by BRUCE A. DIXON
“Latino voters and the Latino political class supported the career of Barack Obama almost as solidly as blacks. They were promised much more than African Americans, but in the end got much less.”
Five and a half years into the Obama era, some of his African American supporters finally admit black voters didn’t get much of substance for their nearly unanimous support of the First Black President. Of course the black political class does its level best to blame everything on evil racist Republicans who don’t even like what the president had for breakfast. In a shameful flip on the notion that black faces in high places should represent us in the halls of power, our black political cognoscenti relentlessly belittle any expectation that the lives of real people down here on the ground ought to improve behind the election of the first black president as unsophisticated and unrealistic. Meanwhile black family wealth continues to fall, black unemployment and mass incarceration remain about the same, and our black political class continue their glittering careers. It could be worse. At least the First Black President hasn’t deported two million of us.
Latino voters and the Latino political class supported the career of Barack Obama almost as solidly as blacks. They were promised much more than African Americans, but in the end got much less. Latinis were promised that the unjust immigration system would be fixed and a road to citizenship created for the millions of undocumented living among us. What Latino voters and the Latino political class got in return for their support of Obama was two million deportations, hundreds of thousands of families brutally separated and scattered by law, not entirely unlike black families in this country once were.
Just like the black faces in high places, the Latino political class doesn’t represent its people to or within the system, they are actually one of the faces the capitalist system presents to the Latino community. So it has fallen to the Latino political class to defend the president, who by now has deported more people than any president before him, and to defend the US empire by obfuscating the reasons those child refugees are here in the first place.
Establishment Latino politicians like Chicago congressman Luis Gutierrez blame the Republicans as usual, for not allowing a vote on an immigration bill, and for being heartless, evil racists in general, and ask that the president do something generous and humane. But he won’t. It is true that racist Republicans are clamoring for the children to be instantly deported, despite US law which says children from countries not bordering the US are entitled to individual hearings before immigration judges. Even though speedy deportation is illegal, and Republicans don’t have the power to make the president do it, Obama has already begun deporting children without the hearings the law prescribes. How they’ll manage to blame this on Republicans is a mystery.
” …like the black political class, they owe allegiance to the system, the empire that gave them their careers, not the Latino communities they ostensibly represent…”
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