Ba-Rock with them Obamas

Let’s be clear: Barack might be the first Black President of the United States at some point soon but when he enters his tenure he will face a country, fractured at best, with factions and divisions that he will have to navigate. He may be the first Black President but he will be the president of a predominantly white country with a rather large population of people who will feel “disenfranchised” by his presidency. I won’t bother getting into the moral or logistical problems of such silly sentiments but if you need evidence, look at how his vicious battle against Hillary Clinton was. People were beyond the point of angry about his victory, many were furious and in spite of relatively minor policy differences between the candidates they were in some cases willing to vote Republican just to spite Obama. He has a tough line to tread coming up so we as Black people really can’t afford to expect his presidency to be the answer to all our problems. To a degree his hands may be tied by the difficulty of maintaining his necessary “color of water/post-racial” politics. Besides that, there may be a significant problem with his presidency: we lose traction for the whole “perpetual victim” argument. Black people will not be able to argue as effectively that we are the victims of vicious circumstance and evil conspiring by other races due to the simplistic (read: completely ass-backward) assumption that a Black president means that we’ve made it. For most Black people at the grassroots level Barack Obama’s presidency won’t mean diddly squat outside of some sort of intangible “inspiration factor” and a decent amount of social capital. Too bad “inspiration” is not (as far as I know) edible and social capital hasn’t paid anyone’s rent lately. These intangibles aren’t enough bang for our proverbial buck, so what’s the solution? How do we get the most out of this situation? Two words: Michelle Obama. Michelle is hardcore and, to a degree, unapologetically Black (I see you B.Terry, haha) making her our conduit to presidential power. If Hillary Clinton is allowed to count any of that “foreign policy experience” (read: sawdust, bullshit and fraudulent sniper fire) she accrued while in the white house, we should be able to get at Michelle very effectively to push some of our social problem solutions and other reasonable domestic agendas. If we can’t go front door with Barack, Michelle will sneak us in through the window. If Eleanor Roosevelt is any example, the First Lady of the US, while not wielding any concrete power, does have the ability to bring subjects to light and attract funding, attention and potential solutions. We can use Michelle as our advocate because she thankfully doesn’t have any votes attached to her name and seems to care enough about Blackness and Black people to be down. The jury is still out on Barack but Michelle is rockin’ with us so let’s use it while we can. In the words of the eminent Hip-Hop scholar, young Cory Gunz: “We Ba-rock with them Obamas.” Ya dig?