We have lost another voice.

I never spoke with Dr. Ronald Walters personally. Our voices only came together here, where our commentaries appeared weekly at the Black Commentator. As a professor of political science, he was a suit-wearing Democrat and served twice as Rev. Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaign manager. On the other hand, I posses a doctorate in literature, wear freedomlocks, and I am the enemy of one group or another as I am also a socialist and a Black feminist. He was a participant in the Civil Rights Movement while I participated in the Black Power Movement.

He lived in a world where his ideas and strategies about the Black community within the American Empire could be heard and exchanged, argued among the recognized Black leadership. On the other hand, I am too “academic” for the grassroots warriors, and perceived by frightened academics and (by recognized Black leadership in general) as being outside the realm of the new post-racial era.

But we have lost a voice.

Walters, interviewed by Bill Moyers in 2007, expressed concern about Obama’s eagerness to run from race and issues of racial injustice. What is Obama’s strategy? Different, Walters suggested. Jackson’s campaign had as its base the heart of the Black community. Obama, in turn, is trying to “maintain the middle.”

Obama is trying to “neutralize race.”

For Obama, “incompetence” explains the catastrophe that was New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. The “criminal justice system going awry” explains Jena. (You can substitute the word Obama and replace it with the American Empire). And did Obama, Walters asked out loud, tell his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, of his plans to run for president? Do you see him at any “venues where Blacks raise issues of injustice?” We did not hear “hot button” issues from Obama when he ran for president.

Watching Dr. Walters, I wanted to believe that he knew what Obama stood for then and that he knew the invisible hand controlled the pathway to the White House for this - and no other - African American.

In a 2008 open letter to presidential candidate Barrack Obama, Walters urged the candidate not to “weaken the force of change” with an agenda that appealed to the “blue collar” worker at the expense of the Democrat’s loyal base - Black and Hispanic voters.

It is true, the blue collar voter, Walters argued, experienced “significant job losses, high prices for everything from milk to gas, the loss of their homes and disaffection with the war policies of the Bush administration.” Yet, they will vote for “McCain if Obama were the choice in fall.”

I think this year, the blue collar constituency is likely to split. One group could go with McCain; another group may buy in to Obama's promise of change to an agenda that favors lower income citizens; and still another group, frustrated by the choices, is likely to stay home.

The split could threaten the Democratic base - unless, Walters continues, “it could be neutralized by the dynamism created by the Obama campaign.”

The new coalition of “change voters,” could take up the slack and could “triple the number of new voters to about 10 to 12 million.” These change voters should be the focus of Obama’s campaign strategists.

But, Walters concludes, “the other path” is to focus on the core and loyal constituency. The obsession with blue collar voters by moderate Democrats and pundits should not dictate Obama’s campaign strategy. “Such a strategy is disrespectful of Blacks by suggesting that they would stand still while Obama pursues conservative interests to their detriment, in effect, exchanging the progressive substance of change for race.”

Disrespectful to Blacks? Did Obama and his strategists listen to a long-time dedicated supporter and activists in the Democratic Party?

I can understand why I would receive a deaf ear, but here is a man who spent the better part of his life teaching government and politics, an “expert on race,” a man too knowledgeable about the workings of American Empire and its strategies to be ignored.

This past July, his column at the Black Commentator seemed to express frustration over the Obama administration’s (NAACP’s and the media’s) swift move to condemn and to sweep aside Shirley Sherrod, based on eight minutes of a 35 minute speech she gave before an NAACP audience.

“What sticks in my craw,” he wrote, “is that all parties” agreed with Andrew Breitbart’s definition of racism. Now, Dr. Walters was an intelligent man, an elder, longtime on the field. When the subject is Black injustice, such as Jena, or Black Americans struggling, suffering and dying needlessly, it is not racism. If it is a Black, however, who does not appear to bend over backwards for a white American - that is racism. “But even the first eight minutes,” wrote Walters, “were not racist.”

It was not racist that Ms. Sherrod wanted to work only for Black people. Charge Cesar Chavez with being racist for only working for Hispanics. It was not racist that she remembered the past mal-treatment of blacks and decided how much help she would give him. It would only have been racist if she decided she would give him less than equal service. It was not racist for some in the audience to respond audibly in agreement with Sherrod who voiced the irony that the shoe was on the other foot and she now had the power to determine how to help a white farmer knowing that Black farmers had faced trouble at the hands of whites.

Should not the “cultural context” of Sherrod’s exchange with a NAACP audience been considered? When a video of Rev. Jeremiah Wright was subject to an evaluation “at the hands of conservatives who had neither respect nor much knowledge of Black culture,” we saw what happened and got the message then.

Walters warned: “the White House, the media and other institutions are vulnerable to having racial situations being defined by those with a distinctly political agenda if they do not change their approach.” Why is the White House running from racism?

[T]he President lives in a country where race is one of the most dynamic issues and his own race will continually invite some relationship to those issues. In this sense, it was, and is, naïve for him and his advisers to believe that they can either ignore these issues or handle them on an ad hoc basis…they deserve ‘war room’ attention.

Was this perhaps the voice of an elder, a disillusioned Democrat, but an elder who knew what many of us have said in the past - the Democratic Party (and certainly not the Republican Party) does not deserve the loyalty of 85 percent of Black voters?

We have lost a voice, someone who might have reached a point and yelled - enough is enough!

One thing is for sure, Dr. Ron Walters never forgot Black Americans.

Click here to send a condolence message to the family of Ron Walters

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.