Barack Obama

(The Justice Department kept tabs on Associated Press reporters. If President Obama doesn't drop the hubris and show real leadership, says Doug Daniels, the next three and a half years are going to stuffed with congressional hearings and hit-job investigations by giddy Republicans, and we can forgot about advancing any progressive agenda, like gun control. Image source: AP). 

Since Sept. 11, there has been a relentless and predictable attempt, usually from those on the conservative right, to justify the erosion and suspension of constitutional liberties by playing the terrorism card. It was a thin argument then, and it still is today.

Unfortunately, the country has learned once again that the Justice Department has pursued overly intrusive policies and shrouded them in the ever-exploited name of national security. Its seizure of a broad swath of Associated Press phone records from last year has triggered an almost comically hypocritical eruption of outrage from conservatives, who largely cheered during the Bush years as that administration engaged in a tremendous amount of journalistic intimidation and constitutional overreach. But that doesn’t mean their outrage is unfounded.

While the secret subpoenas were not illegal, they stand in stark contradiction to the spirit of a free press, and it’s disingenuous, at best, for the White House to distance itself from the type of policy that has been the hallmark of Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department. On the issue of leaks, this administration has crossed the line from thoroughness into zealotry, selectively prosecuting leaks it finds politically damaging, while shrugging off others, (like the one concerning the Bin Laden operation, for instance.) So far during the Obama presidency, six people have been prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917, which previously had only been used three times throughout its entire history. Any journalist who has worked in Washington understands the reality of leaks: They are an accepted component of the DC machinery.

The focus in this case has understandably been on the violation of trust between the government and the press. However, reporters from an organization like the AP won’t be intimidated. In fact, they’ll likely become emboldened and more aggressive.

But when it comes to leaks, press intimidation has never been the central objective of this administration; intimidating potential whistle-blowers has.

The Justice Department, of course, insists its actions were entirely necessary for the purposes of national security. But the records were obtained with no prior notification to the AP, and included work and personal phones used by more than 100 reporters over a two month period in multiple states. Obviously many of these conversations were entirely unrelated to the investigation centering on a terror plot out of Yemen. And the AP says it withheld the story in question until they were told there was no longer a national security threat. Even Senator Patrick Leahy, the Democratic Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, openly expressed his skepticism that the government’s fishing expedition could be justified.

On Wednesday, in a transparent attempt at damage control, the White House instructed its Senate liaison to ask Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to reintroduce his press shield bill that stalled in 2009. The law would be a good first step in protecting journalists and their sources, but it’s unclear whether such a law would have prevented the staggering breadth of the subpoenas in the case of the Associated Press.

Between the AP story and the IRS scandal, reasonable Americans (beyond the Tea Party nihilists and conspiracy theorists) probably aren’t feeling too confident in their government at the moment. The president’s reaction has been far too tepid and detached. It’s time for him to send a very clear message by making heads roll at the IRS and Justice Department. Eric Holder has long-overstayed his welcome and should resign, along with Deputy Attorney General James Cole, who oversaw the AP investigation after Holder recused himself.

But more important than personnel changes, the White House should make it clear these types of policies will not continue, and the president should very aggressively pursue legislation that would make conversations between reporters and sources privileged and not subject to subpoena.

For a president that obsesses over message management, Obama seems oddly content to allow parts of his administration to spiral out of control while he stands on the sidelines. If he doesn’t demonstrate some real leadership and show that the type of hubris on display this week is unacceptable, the rest of his term will be defined by congressional hearings and investigations, not by the progress he could achieve on landmark issues like immigration reform, gun control, and health-care reform, which still has a bumpy road towards implementation.

If the president’s whiny, evasive tone this week is any indication, those of us with hopes for genuine progressive reforms may have a rough three and a half years ahead.

Doug Daniels, a freelance journalist, is a former staff reporter for Campaigns & Elections. He is the author of the forthcoming memoir Sifting Through the Wreckage.

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(In January, Hillary Clinton gave testimoney on the attacks on a U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in which four Americans died. Republican Senator Jim Inhofe described the former secretary of state as having a "forceful attitude" that he wasn't accustomed to hearing from women.)

