Obama, the World, and Africa

Abstract

The article discusses President Barack Obama's troubling foreign policy as it relates to Africa and the Arab Spring; the apparent disinterest amongst African Americans in U.S. military intervention in Libya and unrest in Mali; and the need for building new, internationally focused Black movements in the United States as we look to and beyond the 2012 presidential election.

Keywords:

• 2012 presidential election
• Africa
• Arab Spring
• Barack Obama
• international solidarity
• Libya
• Mali
• Muammar Qaddafi

Acknowledgments

I thank Barbara Ransby and Prudence Browne, editor and managing editor, respectively, for the opportunity to contribute to this issue of Souls. This article benefitted from comments from the anonymous readers, as well as conversations with Gretchen Bauer, Marlah Bonner-McDuffie, P. Gabrielle Foreman, Michael Gomez and his on-line KeepitTight Africa Circle forum, Brian J. Purnell, Gilberto Rosas, Elaine Salo, and Sidney J. Toombs III.

Notes

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/10/20/obama-muammar-gaddafi-dead_n_1022106.html (accessed July 18, 2012).

http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/205516/20110829/libyan-gaddafi-rebels-tnc-blacks-african-union.htm (accessed July 25, 2012); “US and NATO-Supported Libyan ‘Rebels’ Continue Persecution of Blacks in Libya,” Black Agenda Report, http://blackagendareport.com/content/us-and-nato-supported-libyan-rebels-continue-persecution-blacks-libya (accessed July 25, 2012).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-18427541 (accessed July 24, 2012).

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2012/07/20127533425563880.html (accessed July 25, 2012).

For a more thorough discussion of Black America's refusal to criticize Obama, see Bill Fletcher Jr. essay “‘What happened?': Obama, Demobilization and the Challenge of the 2012 Elections” in this issue of Souls.

Gerald Horne, “One Historian's Journey,” Journal of African American History 96, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 248–254; Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011); Edward Eugene Onaci, “Self Determination Means Determining Self: Lifestyle Politics and the Republic of New Afrika, 1968–1989” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, 2012).

Fletcher. “‘What Happened?'”; Tariq Ali, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender and Home, War Abroad (London: Verso, 2011).

V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1970); Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International Publishers, 1966). I should add that racism and sexism were central to the making and working of modern capitalism and imperialism. For further discussion of this topic, see Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Political Affairs 28, no. 6 (June 1949): 51–67; Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Zed Books, 1983); McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom; Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008); Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011).

Neoliberalism emerged as the prevailing global economic order by the 1990s following the demise of the Soviet Union, Eastern Bloc, and militant Third World regimes. Kean Birch and Vlad Mykhnenko, eds., The Rise and Fall of Neoliberalism: The Collapse of an Economic Order? (London: Zed Books, 2010); Ali, The Obama Syndrome, 3–4.

Horne, “One Historian's Journey,” 249; Robin D. G. Kelley, “‘But a Local Phase of a World Problem’: Black History's Global Vision, 1883–1950,” The Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (December 1999):1045–1077.

Jonathan Offei-Ansah, “Gaddafi's Ghost will Haunt Libya”; “End of an Era”; Desmond Davies, “Wither the ‘New’ Libya,” all in NewsAfrica, November 30, 2011.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/world/africa/us-expands-drug-fight-in-africa.html (accessed July 25, 2012).

Ibid.

Angela Y. Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005); Ruthie Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Globalization (New York: The New Press, 2010).

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/africa/2011/10/20111017171543493140.html; http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/27/world/africa/kenya-planned-somalia-incursion-far-in-advance.html (both accessed July 30, 2012).

Kony gained international notoriety following the internet release of the deeply problematic film Kony 2012 produced by the American charity Invisible Children.

Chika Ezeanya, “US’ Africa Invasion,” NewsAfrica (November 30, 2011): 17; http://www.chinafrica.asia/angola-laudable-oil-trade-with-china/ (accessed August 4, 2012).

Financial Times August 4/5, 2012.

Chofamba Sithole, “The Great Kony ‘Con,’” NewsAfrica (30 April 2012): 24, 26; Ezeanya, “US’ Africa Invasion,” 17; http://allafrica.com/stories/201207260922.html; http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/90778/7649195.html (both accessed July 26, 2012).

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua and Clarence Lang, “Strategies for Black Liberation in the Era of Globalism: Retronouveau Civil Rights, Militant Black Conservatism, and Radicalism,” Black Scholar 29, no. 4 (2000): 25–47; Tim Wise, Color Blind: The Rise of Post-Racial Politics and the Retreat from Racial Equity (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2010), 27–62.

http://www.cleveland.com/nation/index.ssf/2012/07/vice_president_joe_biden_tells.html (accessed July 26, 2012).

Noam Chomsky, 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001); John K. Cooley, Unholy Wars Afghanistan, America, and International Terrorism (London: Pluto Press, 2000); http://www.democracynow.org/2011/5/2/did_pakistani_govt_know_where_osama (accessed July 26, 2012).

Fletcher, “‘What Happened?'”