…Harris-Perry is far too intelligent not to know that Obama’s Race To The Top policies are deliberately, not accidentally driving the wave of school closings, or that President Obama is deep in the pocket of the charter school sugar daddies. She knows too that there are deep connections between the money spent on the warfare state and bank bailouts and the money available to support public education. And she’s well aware that nobody’s career has ever been harmed by supporting the policies of a sitting president, no matter how vile (or even racist) those policies might be.
The black political class, based as it is on the fiction that it “represents” an underprivileged minority defined by race, is perfectly willing to entertain a shallow discussion of whether school closings are “racist.” But explaining to her audience where the pressure for high stakes testing, for school closures, for teacher firings, for turning public schools into profitable low-cost holding tanks are coming from — if it means disagreeing with the First Black President, it ain’t gonna happen.
If corporate school reform was something Republicans and Democrats disagreed on — if elected Republicans were doing it and elected Democrats were against it, Melissa Harris-Perry might see fit to focus real intellectual wattage on the subject, and truly inform her audience. She and her guests have no trouble cackling at evil Republicans. But when the evil is bipartisan, and a black Democrat in the White House, her career is more important than the truth. She knows the microphone and the audience ain’t hers either, it’s MSNBC’s. If she doesn’t tow the line, maybe they’ll give Michael Eric Dyson a show instead, he’ll know how to stay in his lane.
Like boxers instructed at the beginning of every fight to “protect yourselves at all times”, MHP knows her obligation is to protect the Democratic party elite, and the president, and to protect millions of voters who supported Barack Obama and his party from knowing what they really voted for. In this case that meant drawing attention away from the charter school profiteers and sugar daddies, and their intimate ties with this president, his secretary of education, and a whole layer of Democratic and often black politicians…
Speak Your Mind