Before I get started, two housekeeping chores first.

“This is not another session of Obamapologetics, I only use him to relate an experience that seems to be common amongst Black people who say we have no trust of one another.” And “We already know that President Obama can’t trust anybody except his wife, mother in law, daughters and close family members.” At this point, he really can’t even trust the Secret Service, with their trifling butts messing up on his watch.

Now.

Back when I was in high school and college, I consistently got pushed to the head of the class when it was time to elect a Class President.

I’ll take a couple of bragging points here — I was an A-student and maintained a 4.0 GPA, graduating with the highest honors an institution can bestow. I had a friendly laid-back demeanor, I knew how to keep a secret so people found me easy to confide in without risk of disclosure, and I had this “dry wit” that people found dryly humorous. In short, I was “likable” and always “green grass roots.”

Barack H. Obama, current and now out-going President of the United States, did start his campaign off very grassroots; but ultimately, anyone running for an office that large gets “owned and handled” by corporate entities for one main reason–you need money and they are the only ones with money to spare.

That said, I had a small perch on which I sat as far as “politics” were concerned and when I wrote my book, The United States of Georgia in 2009 to commemorate everything I documented in the south during Obama’s first term election, it wasn’t hard to draw parallels between his election and my own.

In my mind’s eye, I was able to visualize the very first thing that happened before I had time to breathe and get situated in my little corner office that the campus supplied for my president-related workplace.

Instead of being able to focus on my campaign promises, the first thing my campaign manager came in to remind me of was what I now “owed” her for helping me get elected. I had her already in mind once things ‘gelled,’ but she didn’t waste time telling me what I was already well aware of.

The second thing that happened was all of the other folks who had so much as passed out a flyer on my behalf. “If it wasn’t for us, you wouldn’t have won.”

The third thing that happened was the powers who were already in control. That was three. Most people, nobody these days, gets past a third inciting incident with me before I’m gone.

The first thing on my agenda was to take to them the list of Student Council “demands” on improvements that we had campaigned on, and what they hit me back with was “We need to get some pictures of you for the school album; but we have no intention whatsoever of allowing you to follow through on any of those initiatives. We like things like they are, and you won the election, so just sit there, smile, and play the role and everything will be just fine.”

I did what President Obama cannot do. I quit and let the Vice President, a white girl, have it. But she didn’t run to be President, didn’t even want the job when I stepped down, so she quit, too.

But let’s talk about the elements of TRUST and what it takes –what mutual elements it takes– to begin to trust others; and why Black people have such a problem with it and why President Obama can’t trust us any more than we say we can’t trust him.

The understanding is always there that you don’t have to love someone in order to like them, or like them in order to love them. Not even white people “like” the majority of people they do business with, but they get it done only because it is needful and necessary to meet a set of goals or expectations. That’s the end of it. Emotions don’t come into business relationships when there is a mutual expectation of the outcome.

But we want to fight and dicker over every little issue that comes up for reasons that I can only attribute to watching too much whiny histrionic drama on TV and listening to too many blinging-mad entertainers in certain genres of music who don’t have a clue what they’re mad about most of the time. “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

One of the essential elements of trust is reliability.

Is it possible to rely on someone who comes out calling in personal favors and “UOI’s” that take priority over the big picture? It is a given that people who think only of themselves when there are bigger missions to tackle cannot be relied upon or trusted.

The next one is congruence.

Be true to yourself before you start pledging allegiance to others.

A campaign lie is not always a lie for the sake of malfeasance, sometimes it is done out of consideration for others. However, one of the main places where FOX News and CNN knew they could make a fool out of Black people in general, for voting for Barack Obama, is in the area of ‘trueness.’ Some of us like to call congruence “keeping it real.”

They knew that too many people voted for Obama, not because of the platform and campaign promises that he made, but just because he was a Black man. These slow riders waited good until they realized that the “they” who weren’t going to LET him win couldn’t stop him FROM winning, and they then pulled up on the Late Freight at the Whistle Stop Party Train at the polls with no clue whatsoever of what the man stood for or what he had campaigned on.

They assumed the position and treated him as some kind of “Obamessiah,” and he went with the flow, because a vote is a vote after all.

