Obama As Community Organizer—Organizing Blacks Against Whites To His Own Benefit
[VDARE.COM note:
Steve
Sailer`s book tentatively entitled
The Half-Blood
Prince: Barack Obama`s "Story of Race and Inheritance"
will be available ANY DAY NOW!]
At the
Republican convention, VP nominee
Sarah Palin famously
observed:
"I
guess a
small-town mayor is sort of like a `community
organizer,` except that you have actual
responsibilities."
This wisecrack evidently got under the
skin of Senator Barack Obama. In
Obama Suddenly Riled, [San
Francisco Chronicle,
September 4, 2008
columnist Carolyn
Lochhead reported:
"Sen. Barack Obama
ditched his normal languid cool today, punching back at
Gov. Sarah Palin as he spoke with reporters in
York, Pa, hotly defending his work as a community
organizer… Obama`s hackles were clearly raised by
Palin`s dismissal of his community organizing …"
The Obama message team then told us
over and over about the unemployed steelworkers Obama
had moved to
Chicago
to help.
Palin`s crack was funny. But it shows
that, as I predicted in
February, GOP nominee
John McCain is choosing to fight the election with
one hand tied behind his back. Even his
VP candidate isn`t allowed to ask
why Obama
wanted to be a
"community organizer". Which
"community"
did this
post-racial transcender of ethnic divisions want to
organize?
Like most questions about Obama`s life, the answers
about his
community organizing revolve around a single word:
race.
As
Obama wrote in his 1995 autobiography Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
"In 1983, I decided to
become a community organizer. … That`s what I`ll do,
I`ll organize black folks."
The Obama campaign`s recurrent
“steelworker”
shtick is supposed to make you think Obama moved to
Kowalski. But the last thing Obama wanted to do in
1985 was help anybody with a Central European name.
Chicago
in 1985 was site of the abrasive
"Council
Wars" between the leader of the white majority
among
Chicago`s aldermen, the Croatian-American
Fast Eddie Vrdolyak, and Obama`s idol, the black
mayor
Harold Washington. This was the most blatant white
vs. black conflict in the country at the time—which
helped make Chicago attractive to the young
mixed-race man from
ethnically laid-back Hawaii. Obama had long been
looking for a more racially hostile environment where he
could finally prove he was
“black enough”.
Ultimately, he didn`t help any
steelworkers, black or white. The
Southtown Star reported on August 24:
"And none of the laid-off
steelworkers Obama talks about in stump speeches, the
people he was brought to
Chicago
to help, could be found for this article, despite
repeated requests to the campaign."
So what
is an
Obama-style "community organizer?"
You`re not some local
Scoutmaster or the lady who organizes the annual
block party or some other local citizen.
It means a radical racial activist
who, in
Tom Wolfe`s immortal phrase,
"mau-maus
the flak catchers"—intimidates bureaucrats into
giving
your ethnicity a bigger slice of the pie. It means,
more than anything else, that you organize
political protests for more handouts from the
taxpayers (even though
dependence upon those handouts is one reason the
community is so disorganized.)
It`s kind of like being the neighborhood fence who
encourages the local heroin addicts to steal hubcaps so
they can shoot more smack.
The
famous black University of Chicago sociologist
William Julius Wilson published a book on four South
Side of Chicago districts, There Goes the Neighborhood,
reviewed here in February. A key finding of his
study: poor, disorganized neighborhoods had no shortage
of Obama-like
paid organizers. For example, in the Little Village
neighborhood, which is
mostly Mexican illegal immigrants:
“There
was a vast array of paid service providers in the
neighborhood. … There was a school for
at-risk youth, and clubs … for youth not
particularly at risk.”
Wilson goes on to list some of the other
taxpayer-supported programs: programs for
pregnant women, for
parents, for
AIDS patients, for people who
don`t yet have AIDS, for
sick people, for
the mentally ill, for
gang-prevention, for seniors, for
high school graduates, for
high school dropouts, and for people who never went
to high school and want to
learn English so they can vote.
In contrast, Wilson found,
Chicago neighborhoods that don`t need all this
taxpayer and foundation-funded help because they
self-organize—with picnics, parades, church
festivals, and rapid
graffiti clean-up—largely do so in order to keep
property values up…and outsiders of other races out.
But that`s not the kind of community
organizing Obama likes. Indeed, according to a John
Judis article in
The New Republic [Creation
Myth, September 10, 2008], Obama spoke out in
1988 against the Save Our Neighborhoods group, which had
engaged in
Alinskyite community organizing to keep
unscrupulous realtors from
"block
busting" their communities in order to cause
rapid turnover, which leads to slumification.
And yet,
like his mentor Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., Obama
isn`t crazy about blacks
moving out of
the ghetto, denigrating
that "old
individualistic bootstrap myth: get a job, get rich, and
get out."[
What Makes Obama Run?,
By Hank De Zutter,
Chicago
Reader,
The
economic subtext: the jobs of both Wright as a South
Side black preacher, and Obama as a South Side black
community organizer and politician, were imperiled by
the right of blacks who can afford it to move out of the
black slums and find a less dangerous place to raise
their children.
It`s less enjoyable being a
"community
leader" if your putative followers keep moving to
Schaumburg
their followers to stay put—even at the risk that their
children will join gangs and go to prison or the grave.
