Obama’s speech and the bankruptcy of identity politics

President Obama’s State of the Union address, delivered Tuesday night, is nearly as remarkable for what it did not mention as it is for the unabashedly right-wing and pro-corporate agenda it outlined... the speech is typical of a political order in which “no aspect of social reality can be openly and honestly addressed by any section of the American ruling class or the corporate-controlled media” which fears that “any acknowledgment of the real state of American society could become a focus for the social anger building up just below the surface.”

One of the more striking omissions from the president’s speech was any reference, even in a tangential way, to the desperate conditions facing the majority of the nation’s 37 million African-Americans, or the closely related social crisis overtaking the cities...

It is time to draw up a balance sheet. The four years since the housing market bust of 2007—two of them under the Obama administration—have been the most disastrous for African-American workers since the Great Depression.

The crisis engulfing the entire working class—mass layoffs, wage and benefit cutting, the foreclosure epidemic, homelessness, hunger, the gutting of public education, drastic increases in college tuition, the slashing of all forms of social spending—have hit African-American workers with particular force.

The official US poverty count last year hit a record of 43.6 million people, or one in seven. Among African-Americans, 25.8 percent of the population, more than one in four, lived in poverty in 2009, while one in three African-American children lived in poverty. The official unemployment rate for African-Americans went from 8.7 percent in 2007 to nearly 16 percent today; 40 percent of African-American youth are unemployed. Home ownership among African-Americans, who were disproportionately victimized by the banks in various forms of sub-prime lending, has fallen sharply.

In the face of this disaster, Obama’s State of the Union Speech can only be called a provocation...

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2011/jan2011/iden-j28.shtml

“no aspect of social reality can be openly and honestly addressed by any section of the American ruling class or the corporate-controlled media”

This is true, and crippling.