Some Republicans would like us to believe Benghazi is another Watergate. President Barack Obama and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton betrayed their oaths of office, they say, and were more concerned with politics than with rescuing besieged personnel at a diplomatic outpost.

A new poll by Public Policy Polling suggests that all this effort to whip up scandal over the attacks on the U.S. embassy in Libya, in which four American diplomats were killed, is not paying off. Instead, the controversy is ending where it began -- as a niche issue for listeners of AM talk radio who already believed it's another Watergate even if they can't quite place Benghazi on the map.

Yet the GOP leadership is persisting with this fetish. Why?

One, Republicans want to repair their reputation as the party of national security. Two, Benghazi is a chance to take aim at Clinton before her presumed run in the 2016 election.

But beneath all this is something uglier, something far more destructive.

They are using Benghazi to undermine the legitimacy of America's first black president.

Note the pattern. Obama is not an American citizen, certainly not "natural born." He's a closet "Muslim" who "hates" white people and attended an "anti-white" church while being mentored by "domestic terrorists." Mitt Romney’s utterly failed election strategy was to mobilize white voters with appeals to racial tribalism and identity politics. He used a mix of dog whistles and overt racial signals to suggest that Obama is a type of political "Other" not to be trusted as president.

Attacks on Clinton originate from similar anxieties, only these are about a country in which a particular type of white masculinity is in peril. In a mirror of the racially tinged attacks on Obama by the right-wing media, Clinton has been described as "angry" and "not knowing her place."

In January hearings on Benghazi, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma channeled this crude sexism when he said: "I think that [Clinton] has gotten by with that type of a forceful attitude, something that’s not normally accustomed — that you don’t hear from women as much as you do men." Clinton is no stranger to such assaults. In the 1990s, conservatives accused her and her husband of committing murder in a long-forgotten scandal that was once known as Whitewater.

As we saw during the 2008 and 2012 presidential elections, contemporary populist conservatism is nothing if not an exercise in protecting white male privilege vis-a-vis appeals to white victimhood  polarizing rhetoric such as "real America" and "taking our country back."

In this context, a black president and a female secretary of state are potent symbols that arouse hostility and anxiety among many Republicans, especially the Tea Party base of the GOP.

In post-civil rights era America, there has been a retreat from a constructive and critical engagement with how inequalities of race and gender impact social policy and the Good Society.

Moreover, the ethic of “colorblindness” has been reimagined to mean that those who dare discuss systemic, personal, or institutional examples of white racism are maligned as “the real racists.”

This strategy has born fruit: Despite all the available evidence of how racism and racial inequality continues to negatively impact the life chances of people of color, public opinion surveys reveal a significant percentage of white Americans feel "oppressed" and believe that "racism" against white people is a bigger social problem than discrimination against racial minorities.

The Benghazi scandal is the union of two very powerful forces in the age of Obama.

The first, what social scientists have termed “symbolic racism,” is a type of white racial animus that views people of color, and blacks in particular, as not worthy of trust or full citizenship. The second is how movement conservatism's war on women’s reproductive rights, equality, and freedom is predicated on the idea that men are naturally dominant and women naturally subordinate.

A black president and a female secretary of state cannot be reconciled within such a worldview.

Conservatives will predictably respond in a shrill manner to such a suggestion. Yet given the ways in which racism and sexism are dominant landmarks on the cognitive map of contemporary right-wing politics, the synergy of those two social forces are over-determining the Republican Party’s hostility.

The manufactured Benghazi scandal is a perfect storm for a Republican Party wherein racism and sexism are synonymous with contemporary conservatism.

Chauncey DeVega, a pen name, is the founder and editor of We Are Respectable Negroes. His commentary has appeared in Salon, Alternet, the New York Daily News and the BBC. Follow him @chaunceydevega and @WashSpec.

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(In accusing President Barack Obama of manipulating gold markets, former presidential candidate Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican who invests heavily in gold, tacitly conceded that it doesn't take much to send the price of gold into free fall, says the author. Image source: TP)

Ron Paul was sure this April would see glowing reviews of his new Institute for Peace and Prosperity.

