Them Niggas Got Shot: The Disturbing Idolatry of King & Obama

by Gee Joyner
R3 Contributor

I’m sure I’ll be rhetorically crucified in cyberspace by the American Negro. I am almost positive this text may have an adverse effect on my personal, and. possibly, professional networks and even my occupation. But I must do this. I must write this. I must continue writing this piece in order for me to rid myself, and my constituency of an internal and explicit hypocrisy. A few times a year I travel to scholarly/academic conferences and listen to presentations of the numerous nuances of the ills of the “Black American Community” or the “Black Problem in America” or “What Blacks Need to Do Better” and I get disgusted, fidgety, and begin to feel out of place. Just as out of place as I did when I was in elementary school when I was always the only Black kid in the class, or at recess, and, sometimes, at lunch. The majority, in my opinion, was the other. I guess you could say that I had reverse-xenophobia. 

 I always feel socially uncomfortable with the gullible or those who revel in media interpretations of an event or an individual. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a man of principles and a man of flaws. Just like Barack Hussein Obama. Except King’s social infidelities are more widely known because of J.Edgar Hoover (i.e. whore mongering, marital infidelities, sexual deviances  if you will—he allegedly patronized prostitutes per Hoover and the late Rev. Ralph Abernathy). Yet, we all must understand, that Obama, just as Dr. King, is and was human. I fear that too many of us laud these men’s secular accomplishments and deem the two to be deities in a sense as it pertains to the Black American struggle and pseudo-triumph over U.S. racist institutions (i.e. social, economical, and political). 

I have been mildly entertained and hugely perturbed by cyber-debates that give analyses as to whether President Obama should be publicly sworn into office on the nation’s reserved federal holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the analogous anecdotes of irony that have inundated Facebook posts and the Twittersphere. Many believe that it is only fitting that the first Black President of the United States is being sworn in on the King holiday and will be sworn in with a bible which once belonged to Dr. King to take the oath. The ironic thing to me is that we, as a very informed and knowledgeable audience, are even comparing the two men. One is a prophet at the least and the other is a politician at best. One dedicated his adult life to the Black Civil Rights Movement, as well as the Poor People’s Movement and the anti-war effort concerning the United States’ involvement and occupancy of Vietnam, and the other is a politician whom, whether it is in his heart or a mere political agenda to sway voters, has fought for women’s and LGBT rights and is a warmonger by default (no U.S. politician can be elected Head of State without a plan for “national security” which is political jargon for U.S. protection via war and the possibility of war).