Black Liberation: How Obama Abandoned the Black Community

The following is a presentation by Keehanga-Yamahtta Taylor about her book from #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation. The main focus of the talk is the total abandonment of the black community by America’s first black president Barack Obama.

African Americans have double the unemployment rate of other US workers, 40% of African American children live in poverty, 55% of black workers earn under $55 and police shoot and kill an average of 900 African Americans a year.*

What Taylor finds even more galling is that Obama persistently blames African Americans for their own living conditions. When most of the world Wall Street for the economic cataclysm visited on white working class in 2008, Obama proclaimed there was “no excuse” for African Americans living in poverty.

Taylor  goes on to discuss the disproportionate shut down of public services (schools, libraries, hospitals, etc) and safety net programs in black communities.

She also points out the total disconnect between policing and crime, which is declining. She gives the example of New York and other cities that use their police force to help meet budget targets, New York City, for example, generates $10 million a year from parking tickets and $1 billion from court fines (derived disproportionately from African American neighborhoods because New York police deliberately target them).

She also cites the problem of overt police racism, as evidenced by the texts cops send each other – with racist messages such as “white power”, “niggers must be killed” and “niggers must be spayed.”

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*This number is an underestimate as only 1,000 out of 18,000 urban police departments report police killings to the Department of Justice.

The History of Women’s Liberation

Women’s Estate

by Juliet Mitchell

Pantheon Books (1972)

Book Review

Women’s Estate is about the history of the modern women’s liberation movement. Women’s liberation began in the US in the late 60s and quickly spread to Britain and the rest of the industrialized world. Mitchell compares and contrasts women’s liberation with the earlier feminist movement of 1880-1920, as well as tracing contemporary political influences that shaped it.

Mitchell traces the modern feminist movement to the publication of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan in 1963. In 1966, Friedan would co-found National Organization for Women (NOW) with Gloria Steinem (see Did the CIA Use Gloria Steinem to Subvert the Feminist Movement?). Mitchell classifies NOW as a “reformist” group that limited itself to winning isolated reforms (affirmative action laws, legalized abortion and access to birth control, etc), as opposed to women’s liberation groups which sought to overthrow patriarchy and male-dominated society.

Owing to the immense media attention it received, women’s liberation was the most public revolutionary movement in history. According to Mitchell, its main influences were the mid-sixties black liberation movement, the student movement and the youth (aka “hippy”*) movement.

She traces the official origin of women’s liberation to a protest at Nixon’s 1969 inauguration in which female speakers were taunted with sexually explicit insults. This was the last straw in a long frustrating period in which male antiwar activists edged women out of decision-making and relegated them to typing and tea making.

By 1970, there were women’s liberation groups in all of the developed world, except for Ireland, Austria and Switzerland.

Although women typically experience the most extreme levels of poverty and oppression, the women’s liberation movement, like the earlier suffrage movement, was mainly led by middle class women. According to Mitchell, it’s common for the oppression of underprivileged women to be passed off as natural and unchangeable.

Mitchell devotes most of the book to an analysis of the politics of oppression and the cultural factors (especially so-called “family values) that cause women’s oppression to appear invisible.

In her view, this is why consciousness raising groups were so essential to women’s liberation. By openly sharing their negative treatment by men, women were astonished to learn other women had similar, often identical, experiences. This helped them to acknowledge their individual frustration and suffering was, in actuality, a political problem.

As Mitchell puts it:

The first symptom of oppression is the repression of words: the state of suffering is so total and assumed, it’s not known to be there.

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*According to Mitchell, the hippies rebelled against social manipulation and emotional repression by the political establishment without seeking specific political change.