Black liberalism’s King-Obama narrative strangles the range of black political imagination

Evidence

I am not suggesting that all forms of black politics end up doing this. But black liberalism does it. This form of politics, with traditional black liberals like the Reverends Sharpton and Jackson, and post-black liberals like President Obama, with their “winks and nods,” combines with a bad story of black democratic struggle. It’s a story that glorifies a particular version of Martin Luther King and draws a straight line between his struggles and President Obama. It makes us all patriots and strangles our political imaginations by radically limiting the range of black political action. The whole business of black politics becomes the political project of black liberals, with their latent desire for the disappearance of black America. Looks like we have been accomplices in our own demise after all. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 487

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘bad story’ of King-Obama continuity is the ideological mechanism behind the electoral trap the reader must explain; connects to Glaude’s broader argument across the book.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that a sanctioned national narrative of black struggle actively limits political imagination — turning liberation history into a constraint on present action — is dense enough to sit with.