Instead, April became a cruel month when it was revealed that among Paul’s foundation advisors were an anti-semite, a flake who thinks Lincoln is one of history’s greatest monsters, a 9-11 conspiracy theorist and unrepentant racist Lew Rockwell (all you need to know about Rockwell is he once said the real reason the Los Angeles riots ended was not due to Rodney King's appeal but because of “all the blacks” need time to collect welfare checks.)

Luckily for Paul, the press skipped over all that. All reporters wanted to know was his take on the crash of the world gold markets on April 18 that sunk the price to lower than it was before Reagan was elected.

Paul himself invests almost exclusively in gold. As one expert put it, Paul’s portfolio is “a half-step away from a cellar-full of canned goods and nine-millimeter rounds.” But Paul also believes America’s currency needs to be back on the gold standard immediately.

Thus, when the press asked if Paul had second thoughts, they got a resounding hell no! Paul even declared the price drop to be an Obama/big bank conspiracy involving 53,000 gold contracts that were mysteriously sold that day.

As usual, Paul is so very wrong. There was no conspiracy and gold prices had been plummeting for weeks for a very good reason. It is a lousy investment for 2013.

Still, the recent crash gives us our most powerful argument against his gold standard idea.

Remember that gold prices soared when financial markets cratered in the fall of 2008 and gold is the traditional anti-inflation investment in a crisis. Thus many panicky investors predicted a hyper-mega-Weimar-style inflation apocalypse. And “experts” like Glenn Beck were telling the world Obama’s stimulus and the Euro crisis would push gold to at $2,000 an ounce—even $10,000 was possible!

But the inflation crisis never happened and by February 1, gold was trading at $1,800 when investment advisors declared that stocks are hotter than gold!

And dumping began ...

By the end of February, gold prices would drop $300 per ounce but few noticed.

Also, because the tiny gold market is conspiracy prone, rumors that Cyprus might sell its entire reserve of 40 metric tons of gold were another reason for the great April crash.

Forty metric tons: that’s all it took to start a panic. Thus if Obama really wanted to tank the gold market, all he had to do was sell off a smidgen of America’s 8,600 metric tons that April 18. In fact, the world's entire supply of investment gold is 170,000 metric tons, which would fit into a cube of about 14 feet on each side.

That was one reason two American economists in the 20th century convinced several presidents that the gold standard was a rotten idea. Liberal John Kenneth Galbraith and libertarian Milton Friedman may have hated each other but they both knew tying money to gold would kill economic growth by forcing markets to depend on a single commodity.

According to Friedman and Galbraith, had we been dumb enough to return to the gold standard, the crash of April 18 would have cause a new depression—in spite of the strong financial markets and growing employment.

Consider also the case of the Hunt brothers (they were the Koch brothers of the 1970s) who lost everything when they invested their entire fortune to corner the silver market because they believed hyperinflation would render the world’s currencies worthless; instead silver prices crashed and after seeing billions from their accounts disappear, they went bankrupt.

Strangely, Ron Paul’s conspiracy notions echo these arguments, revealing a double standard: assume there really was a conspiracy to sell 53,000 gold contracts. So Paul himself admits it only takes 53,000 contracts traded between a few hundred investors to trigger a market meltdown. (In contrast to gold, tens of billions of stock shares are traded on daily basis in the real world of 7 billion people.)

Perhaps the real lesson here is that old proverb about who really profits in a gold rush: not the people who dig for the gold, but the people who sell the shovels. Paul must know that proverb well: he earned his grubstake for gold investments through the millions he earned from his newsletter subscriptions.

And today Ron Paul is still collecting millions from all those subscriptions by ordering the faithful to “buy gold!”

Peter Lindstrom is a political consultant and researcher. He lives in Washington, D.C.

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(The white liberal establishment, says the author, was quiet in the face of Melissa Harris-Perry's baseless accusations of racism in a 2011 column in The Nation.)

