The Color of Change recently hosted a conference call for grassroots activist on Mar 14th to discuss issues pertertaining to over incarceration of American citizens, particualry those in the Black communities, due to America's long running failed drug war.
One of the featured speakers was Susan Burton, Founder and Executive Director of A New Way of Life Reentry Project, who among other things spoke about the horrible conditions faced by vicitims of America's drug war when released from prison who are often denied the opportunity to fully reintergrate back into society which often causes them to support themselves and their children by any means neccessary. The conditions that have been created are often designed to keep the private and state prisons full and revenue and profits flowing from the work of cheap slave labor.
Also on the call was Michelle Alexander who is an Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University and the author of the book "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness". Mrs Alexander said that it is going to take another movement to end the New Jim Crow and that the Drug War allows politicians to compete with one another on who can be tougher on Black men leading to high incarceration rates independent of actual crime rates.
Republican Presidential hopeful, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee is in the news for making comments about President Obama’s worldview being shaped by British colonialism in Africa specifically referring to Kenya, the birthplace of Obama’s father.
Huckabee said that President Obama’s youth has caused him to resent the West and explains that this is why his foreign policy differs greatly from that of his predecessors. "One thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, (is) very different than the average American," Huckabee said during an interview with New York radio station WOR this week.
The major sticking point with Huckabee’s statement is that President Obama did not grow up in Kenya. Obama lived in Hawaii, his birthplace until the age of five at which point he then lived in Indonesia with his stepfather and his American mother who some have said worked for the CIA under the cover of teaching English to Indonesian children. By the age of ten, the young Obama then moved back to Hawaii to live with his maternal grandparents who would raise him until he left for Los Angeles to pursue an undergraduate degree that would be completed in New York.
Huckabee’s proof that President Obama resented the west was the removal of a bust of Winston Churchill, the former Prime Minister of England, from the Oval Office, which was replaced with a bust of Abraham Lincoln, a U.S. President whom Obama has cited as one of his American heroes. It should be noted however, that Churchill like Obama, had an American mother and would later be made (Churchill) the first honorary citizen of the United States.
I would like to ask Mike Huckabee who he considers “normal Americans” to be as his divisive rhetoric sounds much like Sarah Palin’s North Carolina campaign trail statement about small towns representing “Real America” which she would later apologize for making. Huckabee should also be asked why he would take issue with a bust of a British politician being replaced with the bust of Republican President Abraham Lincoln.
Another point of contention is how Huckabee, like many other “normal Americans”, have a habit of white-washing history, completely ignoring the inhumane and downright criminal actions of their white so-called champions of Democracy who saw no hypocrisy in denying the basic human rights of self determination to non-white populations of the world. Winston Churchill is most known as the English Prime Minister who led the British opposition to Adolph Hitler’s Nazi war machine during World War II. What is not widely known about Churchill is that he spent a lifetime of military service to the British Crown in helping to oppress non-whites in their homelands while the British raped them of their natural resources.
In fact, Churchill ordered the brutal crackdown in Kenyan against the native people who wanted their independence from British colonialism. President Obama’s paternal grandfather was detained in a 1952 uprising against British colonial rule in Kenya and Huckabee claimed that childhood stories told to Obama about the Kenyan Mau Mau rebellion is what caused him to remove the bust of Churchill. Another problem with Huckabee’s narrative is that Obama only met his real father once in his life and had no contact with his father’s side of the family during his childhood so it is evident that Mike Huckabee, a Baptist minister is lying about President Obama to score points with whom he calls “Normal Americans”.
It is also troubling that a man, who claims to be a follower of Christ, would take issue with the bust of the British Butcher, Winston Churchill being removed from the oval office. As stated before, Winston Churchill who was in his second term as the British Prime Minister order a crackdown on Kenyan freedom fighters in which crimes against humanity were committed by British forces. After the liberation of Germany’s concentration camps during World War II, the British would erect their own concentration camps in Kenya. A British officer described the “labor camps” as "Short on rations, the prisoners overworked, harsh brutality, humiliating and disgusting treatment and flogging, which were all in violation of the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights." Churchill ignored all recommendations to improve the conditions and sought to cover them up. It has been estimated that between 50,000 to 300,000 native Kenyans may have been exterminated by the British and their African collaborators. All of this was done in the name of manifest destiny where Europeans believed that they had a God given right to invade already inhabited lands, steal natural resources and the land itself from the native populations subjecting them to genocidal methods of oppression.
That was the true nature and legacy of the man whom Huckabee wants to honor with a bust in the oval office. What is becoming clear is the true nature of Huckabee who wants to occupy the oval office in the near future. As far as Huckabee’s assertion that President Obama’s foreign policy differs from that of his predecessors is also false. President Obama has not only continued the US military presence in Iraq, he has escalated its activities in Afghanistan and has used predator drones to carry out deadly attacks in Pakistan. At every turn the Obama administration has sought to defend and shield former Bush administration officials from answering for their crimes against humanity which include torture and illegal dentition. A fact check of every point or issue raised by Huckabee during this interview with a right wing radio show will show that either Huckabee is terribly uninformed or has not problem lying to push a right wing neo-colonial worldview.
