Flint, MI—U.S. president Barack Hussein Obama gave a speech at Northwestern High School on Wednesday, May 4, 2016 during which he drank a glass of water as a last-minute and desperate effort to assuage the growing anger and frustration amongst Africans surrounding the city’s lead-poisoned water.
Throughout his nearly hour-long speech, the first African president did his best to restore Africans’ confidence in the government by telling them “I’ve got your back.”
This empty rhetoric harkens back to a popular, and insulting, R&B-tinged radio ad his campaign ran on black radio networks during the 2012 presidential election wherein he promised Africans that he’s got our back and we should have his back by voting for him.
Two years after his re-election, in 2014, Africans in Flint began to file numerous complaints about the poisonous water to no avail.
Recently released government documents show that the State purposely ignored these complaints.
One internal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) memo read, “I’m not so sure Flint is the community we want to go out on a limb for,” thus proving that agents of the State thought Africans in the city were undeserving of access to clean water.
Ninety-six and ninety-three percent of the African vote went to Obama during the 2008 and 2012 elections respectively. Africans in Flint are expected to trust the U.S. president when it took him two years to visit Flint to address the complaints about the water quality.
This sellout clearly does not have our back, and never will.
Obama refuses to admit that the contamination was intentional
According to Obama, the situation in Flint started decades ago when manufacturing began to dwindle and plants either closed or left the city, thereby producing a rising unemployment rate, a shrinking tax base, a short-staffed city government, and an intractable economic crisis—all of which he claims made it more difficult for the city to provide adequate public services.
He went on to cite the lack of government oversight and political and economic conservative ideology expressed through public policy as additional contributing factors.
“Now, I do not believe that anybody consciously wanted to hurt the people in Flint,” Obama remarked.
Members of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement (InPDUM) traveled to Flint, gave out bottled water, put forth the Africans Charge Genocide campaign and recorded testimonies from working class Africans.
Africans conveyed a profound sense of anger and assured InPDUM forces that they know for a fact that the State deliberately neglected to address the water issue.
Many said the State wants to gentrify the city and transform it into another Ann Arbor, a lily-white college town located about an hour south of Flint.
For two years Africans complained of dirtied, foul-smelling tap water.
They charged that drinking and bathing in the water lead to rashes, hair and memory loss, and vision problems.
At one point the water even tested positive for E. Coli bacterial contamination.
If the people say the contamination was intentional, and it’s been exposed that representatives of the State blatantly ignored the people’s complaints—who is Obama to say otherwise?
Barack Obama, traitor to the African Nation
Sixty percent of the population in Flint is African and the city holds one of the largest African populations in the country.
Forty percent of Africans in the city live below the State-designated poverty line, which does not accurately measure poverty.
In Flint, 9,000 children were exposed to the poisonous water.
Despite all the complications with and complaints about the water quality, in 2015 Africans paid an average annual water bill ($864.32 per household) that was over 2.5 times greater than the Michigan average ($316.20 per household), according to a 2016 report released by the Food & Water Watch Group.
Wherever working class Africans are in the world we live in the poorest communities, marked by poor access to clean water, among other challenges.
Unsurprisingly, Obama did not commit the State to paying reparations to Africans whose lives will forever be affected by the poisonous water.
Instead, he said the federal and Michigan governments will work together and commit millions of dollars to improving the water systems in the city and provide increased medical attention to the people.
But the damage is already done.
The ruling class, along with their neocolonial puppets, bamboozled working class Africans into believing that Barack Hussein Obama genuinely represented the hopes, aspirations, and interests of U.S. Africans.
Obama represents white power in black face.
He effectively aligns himself with the colonial State by ignoring the cries of Africans in Flint, protecting killer cops who murder Africans on a daily basis, demanding that Cuba extradite Assata Shakur, blaming Africans for the miserable conditions in which we live in the U.S. colonial State, bombing Libya and Somalia, among other atrocities.
Genocide is being committed at the hands of the government against Africans all across the country!
The poisoning of Flint’s water is genocide.
Sign the Africans Charge Genocide petition at africanschargegenocide.org!
Black Power Matters!
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