The question itself is already a provocation. As I conjure up the words, I envision the Rev. Al Sharpton rousing the peanut gallery, readying himself to shoot me down. What I am about to say runs headlong against everything white liberals have learned about embracing diversity under the big tent of the Democratic Party. So let me just ask.

Why are white liberals so afraid of black liberals?

Black liberals are allowed to meander far and away from core liberal principles, all the while making unsubstantiated protestations, sometimes even going so far as to denigrate their white counterparts without ever having to worry about facing tangible consequences within the mainstream liberal establishment.

In a 2011 column titled "Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama," Melissa Harris-Perry of The Nation castigates the white liberal establishment that gave voice to her so-called authentically black perspective by accusing it of racism. Curiously, she begins by applauding white liberals: “Not only did white Democratic voters prove willing to support a black candidate; they overperformed in their repudiation of naked electoral racism, electing Obama with a higher percentage of white votes than either Kerry or Gore earned.” Then she concludes that white liberals who supported Obama morphed into racists over four years.

Harris-Perry supports her supposition that white liberals are closeted racists with the flimsiest of defenses, speculating that “electoral racism cannot be reduced solely to its most egregious, explicit form. It has proved more enduring and baffling than these results can capture.” In other words — it's complicated.

The white liberals who took a chance on a young black man with a thin resume and elected him to the highest office in the land were painted with the broadest of racial brushes and offered no defense. In fact, white liberals remained uncharacteristically quiet in the face of Harris-Perry's inflammatory accusations.

Certainly there is nothing odious about exploring the possibility of whether racism would play a role in the reelection of the first black president. She should've explored that topic. She also should've reached a very different conclusion than the one she reached, especially considering the tenuous examples she laid out.

Harris-Perry uses the Clinton administration as a model for unequal racial standards within the liberal body politic, noting that Clinton was unable to pass health care reform but that “progressives complain that Obama’s healthcare reform was inadequate because it did not include a public option.” What is missing from her critique is that Hillary Clinton pushed for universal healthcare, not a hybrid Mitt Romney-endorsed imitation. It is easier though for black liberals to push a racialized assessment of American politics than to get bogged down in the minutia of hard details related to actual policies.

This isn't to say that white liberals can't be racist – or can't align with racist elements in American politics. Blacks didn't gain access to FDR's New Deal until well over a decade after the legislation was passed, mostly due to an unholy alliance between FDR and Southern Democrats. But if those on the white left are willing to allow Harris-Perry to besmirch them as racist, they should at least force her to make an actual case that withstands criticism.

Black liberals like Harris-Perry are quick to use abstract anecdotal interpretations to call into question the progressive bona fides of white liberals, but surprisingly enough, when black liberals pivot to the political right, joining forces with right wingers to attack bedrock liberal agenda issues – such as gay rights and opposition to charter schools – white liberals are reluctant to full throatedly voice justifiable criticism.

Harris-Perry is not alone among black liberals who wield racialized rhetoric as a tool for silencing white liberals. Sharpton, now an MSNBC pundit, co-authored a 2009 op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal titled, "Charter Schools Can Close the Education Gap," and has a $500,000 connection to charter schools.

Even if Obama hadn't trounced Romney, there were plenty of legitimate reasons for a principled liberals to renounce support for Obama, the most notable of which are his doubling down on Bush's war policies and embrace of austerity measures. Harris-Perry owes the white left an apology. White liberals should demand it.

Yvette Carnell is a former Capitol Hill and campaign staffer turned writer. She is currently an editor and contributor to Yourblackworld. You can reach Yvette via Twitter @YvetteDC or on Facebook.

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(In a video skit, President Barack Obama played Daniel Day-Lewis playing Obama, reversing the conventions and expectations of the minstrel tradition of "blackface.")

Minstrelsy was America's most popular entertainment for almost two centuries. It involved white men painting their faces "black" with burnt cork or shoe polish. "Blackface" validated white fantasies of blackness. By mocking chattel slavery and lampooning African Americans' ability to be full and equal citizens, race minstrelsy was a lens through which white supremacy reimagined the plantation as idyllic and African Americans as childlike, simple, and stupid.

