Important Critique of Obama

"Whether it ends in 2013 or 2017, the Obama presidency has already marked the decline, rather than the pinnacle, of a political vision centered on challenging racial inequality. The tragedy is that black elites — from intellectuals and civil rights leaders to politicians and clergy members — have acquiesced to this decline, seeing it as the necessary price for the pride and satisfaction of having a black family in the White House."
Fredrick Harris

Media coverage of hurricane Sandy makes it appear that nothing else is happening in the world. We are holding a national election one week from today, and there is no better time for analysis of the Obama legacy.

Fredrick Harris is the author of the The Price of the Ticket: Barack Obama and the Rise and Decline of Black Politics and a professor at Columbia University. In a New York Times op-ed, Harris explains how the Obama presidency has come at a steep price for black Americans, who have by and large decided to stand down politically in order to protect the black president. Harris explains that Obama hasn't protected them. We have given up our birth right, our legacy of challenging the system, in exchange for seeing a black first family and it has cost us dearly.

People like Fredrick Harris are very important to black people, even though they may be angered by his words. One day Obama will not be president and perhaps that will be an opportunity to speak truthfully about what him and what he has done to black America.