Perhaps some of the
anti-white paranoia that runs through
Wright`s and, especially,
Michelle Obama`s statements is
partly explained by these hyper-glib leaders` guilty
consciences over self-interestedly persuading
black parents to continue to expose their children
to the dangers of gang-infested neighborhoods.
For example, on
60 Minutes, Michelle asserted:
"… as a black
man, you know, Barack can get shot going to the gas
station …"—as if KKK snipers were cruising past
the South Kenwood Amoco. (
black, but
a dicey neighborhood).
Obviously, the main danger faced by
black men is
being shot by other black men. But that`s too
unspeakable to mention. So free rein is given to
paranoid fantasies about
The Man being behind black-on-black violence, as in
"Black
Value System."
Embarrassing fact: Obama didn`t actually live in any of
the communities he putatively organized. Instead, he has
spent 23 years living in the sliver of the South Side
that`s so well organized by a rich institution that it
has its own
private police force. Obama has lived in
Hyde Park
Kenwood
bubble between
39th
St. and 64th St. that is
patrolled by the large, well-funded and
hard-nosed
University
A
friend wrote:
"You are missing an
angle. Obama lives in
is policed by the
University
of
police. There is a fierce and drastic difference between
neighborhoods within and outside the
student there, it was apparent … they were only dimly
aware of things like
Miranda
or the
presumption of innocence (for anyone, that is, other
than students, faculty, black women, and black men
dressed like Barack Obama—geez, I wonder who that
leaves?). The
wouldn`t last a semester without them."
Ironically, Obama was a civil rights
lawyer and taught
constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law
School…
Funny thing about professional community organizers: the
more disorganized the community, the more professional
community organizers you`ll find.
As Wolfe wrote in
1970:
"Brothers from down the
hall like
down to the heart of the poverty program very rapidly.
It took them no time at all to see that the poverty
program`s big projects, like manpower training, in which
you would get some job counseling and some training so
you would be able to apply for a job in the bank or on
the assembly line—everybody with a brain in his head
knew that this was the usual
bureaucratic shuck. Eventually the government`s own
statistics bore out the truth of this conclusion. The
ghetto youth who completed the manpower training didn`t
get
any more jobs or earn any more money than the people
who never took any such training at all. Everybody but
the most hopeless lames knew that the only job you
wanted out of the poverty program was a job in
the program itself. Get on the payroll, that was the
idea. Never mind getting some job counseling.
You be the job counselor. You be the `neighborhood
organizer.`"
Similarly, when Obama
discovered that the closest Mayor`s Office of
Employment and Training to the all-black housing project
where he was focusing
"was on a back
street in Vrdolyak`s ward", he exclaimed, according
to Dreams From My
Father:
"We just found ourselves an issue".
The
Judis writes: "He got community members to demand a job center that would provide job
referrals, but there were few jobs to distribute".
As
Wolfe wrote, back in the Wild West days of the
Great Society, no matter how pointless the result of
the protest, mau-mauing was fun for the participants
because the
flak catchers were white:
"When black people first
started using the confrontation tactic, they made a
secret discovery. There was an extra dividend to this
tactic. There was a creamy dessert. It wasn`t just that
you registered your protest and showed the white man
that you meant business and weakened his resolve to keep
up the walls of oppression. It wasn`t just that you got
poverty money and influence. There was something sweet
that happened right there on the spot. You made the
white man quake. You brought fear into his face."
By the time, Obama had arrived in
Chicago
bureaucrats were almost all minorities.
Still, community organizing had its upside: namely,
Obama made a name for himself and networked with what
has become his political base—the social services
industry.
But, isn`t Obama above all petty financial
considerations? After all, didn`t Obama give up a
lucrative Wall Street job to make $10,000 per year as a
community organizer, like he says in all those speeches?
Actually, Obama`s
New York job was considerably less glamorous than he
makes it sound in
Dreams. He was a
copy editor at a newsletter house.
And that low-ball salary he took in
Chicago
was just for the probationary period. His
boss said,
"After three or four months, he was up to $20,000, and
after three years he was probably making
$35,000 or so."
Some perspective on Obama`s $35,000
community organizer salary: I also moved to
two and half years before Obama did. At my marketing
research firm in late 1982, at the bottom of the
recession, the going rate for new MBAs with quantitative
skills from good B-schools was $29,000. It wasn`t great,
but, for a bachelor, it was a living.
Even in
a tradeoff between money and power. The
Combine, the bipartisan, multiracial crew of
Chicago and Illinois insiders I wrote about last week,
is looking for
people who aren`t excessively greedy to be the public
face of the system. Indeed, according to
Mike Royko`s biography, Richard Daley the First
became so powerful because he
wasn`t particularly greedy.
And
that`s what Obama wanted: power.
Obama was trained (and trained others)
in the
Rules for Radicals created by the famous agitator
Saul Alinsky. Yet, as
Judis reports, Obama eventually became frustrated by
community organizing in general, and three of Alinsky`s
rules in particular: don`t trust 1)
charismatic individuals, 2)
politicians, or 3)
lofty rhetoric.
So,
Obama quit community organizing, and became a
charismatic politician admired for his lofty rhetoric.
Hmmmm
[Steve Sailer (email
him) is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and
movie critic
for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com
features his daily blog.]
