President Barack Obama, is not the candidate to narrate the discussion about the historical degradation of African-Americans in the United States. Nada, the first African-American to hold the title to the highest office is simply a first generation African-American. President Obama was born to a woman out of Kansas and a Kenya father. This would leave a cuss on the son. The cuss of what do I call myself in America?
Of course, some in the United States especially amongst bi-racial family what to believe the cuss is over. Over because President Obama regal supreme in the WHITE HOUSE. These families believe President Obama represents the color blind mythical theory, that no longer does the historical pain and suffering of African-American from discrimination exist. Holding up high, this young man who attended Harvard, worked in a law firm served as a Senate of Chicago, and now the POTUS. What better proof that skin color does not matter !! They have alright the right in the world to have the audacity to hope.
The reality is that skin color does matter. President Obama represent levels of blackness within and outside the United States. Forget that biracial special feeling of whiteness, here is a young man raised by his raced white mother with the support of his mother’s parents. A young man who rarely saw his Kenya father, but his mother did marry someone else. Who lived in Hawaii. This is the colorblind focus point, but President Obama is still labeled "black."
President Obama says he was born black on a talk show, it propped laughter. You can't miss the fact. Laughter, because President Obama blackness did not prevent him from becoming President of the United States, but it did not erase his connect the dots to blackness. And because of that connection to blackness, some would explain the level of hatred that is displayed against the President. Not simply because the President has put forth some policies that these folks don't necessary agree with. those who gather to spill hatred against him is not doing simply based on race. Denial sounds good, but President Obama has some enemies simply for being black.
Obama's blackness is akin to Clarence Thomas. Thomas exhibited this level of blackness during his confirmation hearing. The grandson of a sharecropper, who worked hard. The type of blackness that Rev. Jesse Jackson eluded to not knowing an open microphone catching his words. A blackness that power requires one self to extract from the masses. The masses remain predominately isolated and impoverished. Thomas distance himself from this blackness, and pointed that was his sister blackness not his blackness. His blackness is color blind, he does not relate to the masses problems in the black community.
The difference in their blackness was that Thomas sister was dependent on the narrative of a victim of the historical racial discrimination. But Thomas went to great heights emerging himself into the American culture that previously denied African-Americans access, even attending one of America's prestige school, Yale. His blackness was now connected to those who could make a different, the Washingtonian or those who worked hard. Those who represents individually, that the masses are no longer in the binary of despair based on their skin color.
POTUS Obama represents the other colorblind society. Those who are first generation African-Americans who have no connection to the history of slavery in the United States. The POTUS mother unlike Thomas's sister was able as a single mother expose her son to male role models, her parents, and married later on in life. This son was able to attend the prestige Harvard. This son cannot be drawn into the debate of what does the United States owe to those African-Americans who are still lingering under the institutional impact of a system based on race. This blackness is disengaged from the black community simply because a raced white parent raised them.
The POTUS is able to maneuver his way through the obstacles of blackness with the circumstances that lifted him above the narrative of those born in the America as the descendants of slaves. So when he speaks, he goes to raced white privilege, my mother, her parents, his education and finally, his father was a Kenya, who was absent from his life, but an African. But, still the POTUS understand in America, he is an African-American, he is not the same as his mother or his mother's grand parents, but he is no poor black NEGRO.
Pic lifted from the Field Negro Blog.
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