On radio programs that still present an analysis of world politics, the hosts and guests speak openly about “U.S. interests in Mexico” or they discuss “what the U.S. must do to improve conditions in Afghanistan.” The host and guest often talk in an all-knowing, omnipotent tone about “the other.” Most of those radio hosts and guest are white Americans.  Nothing, however, is more irritating than listening to a host and a Black or Latino/a or Asian American—all speaking as if the puppet masters of the world. 

A few days ago, while President Barack Obama (HOPE) was making his grand entrance at the G-20, appear in a photo-op exiting Air Force One and then arriving atop a building from Marine One helicopter, his Secretary of Commerce appeared on National Public Radio (NPR). Gary Locke, Asian-American, proclaimed that “America has various ideals that we subscribe to, and we need to move other countries to begin adopting some of these.”

“Begin”? “America has various ideals” and “we,” Americans, “need to move other countries”? 

Mr. Gary Locke, New Secretary of Commerce, sounds like Rush Limbaugh!

Then there are the news segments on Cuba or the Congo.  The host speaks with anti-Castro member of the Cuban American population to discuss the horrors of Cuba. And the news is always bad and there’s little if anything worth redeeming in Cuba. You won’t hear a citizen of Cuba speaking for themselves about conditions in Cuba. 

As for the Congo, the host usually interviews a British missionary or ex-ambassador and the listeners are presented a picture of Africans gone wild—nearly cannibalistic! They kill with machetes at will. They torture their victims—and on clue, listeners hear the voice of a Congolese “victim” of Congolese violence. They—these not quite human beings—have it in them to just be violent! You will not hear a discussion of Euro-American colonial practices of violence or the continued presence and ownership of the Congo’s material wealth by Euro-American corporations.    

By the same token, listeners of these liberal radio news programs will not discuss how the people of Venezuela or El Salvador are struggling to establish a democracy.  It means something that for the first time the indigenous population of El Salvador elected Mauricio Funes, former Frente Farabundo Marti para la Liberacion Nacional (FMLN), member for president.  It means something that Hugo Chavez is seen as an “evil” president, and yet he was elected twice by Venezuela’s indigenous population. 

It’s not just a practice of conservative, “corporate” media to slant or exclude real news. 

Americans are treated 24/7 to political teaching in power—corporate power—and corporate power is American power!

So when the Head of Predatory Empire tells the world he’s at the G-20 to confront “a crisis that knows no borders,” President of Brazil, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has this response: “It is a crisis caused and encouraged by the irrational behavior of white people with blue eyes who before the crisis appeared to know everything, but are now showing that they know nothing.” 

The U.S. deficit is $1.7 trillion and this from an all-knowing specific race and class of people who know how to grow capital.

Lula da Silva went on to say that he didn’t know any Black or indigenous bankers. “I am only saying it is not possible for this part of mankind which is victimized more than any other, to pay for the crisis.”

That’s not a guest on NPR nor is that the voice of American power!

If they could, white Americans would have filed charges accusing Lula da Silva of afflicting collective whiplash.

Where did that voice come from? Brazil! Americans had to check their maps because Americans will not be told on the Nightly News that free trade leaves first world countries tied to sweatshop “employment” for their citizens while empowering the U.S. multi-national corporations and those few puppet politicians, merchants, and law enforcement beholding to their power.  

William Greider, The Nation’s National Affairs Correspondent and Washington Post reporter, was a guest on Bill Moyers, March 27, 2009.  When asked to consider what needs to happen now in the U.S., Greider tells Moyers and viewers a story.  Long ago, he visited a town in Mississippi during the Civil Rights era when the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee was organizing poor Black workers. At an organizers’ meeting, he observed that the participants focused their attention on two things.  One, they taught each other how to listen to the workers. Second, the organizers also had to convince themselves and the workers that they were citizens.  Greider explained: the organizers and workers had “to act like citizens even though they knew they weren’t citizens” by law. “People get power,” Greider concluded, “if they believe they are entitled to power.”

“People get power if they believe they are entitled to power.”

What is it that granted Lula da Silva the right to speak, to respond to Britain’s Gordon Brown and President Obama?

What is it that saw to the rise of indigenous people in Venezuela or El Salvador?

What is it that galvanized poor, “non-citizens,” in Mississippi?

Greider can’t name that “power.”  He can’t name it, although there has been an effort since the beginnings of this nation to call it disruptive, threatening. 

The viewers of Moyers, however, were to infer a lesson from the “poor” Black workers:  Imitate people of the Black Civil Rights era and get power! 

To hold a responsible position among an oppressed people, Frantz Fanon writes, is “to know that in the end everything depends on the education of the masses…on ‘political teaching.’” Political teaching, Fanon explains, means opening the minds of the people, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence… [It means] to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them; that if we stagnant it is their responsibility, and that it we go forward it is due to them too, that there is no such thing as a demiurge, that there is no famous man who will take responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people.

And the power isn’t something you get from somewhere else, some external source.  Power isn’t that of the leader or the Head of Predatory Empire whatever his race because his or her power will be that of the very thing you are fighting against! It is not a power you want to get from anyone.

Black women walking to work or church during the Montgomery Bus Boycott didn’t wait to get power from somewhere. Kwame Ture didn’t wait to organize workers. King didn’t wait. 

In opposition to that power where control and exploitation is granted to the local sheriff or Congress of Washington D.C. or community of white Americans, this power moved the adamant and challenged the uncivil. 

Now—where is the memory of how Black Americans were treated when they exerted their power against this government’s belief in white superiority?

The ink hadn’t dried on affirmative action legislation before white Americans screamed bloody murder, and the words of an anti-white supremacy martyr were employed to restate the “bootstrap” theory! I have heard and read white commentators frequently refer to Fannie Lou Hammer, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement since the economic crisis of capitalism.  A coat of white paint has been doused over the memory of our ancestors! Erased is the counter-resistance of white America.  Ignored is the collaborative effort of white liberals with the governmental powers in the campaign to annihilate the power of Black organizers and workers in the U.S.  The message—“people get power if they believe they are entitled to power”—then is a message to white America: recognize YOU, the middle class, are a “victim” of Washington and Wall Street and take back the excesses of capitalism just as you took care of the excess of Black power!

Warfare—but class warfare, cleansed of its racial context, becomes a rallying cry to white America! Political teaching now is the role of corporate media: Include the Black without the baggage of actual poor and working class Black people!

Black, Brown and Red Americans have for too long recognized a United States of heartlessness, incapable of empathy with “the other” or self-reflection, encouraged to climb the ladder of “success” over the dead bodies of millions of our ancestors and contemporary fellow comrades in struggle.

When the white corporate media, speaking to and on behalf of “American people,” as King George would say, “our people,” the “base,” rant about spending on the poor or Black and Brown working class, when it insist in shouting that “hard working” people (white people) are being asked to “foot the bill” for the existence of “the other,” these talking heads of media are attempting to engage the language of liberation on behalf of the corporate class in much the same way white liberals co-opt our ancestor warriors to encourage class warfare that focuses on the “liberation” of the middle class. 

President da Silva’s comment points to the racial dynamics of world politics, an oppressive politics of white supremacy—what Americans know but assume is the norm!

Lula da Silva calls attention to the link between a predatory people and the collective admiration for and dependence on predatory capitalism.  

This revolution has always been televised!

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.