Jason Williams: On the Subjective Citizenship of African Americans in the U.S.

By Jason Williams

With the re-election of Pres. Obama, African Americans are yet again being told that they are not to make any demands from Pres. Obama that they would not make to any other President.  Instead they must benefit strictly from color blinded policies, while other minority groups can indeed be recipients to policy initiatives that directly target their communities.

The Congressional Hispanic Caucus has come out recently to make demands but the Congressional Black Caucus has to be silent to protect their very first African American President.  This is usually based off of the logic that Pres. Obama is not going to give the African American Community any special attention simply because he is a self-proclaimed African American notwithstanding his maternal heritage.   However, this reasoning presents itself as an extremely peculiar conundrum because many of the same issues that progressive African Americans are vocal about today in hopes of gaining Pres. Obama’s attention are issues that have historically plagued the African American Community. Such demands have been made to other non-African American politicians for decades, so what makes Pres. Obama any different?

The masses of progressives, especially the African Americans within, have recently disagreed with Dr. West’s social-political commentary and had even devalued his status as one of America’s leading scholars, all due to West’s opinions regarding Pres. Obama’s silence on African American issues.   Such “progressives” base their weak rebuttals off of the notion mentioned above, “Because Pres. Obama is African American that doesn’t mean he should be compelled to answer to our needs” but one must wonder if the President were White would their response be different.   To any intelligent bystander, this conundrum makes absolutely no sense, especially considering the fact that African Americans have always been vocal about their social standing in America.  However, now that there is an African American President in office many are choosing to remain quiet, in fear that the opposition will use any political demands from the African American Community as bait to destroy the first African American President.

Amazingly, this logic pays a lovely service to the oppositional party while it gets to sit back and do absolutely nothing.  This reasoning has somehow persuaded some African Americans to be content with subjective citizenship.  Furthermore, it allows for real problems to be ignored while the other side continues to win anyways.  So long as African Americans continue to be first in everything that is bad  due to zero political intervention the other side indeed continues to win.  So long as other minority groups continue to have their voices heard by Pres. Obama and other officials, African Americans will continue to suffer and increasingly find themselves politically inoperative and outright irrelevant.

This silence on behalf of African Americans is a silence that really needs to be assessed for it presents grave consequences for future political involvement.  What will happen when Pres. Obama completes his second term and a non-African American person gets into office? Will African Americans suddenly become conscious once again to the many issues that plague their communities?  Will certain African American leaders and intellectuals who had benefited from this silence suddenly begin to speak truth to power again?  If this is indeed the case, the opposition will have one, simple, and quick statement, “Your concerns were valid during both of Pres. Obama’s terms and you said nothing, so why should it be relevant now?”  African Americans will be quickly dismissed into the river of political obsolescence, and both its leaders and intellectuals will have not a root to stand on.  Now is the time for African Americans to question their silence or pay for it in the very near future!

Jason Williams, ABD is an Adjunct Professor of Criminal Justice at New Jersey City University. You can contact him at [email protected]