Behold Barack Obama — America’s first black president who betrayed his blackness in the cause of white supremacy

It is often the case that the most cogent truths are also the most simply expressed.

In Malcolm X those simple truths had one their most accomplished tribunes. Perhaps one of the most powerful of the many he ever articulated was his description of the circular relationship that exists between the drive for hegemony abroad and economic and racial injustice at home. To wit: “You can’t understand what is going on in Mississippi if you don’t understand whatis going on in the Congo.”

Malcolm, by the time of his assassination, was a tribune of the ‘other America’, the one consisting of the poor, working poor, the marginalised and dispossessed.

In 2009, when Obama entered the White House, militant voices such as Malcolm’s seemed a historical footnote whose militancy and stridency were incompatible with the times.

Optimism in this respect was premature — a product of wishful thinking rather than reality — illustrated by the fact that in the summer of 2013, upon the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s historic ‘I Have A Dream Speech’ in Washington DC, the economic gap between blacks and whites in the US remained the same. It was a stark reminder that class and race in the United…