Blackface also secured the place of white ethnics (and other whites) struggling with industrial capitalism in the American racial hierarchy. Blackface was predicated on reinforcing the inferiority of black Americans. By literally "buying into" white racist norms, newly arrived--and not quite fully "white"--European ethnics took a step toward enfranchised whiteness.

Historian Eric Lott suggests that race minstrelsy involved a mix of "love and theft." Arbitrary categories of racial identity were reinforced culturally and politically to determine the life chances, safety, security, and (quite literally) freedom of human beings. Because it is a quintessentially American cultural practice, blackface is complex, conflicted, and grotesque.

So it should come as no surprise that blackface was and continues to be popular even among African Americans. Tyler Perry and Dirty South rappers like 'Lil Jon find their precursors in race minstrel performers. The intricacies get weirder.African-American vaudevillians would often have to "double cork" -- that is, a black man whose skin was light enough to "pass" as a white man would have to "blacken up" in order to pretend to be a white man in blackface. Limited by the realities of the marketplace and its restraints on black upward mobility, many of these artists made a painful choice to participate in a type of popular entertainment that reinforced the logic of Jim and Jane Crow America.

Double corking highlights the absurdities at the heart of the color line. Blackness was/is a performance. The white gaze reinforced terms of black humanity and made real the fantasy of race minstrelsy. This fantasy helped to legitimate the racial hierarchies of power, privilege, and opportunity that continue even in the era of a post-racial American presidency.

In light of this, it's clear that President Barack Obama's performance at the 2013 Washington Correspondents' Dinner this week was a version of "double corking." In a video clip, in which filmmaker Steven Spielberg talks about following up his film Lincoln with bio-pic of Obama, the president pretends to be actor Daniel Day-Lewis who is pretending to be Obama. It was brilliant turn of "reverse passing" as well as transgressive and revealing in sharp but quiet ways.

Obama chose to be silent on matters of black uplift, yet the radical right viciously savages him whenever it can as a black usurper longing to "oppress" white people. The president can't even make a factual observation about his own racial identity without being attacked for having the poor taste of reminding people that he is an African American.

For this reason, Obama has been limited to symbolic gestures of racial solidarity. He can give a tour to a black "Kid President." He can honor the Tuskegee Airmen. He can put a bust of Dr. King in the Oval Office. But that's it. His "all boats float" approach to public policy has meant that the needs of African Americans have gone unaddressed. The "price of the ticket" (to borrow a phrase from Fredrick Harris Jr.) for black folks' support of Obama has been very high.

Even so, Obama has faced down questions of race on occasion, the most prominent of which was the "race speech" in 2008. That speech was deeply problematic as it tried to assure white voters that he was the "right type of black" who wouldn't hold them accountable for white racism. His speech at the 2013 Washington Correspondents' Dinner was better.

In it, he subtly revealed his deeper thoughts on race and on the white racial hostility of some in the American public toward the twin and interconnected facts of his personhood and legitimacy. But it wasn't Obama saying this. It was Obama in "double cork," reverse passing. Only by pretending to be a white actor who was pretending to be America's first black president was America's first black president free allude to the white stereotype of the "angry black men" that binds him.

For this reason, Obama's minstrel routine is deeply troubling. Despite his seat at the apex of state authority, Obama as Obama is incapable of speaking truth to power. A white president would have more leeway, but a black president like Obama must "blacken up" by putting on the "double cork" if he wants to talk in a truth-telling way about racial justice.

History has weight. It is also beset by many cruel ironies.

Chauncey DeVega, a pen name, is the founder and editor of We Are Respectable Negroes. His commentary has appeared in Salon, Alternet, the New York Daily News and the BBC. Follow him @chaunceydevega and @WashSpec.

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As is well known, the 2012 election saw a national drive to restrict the ability to vote. Citizens fought back. By Election Day, almost every harsh new law was blocked, blunted, postponed, or repealed.

Count that a true win for democracy. But let’s not be satisfied with just winning defensive fights. Instead, we should seize this moment of public attention to press for breakthrough reforms to assure that all eligible citizens can vote in elections that are free and fair.

