Last night I returned home from work feeling debilitated. My faculty meeting exhausted me, stressed me out, and filled me with useless rage. People don’t want change. Freire was right, there is a sick comfort in oppression, and misery does love company. I don’t want to be necrophilic and be among and around necrophilics. I stand alone in my vote against oppression at that faculty meeting table. Struck by the amount of colleagues hallucinating about change, without being able to define the change they are after. I taught my 3-hour class yesterday complete with my back dripping in sweat. The lesson was ferocious and my students completely tuned in. We all were inspired by the lesson yesterday, and I felt rewarded, but not enough to want to return again next week. After having been teaching for so long, did I really want to continue down this path? People talk about change in the hallway and pump this idea into the mind

The exclamatory commentary that has accompanied Barack Obama’s ascendancy to the nomination of the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate has excited, beneath it, the question of what the nomination itself, and a possible Obama presidency, might mean for the Pan-Africanist world as well as the Third World. While much of the commentary has been laudatory, there have also been cautionary tones, not to mention ambivalent ones.