The mainstream media, in the meantime, made a beeline for those Black people–the ones who had no clue what they were voting for and just wanted to be in on the historic action. These corporate-owned media influencers wanted to prove that “all” Black people only voted for Obama because he IS Black, which was true in some cases, but not so true in others. Like mine; but they wouldn’t have dared to ask me even though I contacted them to tell them I was available in case they were looking for a Black person who had done their homework first.

I made it my business to know exactly where he stood, and where John McCain was positioned, before I made my T-balance checklist column of “this versus that.” I read at least one of Obama’s books, part of one of McCain’s before I threw up, and checked the campaign stats on both of them — especially on Politico and 538. And I kept up with the polls, Gallup and several others, even though I knew nothing would come of it until people actually showed up to vote. Polls didn’t sway me, I was just informed about the ‘pulse’ of America.

There is no argument with the answer to the accusation that we (some of us that is) voted for him only because he is Black. Most people hit back with “So what? You only voted against him because he is Black.” Well, a lot of them did vote against him because he is Black, this is true. He even said so himself and was accused of playing the ‘race-victim’ by the usual suspects.

However, for the sake of trust — congruence, keeping it real, as we like to say, being true to SELF is expedient.

That means following through on knowing what a candidate is all about before deciding to cast a vote for him or her, race be danged. And that is true even if the only faces on the ballot ARE white ones.

But how do you trust people who don’t come forward until you’re at the end of the campaign trail and the only question in your mind is “Where the hell were you for the last two years?”

I know where they were, because I was daring our people not to show up to vote after all the sacrifices our ancestors made for us; and all they said was “They ain’t gonna LET him win.” I wanted to know who the hayell was “they”? They who? The “they” who said “the other they” weren’t going to LET him win didn’t catch on fire until sometime in October of 2008.

Would you trust someone who pulled up on the Late Freight for gainful exposure who doesn’t have a clue what you do or what you said for two straight years?

The third element of trust is acceptance.

It isn’t enough that the people who elect a man or woman show their “trust” for the Leader by voting for them. Period.

The return on that acceptance is that the people who voted also have to prove themselves trustworthy by the Elected One. It’s a give-take proposition.

It is easy for a leader to be taken as arrogant, superior, BigI/LittleU-style, when folks are made to feel small or inadequate and here is where the old-fashioned rules of language and body language, demeanor, come into sharp focus.

Some people actually came incorrect at President Obama from Day 1, as they did to me in my small perch in a little town college.

They had to let him know that ‘just because you are the President doesn’t mean you get to tell me what to do.’ Well, d’uh … yeah, he could tell you what to do because now he’s the boss and you’re not.

But he worked overtime and past time to be fair and impartial, and to hear all sides of an argument before making a decision. All that happened after that was leverage to call him “weak.”

It was no less for Black people to do that to him than it was for whites to scream about him going on a weak@ “apology tour” to all the countries who were spitting nails at us by the time he got elected.

Somebody had to be the bigger man and make it right; and President Obama knew that America was very complicit in the trials and tribulations that were upon us.

Bipartisanship is necessary, even when dealing with other countries. Folks who talk about change agencies and the ‘art of war’ say that in the “appearance” of weakness is great strength. One thing I noticed about him (Obama) is that if he can’t get them one way, he gets them another; and right now, come November 2014 mid-terms, they are sinking faster than Titanic.

Yet, when an appointed/authorized/elected leader is in position and the first thing people want him or her to know is that they carry no true weight of authority, nor are they deserving of any respect related to their office and position; then my stance is this: You don’t respect me, I don’t respect you.

I don’t have to act like a juvenile to make my point, especially with the same folks who voted for Nixon, Bush Sr, ‘W’ Bush, Carter, Clinton/Gore, and Reagan, and had no expectation that they would raise their fists and scream “Put some Brothas on the Wall!” when they got in the Oval Office.

Fair is fair. Treat him the same as you would any other President, but know that one of our biggest problems with trust is consistently calling in The Soul Patrol on those who are assumed “not Black enough” because they had a “white experience” growing up. The folks in Chicago would beg to differ for the most part…they saw him pounding the pavement before a corporation ever took him seriously. That’s how he got elected Senator, insider grooming or no.

