On Kamala Harris and Skin Color

The Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris closed the party convention in Chicago with a strenuous effort to “rekindle the enthusiasm of 16 years ago, when with the election of the first black president, America seemed to be relaunching itself,” Italian journalist Alessandro Banfi wrote.

An attempt embellished with sweet memories of a childhood spent in a mixed-race neighborhood of nurses, firefighters and construction workers tending the lawn of their GI homes with pride. Middle class “where I come from,” she said, “is critical to America’s success.” Even if it is – Norman Mailer remarked 70 years ago in his most reprinted article – largely composed of “neurotic-conformists” whose lives and deaths are rendered meaningless by the practices of a society eager to plunge one and everyone into insensitive masses suffering from “collective failure of nerve.”

The remnants are “saint-psychos” (Negro people, “not working class” workers, deviant intellectuals and artists, illiterates, reactionaries, few radicals, some inmates, and “of course the mass communication media”) who either coalesce and follow along in a silent body and mind prison (of boredom, sickness, and desperation); or towards “new kinds of victories,” which seemly increase one’s capacity to profit from “new kinds of perception,” become a rebel or rigidly conventional and conform to “the totalitarian tissues” of an easily perceived American society.

Uncomplicated America and its proletariat made the United States a great nation; “rich by grace of God and prosperous by the hard work of its humblest citizens,” wrote a renowned Negro American sociologist, a country “drunk with power” that leads humanity “to hell in a new colonialism with the same old human slavery, which once ruined us; and to a third World War, which will ruin the world.” That sociologist’s keenness of insight and judgement led him to be tried in 1951, although the case was dismissed immediately after the defense attorney told the judge that one Albert Einstein had “offered to appear as character witness for Dr. Du Bois.”

Even though Wiliam E.B. Du Bois was not convicted, the US government confiscated his passport and withheld it for eight years. Undeterred, he railed against military actions in Korea, viewing them as imperialist whites’ efforts to keep colored people in a submissive state. In early 1963, US authorities again refused to renew his passport, and Du Bois made the emblematic gesture of becoming a citizen of Ghana, where he died aged 95. Only a few years later, a cohort of White Negros made the most of their recently opened Opportunity doors, eschewed Mailer’s “psychically armed rebellion to free everyone,” and unashamedly embraced what Du Bois had designated as the “murderous liquidations of the totalitarian state.”

Who wouldn’t do so too? Very few for certain, but with dreadful consequences. Such as the practical liquidation of Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya, the sole Arab country with compulsory free education for boys and girls alike, free health care and housing for all, privileges which Americans never had. Denied of justice and prosperity, Libya submerged into disaster that brought about not only the illegal immigration crisis now plaguing Europe but also the metastasis of fundamentalist movements all over the continent. Problems started when Ronald Reagan falsely accused Qaddafi of ordering the bombing of a West Berlin discothèque frequented by US soldiers. Chaos only settled with Obama’s foreign policy strategy.

Uncomplicated America hailed enthusiastically its White Negro president when he pronounced Qaddafi’s death: “He died a fugitive, chased from power by his own people.” Intoxicated with satisfaction, a former editor of Foreign Policy wrote that even though political benefits accruing to the president at home where modest, the “Obama Doctrine” and its essential element of “leading from behind” – inaugurated much earlier with JFK’s flopped invasion of Cuba through Playa Girón – brought about “an important shift in U.S. national security strategy.” That is, in stark contrast to the “famous doctrine” of Colin Powell, another White Negro, and his idea of prior to military action the United States must exhaust every available means of “advancing our national interest”; a policy that “now seems like the quaint echo of a bygone time.”

Even so, just as with Kennedy before, Joe Biden at present and most likely Harris if she becomes president, the letting “others feel they too are architects of a plan” that we are “not bullying,” but doing “in a way in which risks and other burdens are shared” was the reason why Obama had to admit that “his” approach to meeting international threats turned out to be a massive fiasco simply because “we failed to plan for the day after.” “Stupid stuff,” as Hillary Clinton so aptly put it, that brought ruin for Cuba and Haiti in the past, Venezuela at present, and hell for Ukraine and Palestine.

It would not be fair to Mailer and Du Bois to close without inquiring what was the “new kind of perception,” which made the White Negro president to deliver the decisive blow to Libya’s illusions. Dreams of building a society where “everyone has a right to safety, to dignity and to justice,” as in the America portrayed by Harris, a social formation based on “the importance of treating others as you would want to be treated.” Perchance a fallacy, because just before his gutless assassination by terrorists backed by foreign bombers, Qaddafi wrote asking “our son Baraka Hussein Abu Oumama” to intervene “in the name of the U.S.A,” so that NATO and Al-Qaeda gangs “would finally withdraw from Libya,” leaving the country “for Libyans within the African union frame.”

Most likely the hapless revolutionary leader used an inappropriate, though accurate, Muslim treatment for an American White Negro utterly delighted with another of his “new kinds of victory,” specifically the one that prompted his dear wife Michelle to ask anyone at the Chicago conference to go and warn Donald Trump that “he might be seeking one of those Black jobs.”