As a general rule, important decisions—say, for instance, deciding whether or not to invade a Middle Eastern nation—turnout better when they are well-informed. Poorly informed choices tend to end in disaster.

(Click on the image to increase size)

All 10 states that Gallup categorized as “very religious” voted for Mitt Romney in the past election by an average of 58.75 percent of popular vote. All 10 states that Gallup categorized as “not very religious” voted for Barack Obama in the 2012 election by an average of 59.3 percent of the popular vote.

Extremes in religion are almost as precise a predictor as of the presidential vote as Nate Silver’s analytical models, the gold standard in handicapping elections. The country is almost as divided by religion as it is by party, as illustrated by partisan and religious belief in creationism: the idea that humans were created in their present form at one time within the past 10,000 years, rather than evolving from common ancestry over 6 million years. To understand the difference between scientific fact and religious belief, it helps to be Jewish.

Sources: Gallup Politics, Evolution, Creationism, and the Battle to Control America’s Classrooms, uselectionatlas.org.

(Obama and Baucus have the power to push for a carbon tax, says Bo Cutter: AP)

We are at an unacknowledged turning point for the economy and the environment. We could, right now, substantially reduce our debt and deficit projections, take a major step toward a better environment, create a simpler and fairer tax system, make job creation easier, and raise economic growth a bit. For all of these reasons, we could and should adopt a carbon tax.

Taking this step depends on two men: President Obama and Senator Max Baucus, chair of the Senate Finance Committee. Both men want to leave an important legacy, and both are in a unique political position: they still possess real political power, but neither will ever face another election. (Obama, of course, is limited to two terms, and Baucus has just announced that he will retire.) Acting together, the two of them could completely change the odds of enacting a carbon tax this year.

Right now, if you ask around, as I have, there are many across the ideological spectrum who agree that a carbon tax would help us solve a lot of problems, but they won't take a public step because they see no leadership support. My own gut feeling is that there would even be energy industry support for a carbon tax. Obama and Baucus could change this picture by making a carbon tax a priority and building bipartisan support for the project.

Why should we care? Let's look at four issues: federal revenues, the tax system, jobs, and – oh, yeah – the environment.

First, a carbon tax of $20 a ton would raise about $120 billion a year, or $1.2 trillion over a decade. Right now, everyone anywhere near the budget debates is in a convenient and delusional state of mind about revenues. The conventional wisdom is that we either do not need more revenues or they are easy to find. So here are some counter-assertions: (1) despite the right’s imaginations, we are not going to cope with the retirement of the boomers, the doubling of folks on Medicare, and our need for fundamental infrastructure investment without new revenues; (2) despite the speeches the left makes to itself, the problem won't be solved by taxing whomever the left decides is rich; (3) we aren't going to end the home mortgage and charitable deductions. There will come a point when $1 trillion in new revenue over the next decade that actually makes the economy and the world a little better will look pretty interesting, so why not try for it now?

Second, the tax system is a mess and more caught in a state of political gridlock than even the rest of the federal budget. The system is far too complicated, and it probably lowers economic growth and job creation. More practically, raising new revenues from this structure is next to impossible; the 40-year strategy of broadening the base and lowering rates (a strategy I agree with) has played itself out. With the carbon tax's $1 trillion, you could exempt low-income families, reduce the payroll tax, lower overall tax rates, and still bring down the debt and deficit. Sure, there would be fights about how to use the extra revenue, but those are fights the political system is supposed to have.

Third, jobs. We rely way too much on payroll taxes. They are very, very inefficient, and they directly and visibly add to the costs of job creation. Back when the U.S. economy was an unstoppable job machine, these taxes looked as though they were cost-free. Not anymore. I am optimistic about our long-term economic prospects, but I also think the jobs of the future will require much more education and training content than the jobs of the past, and therefore employers will be much more sensitive to other costs, i.e., taxes. Anything sensible we can do to make job creation easier and less costly is a step we should take.

