Instructions should have been given to the helicopter pilot who removed King George from the Washington D.C. area to fly the King to the nearest prison facility to be held until charges of mass destruction and death were read to him. Darth Vader, too, should have been wheeled off to the nearest asylum, with his boxes of incriminating documents, until charges of complete insane and inhumane behavior were read to him.

The legacy of mass destruction, death, insanity, and inhumane behavior - complete and total indifference to struggling and suffering humanity - will remain the very air we breathe after the helicopter is no longer visible.

Meanwhile, new residents at the house are settling in. There’s the smell of Ugali coming from the kitchen where the woman, Filipina, executive chef and the cooks are approving the flavor of fresh greens. Nina Simone’s voice lingers in the hallways, and two little Black girls stand at a window looking out toward the monuments their ancestors built. And maybe, late at night, the new president and first lady will come down the stairs to sit at the chef’s and cooks’ table. Maybe at this table, the president, the first lady, chef, and cooks will invite their ancestors to stay on and be at ease.

If only we could stay here with a Black family now walking about the rooms, not as guests but residents.

I don’t think we are there yet, Rev. Lowery.

Because very soon a time will come when the little girls are at school, when the first lady is meeting with staff, when the president has chosen a comfortable chair, checked his Blackberry (because he will have his Blackberry!), and has lifted the folder labeled “Iraq” in one hand and the one labeled “Afghanistan” in the other, they will come like a swarm of flies. Encircling President Barack Obama’s desk in the Oval Office, they will talk all at once but in polite whispers: Sacrifices, sacrifices, sacrifices, Mr. President! Sacrifices! Mr. President more sacrifices here at home from the American people! More sacrifices in Afghanistan, Mr. President! More! And then - peace!

And he, the President, will repeat: Americans will not give in to an ideology that presents a “false choice between our safety and our ideals.” The swarm of flies, the enablers will smile and say - Repeat after us, Mr. President: Israel, Israel, Israel has the right to defend - democracy!

There’s what lingers in the air to stifle life!

Outside, away from the white picket fence, I see the un-housed, the barely housed, the un-feed, the dead. I see those slated for death, slated for “planned” misery. And I have to think, realistically. I have to think of the majority, far away from the White House and far below its sunny optimistic view.

What a cruel twist of fate, or should I say departure from our and others struggles and narratives of liberation, that Black children should learn the language of our historical oppressors from an African American Head of State. The children have heard the language before, but now this will be change!

This will be a new image to digest: At the White House, a Black family guards the right of the U.S. to exert military aggression. A Black family will seek to preserve the rights of corporatists to seek profits at the expense of workers, the poor, and the defenseless.

I am afraid that Black, Brown, Yellow, and Red children will come to identify with the political and economic engine that creates the suffering of other children. I am afraid these, our children, will lose sight of their historical and political alignment with the oppressed, and come to call those suffering children the “enemy.” More than ever before, these children of color will cheer for a U.S. victory, a victory for the righteous! Death to “terrorists,” “insurgents,” “boogie men,” and “evildoers.” And for how many Black teenagers will the military become a way to serve as “patriots” of imperialists “values”? How many will come of age in time for deployment to Afghanistan?

We have never been a people to advocate for U.S. aggression elsewhere when we knew, often first hand, what we ourselves were experiencing here at home. The devious King George put a Black face on aggression (Colin Powell, Condi Rice), and on torture (John Yu), and on injustice (Alberto Gonzales). Now we have a Head of State, a Commander-in-Chief who tells us that Israel has the right to slaughter over 1600 Palestinians in the name of democracy!

I would like to see President Obama pick up the mantle from Martin Luther King Jr. and call for an end to all wars, all military action. I would like to see the 3 billion that Israel alone receives to establish blockades on Palestinian and drop bombs on babies redistributed to states for the welfare of children in the U.S. I would like to see him commit his efforts to the education of children here, so that Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow children receive the empowering education his two little girls will receive at their private school in Washington D.C. (Of course, with the appointment of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education, I shouldn’t hope for anything but more branding and shipping of Black children to juvenile correctional facilities). I would like to see President Obama espouse the values of compassion, equalitarianism, and love by beginning at the bottom of American society where the poor and worker struggles to live.

But those of us who have been around long enough hear the recitation, the rhetoric cliches about “American values.” What are these “American values” that must be kept “safe” at the cost of so many lives here in the U.S. and abroad?

Are these “values” the motivation for sanctioning the existence of Guantanamo and Bagram, an invasion of Iraq, and an 850 million embassy in Baghdad? Are these “values” the motivation for the displacement (liberation?) of 2 million Iraqis and for the deaths of over 1600 people in Gaza? What are these “values” that legislate over 2 million mostly Black and Latino/a to reside in U.S. prisons while King George, Darth Vader, corporate CEOs flourish and thrive, upholding the lifestyle of the rich and famously criminal?

If we aren’t talking about “values” that endorse and sustain white privilege what are we talking about? These “values” are certainly not ones that privilege all of humanity over and above corporate greed!

We aren’t talking about protecting Black privilege!

What is to be kept safe?

Is it the safety of our children here in the U.S? How many Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow children are without nutritious food? How many go to bed hungry? How many are without adequate health care? A concern for the safety of all American children would guard them from life-threatening conditions they face here everyday!

A concern for safe-guarding democracy here would not see parents now struggling without employment or means of income to provide for their children. And will the Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, take his eye off the interest of the ethanol and factory farm industries to redirect them to the safety of these children?

White privilege determines who and what will be protected, kept safe, and who will die in defense of “democracy” and “freedom,” ideals the Black, Brown, Yellow and Red know in his or her heart but have yet to experience.

