Savant's Encouraging Words to Me

Truth be told, if it weren't for all the Tea Party reactionaries, and the whole white racist backlash against Obama (and the progressive hopes he inspired in many but have forsaken), the president would be getting much more opposition within the BLACK community than he has so far. Many more of us would be saying more or less the same things Cornel West is saying. And many of us KNOW this even if we don't say so outside the ear shot of our own communities. Our criticisms have been largely muted by fear of aiding the right wing racist reactionaries. We've thus tended to voice our criticisms gently and in hushed tones, criticisms that we might otherwise pronounce with unfettered forthrightness. I heard one Ferguson protestor on Democracy Now say that "Obama has forsaken us!" My mama (in her 80s now) who our family's in 2008 Thanksgiving dinner thanked God for Obama ("They took Martin from us, oh Lord. But thank you for sending us Obama!"), now says

"I am so disappointed. I know he can't do everything. But I expected more of Obama than this." I had no illusions Obama was another KIng, or Malcolm or Paul Robeson disguised as a politician. But I hoped he'd at least be a FIGHTING LIBERAL, like FDR. That's about the most you can expect in this corporate dominated government which laughingly calls itself a republic (or even "the world's greatest democracy"). The future, young brother Timothy, will ultimately depend on you; on conscious Black millennials like you; and your conscious white, brown, Asian and other contemporaries. As a conscious educator I will support and nurture your generation even as my elders of the 60s generation supported and educated me. This will be a protracted, intergenerational struggle until freedom rings (in Dr. King's words) "from every village, from every hamlet, from every state and every city"---until freedom rings and dignity is the birthright of every man, woman and child on earth. Freedom rising!!!!

 -Savant