Finally, the environment. A lot has been published recently about climate change and its sensitivity to greenhouse gases. Cutting through all of the models and the uncertainties, the net conclusion is that warming is probably a small bit less sensitive to greenhouse gases than we have thought. Climate change deniers have used this for the obvious purposes. But the actual end conclusions haven't changed much. At current rates, we will put half a trillion more tons of carbon into the atmosphere by 2045 and 1 trillion more by 2080. Because of this the Earth's temperature will probably warm about three-quarters of a degree in the next 30 years and 1.5 degrees over the next 50. (Thirty years may seem a long time to some of you; from my perspective, it's a blink of an eye away.) And the math keeps suggesting that the earth's sensitivity to extreme events is increasing more rapidly than global warming. So the future may be less hot but more dangerous.

Isn't it worth a small amount of political difficulty and a fairly small tax now to slow down these trends? Everyone in politics talks a lot about political courage – mostly their own. As far as I can tell, political courage normally consists of doing something your supporters love and your opponents hate and then bragging about it. But maybe the two leaders I mentioned at the start will realize that they can afford to change that definition and leave a real legacy.

Bo Cutter is a senior fellow at the Roosevelt Institute.

(Jackie Robinson, the subject of the movie 42, testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1949).

I am not a person who romanticizes Jim Crow. Separate but equal was never equal, and activists were right to upend that system of apartheid. But everything comes at a price and the price Jackie Robinson paid, at the expense of blacks specifically and the liberal movement in general, was too high of a price to pay.

For those who don’t know, Jackie Robinson testified against black activist and artist Paul Robeson before the House Un-American Activities Committee, backed Richard Nixon against John F. Kennedy, backed the Vietnam War, and even questioned the patriotism of Dr. Martin Luther King when he announced his opposition to the war.

This is who Jackie Robinson was. For him, it was the white man’s way or no way.

For some, celebrating Jackie Robinson’s integration into baseball boils down to the idea that blacks needed to be liked by even the most racist whites in order to have any real shot at the American dream. So to them, it was acceptable for Robinson to do whatever it took, even if it meant going so far as to unleash the Congressional hounds on Robeson, as long as it ensured that the doors to white baseball were opened to Robinson.

I don’t buy into the notion that black people must be redeemed in the eyes of whites in order to progress, mostly because it places far too much power in the hands of racist whites and leaves blacks in a tenuous position, both psychologically and economically.

Saddest of all though is the idea that many black folk who went to see 42 will not only view Jackie Robinson’s integration as a grand success, without ever bothering to consider the human consequence, but that they will undoubtedly view the movie’s box office success as some sort of win. How is that possible? How is it possible to consider the movie’s box office success a win for anyone except those who benefit from the movie’s revenue? Simple: Since there is no real black movement or black leadership in this country, black people latch onto whatever symbolism they can as a way of giving themselves an emotional victory, even if it’s largely a product of their own imagination.

Right now on my Facebook page some of my black friends are celebrating Jay-Z’s trip to Cuba, as if it has any relevance to their lives. As if Jay-Z isn’t the same man who tried to take advantage of Occupy Wall Street, the only group to even attempt to take on income inequality in this country, by selling Occupy-themed T-shirts without giving the group a percentage of the revenue. In the minds of many black folk, it’s perfectly fine to show indifference to working-class values as long as you are a member of the black 1 percent. You too can be a vulture capitalist because as long as you don’t take any lip from conservatives like Marco Rubio, blacks will rally around you no matter what.

If we’ve learned only one thing from the Obama Era, it should be how to discern sentiment from concreteness, emotion from passion, and symbolism from substance. Judging from the success of 42 at box office, we’re just not there yet. We didn’t learn the lesson when Robinson integrated or when Obama was elevated to the highest office in the land without ever addressing the needs of the working poor. In 20 years or so, I’m sure we’ll be afforded another opportunity to either show up or get shut out. The cycle continues.

 Yvette Carnell is a former Capitol Hill and campaign staffer turned writer. She is currently an editor and contributor to Yourblackworld. You can reach Yvette via Twitter @YvetteDC or on Facebook.

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