From my small vantage point from the low-hanging presidential branch, that automatically lets me know how I have to handle people going forward.

Long-handled pitchfork, especially with folks who will cry crocodile tears at my election and then threaten to cut my alleged ‘nuts’ off in the next breath. That’s simply someone who cannot be trusted for pretty obvious reasons.

Too many of “us” came at President Obama without a protocol or an agenda, and then went “slap Black Tea Party” on him by not accepting him in his capacity as President from Day One. He wasn’t the homeboy ’round the way any more, and under those circumstances, your best friend can’t even afford to call you by your first name. It’s total disrespect. Two characters from House of Cards (Kevin Spacey’s character, Frank Underwood) and The American President (Martin Sheen’s character, AJ MacInerney) talked about it in the movies, it’s as close to the truth as it gets in DC.

Last but not least, the Trust Test means openness.

Call it accountability, call it authenticity, genuineness, full disclosure, transparency, call it good news/bad news, call it anything but a surprise. Folks hate surprises when they think they had all the bases covered; that’s why surprise witnesses seldom show up in courtrooms, though it is dramatized that way in TV courts.

And this also applies to all those folks in Black churches all over the USA who start trying to play head games on people in church and then feign innocence when they get caught.

President Obama went to DC with “binders full of Black people, male and female” and then had to stand down and watch nearly every one of them take the GOP political “hits” that came at them and ran them out of DC from the start.

From Desiree Rogers to Van Jones to everyone in between. Rahm Emmanuel eventually went back to Chicago to run for mayor, Reggie Love left, or got low-ball fired for reasons that are still not very clear now. Lisa Jackson held on as long as she could at the EPA and then left at the turn of the first term. And Susan Rice, poor skirred child, they ran her off before she even got to the gate, though President Obama told her that he had her back. Eric Holder is holding steady, and told the folks who tried to “black attack” him on some bogus mess that they started in Benghazi, to enjoy chewing their broccoli, or asparagus, or something like that. Sonia Sotomayor? Well, she isn’t necessarily what we would call Black, but the minority opposition forces hit her, and every one of Obama’s appointee selections, save a few of their own, with everything BUT the kitchen sink before he was done naming them.

Black folks, particularly the Congressional Black Caucus and those amongst us who happen to be members of the Democratic National Convention Committee and the NAACP, et al, stood down and barely made a peep on the behalf of any of these folks.

Openness demands that when a Leader of any capacity has to deliver bad news, people understand that things don’t always work out according to plan. When we ask openness of someone and then go into overload trying to hide our own motivations by not delivering on our own promises to respect this office and do what we were supposed to do to back it, then that Leader has no choice but to go it alone, or drop the whole danged thing.

I don’t know why it didn’t surprise me that President Obama was left out there drying up on the Vine by his own constituents on big initiatives like the Healthcare Reform Act (“Obamacare”), let alone the smaller bids. I, too, had had one too many experiences with Black folks who said they were with me and then ran for cover and left me hanging by myself the minute things didn’t go exactly right.

All I heard was “We didn’t make you do that,” or “We didn’t tell you to do it LIKE that.”

That is what they say when they run for cover after you step up and put your head and neck in the noose for them. Burn. Level 4 biohazard area politics with no environmental containment suit for YOU. Not today.

I’ve been attacked and/or abandoned by folks who claimed they were with me all the way, and I know what that feels like. Thing is, I will never let them do it to me again…don’t care what they want, or why. I used to give people three chances if they apologized; now they barely get two, and sometimes only one. Depends on the circumstances.

Trust in the Black Community demands all of these elements, without compromise, without leaning toward what we do and do not like about each other on a personal tip. Personal dislike has little to no chance of resolution, and for some folks, it’s just an excuse not to do something that they know needs to be done.

But I do have a question to ask that was posed to me by another Sistah a few days ago when we were discussing this very same thing: “Where dem insider Jeremiah “God D*** America!” Wright critics at now?”

The End.

WILLIE LYNCH: Divide & Conquer