Uncle Jesse’s Wistful Tears of Anticlimactic Regret on the Cusp of the Obama Presidency

As already indicated in the previous two segments of this tribute series in commemorative celebration of the epochal passing of the Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson (1941-2026), the much remarked and globally canonized “Fountain” or “Waterfall” - or is it a wellspring? - of tears that torrentially poured or “tumbled” from the bold and eagle-sharp eyes of the legendary American human and civil rights leader and preacher-politician par-excellence of unarguable distinction - even President Donald John Trump, no widely recognized friend or darling of the African American Community, in a rarefied tribute, graciously called the mentee and protege of the immortalized Reverend-Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., “ a force of nature” and “a great piece of work” - both signified and symbolized something far and well beyond the most obviously tempting interpretation attributed to “them” or “it” by many a major pundit, critic or commentator on the life and the work of America’s second most prominent and globally recognized Black Leader in the Twentieth Century.

The foremost African American Human and Civil Rights Leader in the Twentieth Century, of course, was unarguably none other than the savagely and grisly assassinated Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., the crown jewel of whose yeomanly achievements in the sacred and the glorious cause of the African American Liberation Struggle was the putatively unimpeachable conferral of the Nobel Peace Prize by both the Swedish and Norwegian Nobel Peace Prize Academy and Committee, respectively, and, of course, the dozens of rights acts and laws enacted and passed by the United States Congress throughout much of the 1960s and the 1970s.

The “Jesse Jackson Tears,” in the most obvious context, represented the epic and the heroic capacity of the formerly chattel enslaved Continental African and the descendants of the latter right here in the Americas, formerly called the European New World and, in particular, in our time and generation, The United States of America, to transcend approximately some Four Centuries of psychologically and emotionally withering humiliation and unspeakable dehumanization over at least some Twenty Generations.

But that is, as already indicated, only one and the most obvious aspect of what has become known as the African American Experience in largely and predominantly academic circles. In reality, it epitomizes much, much more and has only tangentially anything fundamentally “celebratory” to do with the primary event with which the Reverend Jesse Louis Jackson’s “Cascade of Tears” has come to be almost invariably associated, namely, the epochally seismic night of November 4, 2008, when the now-former President Barack Hussein Obama’s name was gloriously entered into the Annals of American Presidents.

For the very first time in nearly 250 years, the Myth of White Supremacy and, conversely, Black Sociopolitical and Cultural Inferiority was effectively and almost definitively broken in an ethereally Christocentric manner and context. Henceforth, the fascistically constructed distinction between what constituted “Black Leadership” and “Real” and/or “True” Leadership that is, the traditional lilywhite leadership model or pattern, was forever torn asunder. Ironically, however, this is also where “The Real Problem” begins, that is, where the “Jackson Tears” assumes its most potent practical relevance and contradictions, if also because having been fathered by a largely Absentee Continental African Emigrant Scholarship Student and a White American Mother which, by the way, in our time has increasingly become a quite common occurrence and compositionally pervasive within the African American Community, starkly and sharply reflective of generations and centuries of the libertine cultural morality or ethos of the dominant White-American Society, fundamentally patriarchal in thrust and conduct.

Nevertheless, American-born African-American citizens with Non-American-Born African or Continental African Fathers and Non-Black American Mothers like former President Obama are often envisaged not to be full-blooded African Americans, although going by the White-Supremacist constructed Principle of Hypodescent, the so-called “One-Drop Theory,” are legally and statutorily categorized as Black and African American.

Now, the foregoing observation is relevant and very significant to highlight or underscore here because, for the most part, the ethno-racial identity of Mr. Obama did not become a major issue or a discursive bone of contention, verging on epic proportions and one that called for a critical eaximnation, until the then Senator Obama’s electioneering campaign for President of the United States of America gathered what “eerily” appeared to some African American leaders like the Reverend Alford “Al” Sharpton, a New York City resident and activist and a longtime Jackson protege, and former US Ambassador to the United Nations, Dr. Alan Keyes, who had fiercely contested then Candidate Obama for the latter’s senatorial run for the United States Congress from the State of Illinois, to be fast and inevitably becoming a near-certain possibility, if not a concrete reality.

All of a sudden, the widely known and popularly acknowledged and recognized Chicago Black Community Organizer was rudely awakened and made to understand that he did not adequately measure up to the standard of what really constituted a bona fide Black or African American Identity, that he was still in the teething stages of the acquisition of a credible African American Identity. This writer has personally experienced something eerily and strikingly identical to the foregoing brief narrative, which contributed significantly and expeditiously to his decision to take an early retirement parachute out of his tenured professorial job at a New York State-sponsored Community College a little over a couple of years ago. But in as much as I had hoped that the situation could have been much better and very different, nevertheless, I am not the least bit bitter for the prized experience gained therefrom. To be certain, this most gruesome albeit sociopolitically and culturally enriching experience has convinced me of my dual African and African American ethnic identity more than ever before.

At any rate, right here within the New York Metropolis, we had the Reverend Al Sharpton, the veteran community and civil rights activist and presently a television current affairs talk-show host and the renowned founder of a civil society establishment called the National Action Network (NAN), hopping riotously and rampantly from one radio and television station to another, telling his quite considerable audience and followers that the jury was still out by his own personal guidelights, and that he was still not certain whether Candidate Obama, a former Harlem Community Organizer in the late 1980s when the then young Mr. Obama attended Columbia University, and also worked as a volunteer advisor/consultant for NYPIRG, the New York Public Interest and Research Group, really qualified to be certified as a bona fide Black or African American Leader.

Now, it is very obvious that this drawnout strategic game of deliberate noncommitment was absolutely no happenstance at all, when one also objectively recognized the fact that for more than a decade, the future President Obama had also been known as a very progressive and dynamic and a results-oriented community organizer in the City of Chicago, a remarkable political achievement that would even be strategically and mischievously deployed as a putdown by the Hillary Clinton Presidential-Election Primary Campaign across the country. Even more bewildering was the fact that the Reverend Sharpton’s own longtime mentor and political role model, to wit, the Reverend Jesse Jackson, and the latter’s nationwide socioeconomic and political empowerment organization, the Operation Rainbow PUSH Coalition, had been headquartered in the State of Illinois’ largest city for decades.

As well ought to be equally significantly noted that the then former US First Lady and Presidential Candidate, Mrs. Hillary Clinton, had also been born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. It is in view of the preceding facts of the proverbial reality on the ground, as it were, that the much-remarked “Jackson Trail of Tears” could not wholly have been a spontaneously ecstatic, ethereal and an opportune full-circle peaking of the age-worn and near-sisyphean epic battle of the African American struggle for “Political Equality.” Free At Last! Did I hear the Dear Reader say? Hell, No! Not Yet Uhuru.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]