of knowledge than he will receive from his white corporate-minded advisors.

Before Obama and Clinton declare the concerns of King addressed, the issues of racial disparities solved, they’d have to come to grips with the “greatest purveyor of violence.” Both Obama and Clinton have shown that they are more than willing (it is a given!) to engage this imperialist (domestic and global) agenda of violence, and they expect the American public, particularly Blacks, Latino/as, working-class, and poor to ignore the implications of Black president’s or woman president’s commitment to corporate militarization of the globe.

In the meantime, their friends in corporate media, while they name the topic of discussion, limit if not prohibit, conversation on domestic policies as they relate to the lack of economic equality for Black Americans. Obama permits this game of naming the topic and then restricting the dialogue every time he is congratulated for being the Black man who “transcends race.” Romney and Huckabee speak of consolidating business interest and the rights of southern states to wave the confederate flag, and this not-so-covert language of exclusion is normal for good old boys - born in good old America! To discuss the history of Black struggle, however, is next to criminal behavior! It is “playing the race card!” Obama remains silent on this issue too.

We can’t pretend that imperialism is not an indulgence in criminal behavior.

One hundred and fifty years of moving forward and then thrown two steps back, moving forward and thrown back three steps…serving the interests of white Americans who have long feared sharing with Black Americans equal power. “We must come to see now that integration is not merely a romantic or aesthetic something where you merely add color to a still predominantly white power structure” (my emphasis) (The Other America).   

We’ve seen the suit-wearing, shoe-shopping articulations of white-lite imperialists, Colin Powell and Condi Rice, speaking like drones of the U.S.’s imperial might. But we have the memory of how we have fought for freedom since the days Black women, clutching our babies and children, jumped overboard, settling free in the Atlantic Ocean among the thousand others strong. Our memory could sustain us through the image of a Black woman Secretary State gleefully accepting her anointment by the imperialists with an oil tanker carrying her name above those water spirits.

Will the face of IMPERIALISM - the face of American militarization - become Black?

Black Americans have struggled against enslavement, exploitation, injustice, inequality, and imperialism. Black Americans have struggled to maintain a narrative of liberation against the inhumanity of imperialism. To offer change would be to recall and live toward realizing the goal of a liberating narrative. For a “liberating narrative grounds itself in the story of lived freedom, the story of individuals and groups pushing up from below…to reveal the ambiguity and multilayeredness of reality” (Taylor). It looks to “new and open-ended relationship to history and to humanity.”

Is Obama’s narrative of “hope” in keeping with Black America’s “liberating narrative?" How does his rhetoric of hope measure up to Black America’s historical struggle to engage a “new and open-ended relationship to history and humanity?” Are we to see our already marginalized narrative of liberation eviscerated by a Black face that espouses the aggression of militarization? This government, whether lead by the Republicans or Democrats, is a violator of human rights! The evisceration of the liberation narrative in the U.S. is not only a betrayal of King’s hope for true justice and equality for all Americans, but it is also an engagement in treasonous behavior!

We need to jettison the liberation narrative with our own commitment to unite and aggressively defend our right to the realization of King’s “radical revolution of values” (Beyond Vietnam: An address sponsored by the Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam). We must begin by refusing, as Malcolm said more than forty years ago, “to be the victims of a political sellout” (1964 Press Statement by Malcolm X).

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.