Cornel West: The Age of Obama Is Over

On CNN Wednesday, leftist Professor Cornel West, given the chance to bloviate about the non-indictment of Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown, decided to impart his perspective with a vengeance, even targeting President Barack Obama and blurting that the Ferguson affair signaled the “end of the age of Obama.” 

West began, “Ferguson signifies the end of the age of Obama. It’s a very sad end. We began with tremendous hope, and we end with great despair. Why? Because we have a Jim Crow criminal justice system that does not deliver justice for black and brown people, and especially black and brown poor people.”

Moving on to class warfare and criminal justice, he stated:

It’s very sad that Wall Street executives can go free, and drone droppers can go free, and torturers can go free, but police who kill our precious children walk free. And we weep, and we do fight back, but there’s been a class war and a kind of racial war against black and brown youth. And when you get a case like Ferguson, only one out of 11,000 cases did not, did not, have grand juries that do not deliver an indictment, here you get one out of that 11,000, but that’s just the peak of the iceberg.

Ignoring Obama’s fanning of the racial divide, West continued, “The sad thing is we have a black president and a black attorney general, we have a black head of Homeland Security, but not one federal prosecution of a case against a policeman killing a black youth under the five-and-a-half years where we’ve had all black folk in place.”

When asked why he had tweeted that “Obama’s empty neutrality, moral bankruptcy and political cowardice is now undeniable to even his most loyal cheerleaders and boot-lickers,” West seized the opportunity to lump Israel together with the Russian jackboot. He managed to include a defense of Edward Snowden and to climax with a final attack on America’s “Jim Crow” justice system:

I have a deep commitment to the truth, and the condition of the truth is always to allow the suffering to speak. And I have a profound love for those friends who called the wretched of the earth. So when you’re talking about persons who are suffering, I don’t care if they’re being bombed by Israeli defense forces in Palestine, I don’t care if they’re subordinated in Russia, I don’t care if they’re being mistreated in Guatemala, and I don’t care if they’re black, white, or red in the United States. Poor and working class people need to be at the center, and unfortunately President Obama chose a Wall Street presidency rather than Main Street. He chose a drone presidency rather than cutting back on the drones. He chose massive surveillance that Edward Snowden and others have revealed rather than protecting rights and liberties. And he chose not to give even one speech that focuses on the Jim Crow criminal justice system that’s been targeting poor black and brown youth, saying, “The era of police impunity is over. The era of lack of accountability is over. I am going to ensure as President, every American citizen, especially black and poor and uh-uh-uh-brown, will be treated well.” We never got that, at all.

West through the years has spread racial fear and dissension, accusing whites of enforcing “white supremacist ideology”:

White supremacist ideology is based first and foremost on the degradation of black bodies in order to control them. One of the best ways to instill fear in people is to terrorize them. Yet this fear is best sustained by convincing them that their bodies are ugly, their intellect is inherently underdeveloped, their culture is less civilized, and their future warrants less concern than that of other peoples.

He has accused Israel of being responsible for “46 years of vicious occupation.”