Cornell West on the rhetoric of "responsibility":
I think that it’s quite telling that he would give personal responsibility speeches to black people, but not a lot of personal responsibility speeches to Wall Street in terms of execution. And when you actually look at the degree to which issues of accountability for poor people—but where’s the accountability when you’re bailing out these Wall Street elites, $700 billion? That’s socialism for the rich. That’s your policy. Don’t then go to these folk who are locked into dilapidated housing, decrepit school systems, many on their way to a prison-industrial complex, and talk about their fathers didn’t come through. And we know the fathers got problems. We understand that. But there are structural institutional challenges that he’s not hitting, hitting head on.
Dedrick Muhammad makes similar points in his critique of the NYT's coverage of Obama's address to the NAACP.
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West added this in that DN! segment:
"And at this point, you see, you can’t allow race and him being the first black president to hide and conceal the very ugly class realities of poor and working people"
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