With utter disregard for the dead East Timorese and Columbian peasant fighters, President Obama encircles himself with the likes of Dennis Blair and Eric Holder, among many sworn to uphold white privilege. President Obama has sworn (at least twice now) to uphold white privilege!

For all the well-placed rhetorical notes resonating with Martin Luther King-like cadence and chants of a “change” that’s “gonna come,” nation-states adopting American brand “democracy” and accepting American brand weapons of mass destruction, while curtailing the civil liberties of their citizens will have the right to slaughter citizen resistance.

Guard white privilege to rule with an iron fist and maintain global plantations.

We are not there yet because a defender of liberation narratives has not arrived at the White House. A defender of the rights of the majority of people in the world, the trampled and long wretched people, can’t be in the White House or he wouldn’t be curtsying to those who pull the strings.

In this country and around the world, millions gathered to voice their opposition to Israeli violence, and they were ignored. Millions filed into Washington D.C. to celebrate and the corporate media demanded that the world hold its breath and watch in awe of an historical moment. Only to be told in the next moment, when allowed to breathe again, that Israel has the right to defend democracy!

If this president, this African American, can’t find his way beyond Wall Street and the disastrous economic system of inequality and injustice, then what good is hope?

No, Rev. Lowery, we are there yet. Black is still BACK, as invisible as Brown, Yellow, and Red.

A new day?

Martin Luther King, Jr. discovered what motivated U.S. political and military maneuvering that brought napalm and M-16s to Vietnam in order to force a new government into existence. Placing himself in the position of the Vietnamese people, King considered their struggles a war of “liberation.” Only then could he think and wonder out loud about a government, the U.S., and its plans, its “values,” that excluded the presence of the peasants at the table! Of course, King said, from this vantage point, the people would question the “political goals” of the U.S. It would have to come to the conclusion that mass destruction and death was to ensure a goal of capitalist agenda for the Vietnamese people whether or not they want capitalism. Of course, the Vietnamese, King surmised, would deny “a peace settlement” because what “peace” is in a settlement that brings U.S. capitalist interest, not democracy - to Vietnam? “Is our nation planning to build on political myth again?” King asked.

The “true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence,” King said, is to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves” in order that “we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition.” To that end, “if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition” (“Beyond Vietnam”). Who will question the “values” versus the lofty “ideals” of this country in this era?

For the moment, again, the American public is being asked to be enthralled with the rhetoric of American “innocence.” What a great country! What a great people! Just look up and see the Black family at the White House. But who remains with the power to establish the criteria for the kind, that is, the perspective the Black, Brown, Yellow, and Red person must have to be allowed at the table - and be heard?

There isn’t anything generational in what Rev. Joseph Lowery said at the inaugural of the first African American president of the United States. If only mass destruction and death only happened back in the day! White privilege has been a weapon of mass destruction - in every generation since the arrival of the first white settlers! How many still suffer and die to keep racial and economic hegemony afloat?

I have heard so much talk from the corporate news media about President Obama’s mixed heritage. These news darlings smile into the camera and assure the American public that President Obama has every one’s race in his blood - even if his defect is that he looks Black!

Have no fear: He’s everyman! He’s every American who believes in saving fetuses but not children, locking up or executing the “criminal,” and bombing (defending!) the right of allies to contain and slaughter the “enemy.” (He’s not ALL BLACK!). The interests of Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow people, the interests of compassion for all, the interests of the majority - will not usurp our, the nation’s, “democracy’s,” (white) interests - with President Obama in the White House!). Have no fear, American public!

So now I can imagine little Black, Brown, Yellow, and Red children looking toward the white picket fences and peering to see the Black faces in the windows of the White House, but listening to the underlying message - it’s not good to be ALL Black, Brown, Yellow, Red. It won’t be enough to spend a fortune for straight-hair treatments and skin lighteners. Our children will need WHITE blood! They will need to say they are cablinasian (Tiger Woods) in order to rise from the dungeon James Baldwin described in Fire Next Time on which sits “a county and countrymen…that…have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.” In their own homes, Black children will look at their grandparents, parents, siblings, uncles, and aunts and come to regard their racial heritage (racially mixed but visibly Black) as a defect. But isn’t this scheme of white privilege, for all humanity to value whiteness, the eternal flame to keep safe at all cost?

There was no such commotion about the racial heritage of former President Bill Clinton, the first Black president. No one checked his pedigree to see if he had Black blood. Clinton didn’t check either. He couldn’t proclaim, as a triumphant show of multiculturalism, that he had Black, Brown, Yellow, or Red blood! Not one corporate news darling frowned while thinking out loud: if only Bill Clinton actually possessed Black or Red blood he would make a better candidate or president! King George was white and his family white - and both the mythical “Black” president and the King, the most incompetent ever, were just right for the office of overseer of white privilege.

The closer you are to the values, i.e., interests of white privilege the better your chances to be what is considered “successful” in the U.S. Our children will have to dream America to be seen, let alone heard! Over the last two years of the presidential campaign, this is the lesson our Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow children have learned - whether or not they can articulate this atrocity or not.

But if there are jobs for your people, if there is anything to be had once we have absconded with the loot, then your people can serve as guards - guardians of American interests. Guard the merchandise, the stores and shops, the schools and prisons, the hospitals and nursing homes. Be all you can be and become a member of the National Guard and join the police force, guarding the interests and the powers that maintain inclusion but only on the margins for the Black, Brown, Red, and Yellow.

For our children to emulate, we need public intellectuals like Malcolm and King! We need community organizers like that of Gabriel (Thomas H.) Prosser and Fannie Lou Hamer!

We need collective anger and discomfort to sow human values beyond the white picket fence!

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.