change we can believe in
Mainly I just want to affirm and echo Jim’s post below.
I just turned fifty — I’m not quite three years older than our next President, an interesting and rather sobering thought in itself. When I was a small boy in Birmingham, Alabama — around the time that Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his great Letter from the Birmingham Jail — there were still “White” and “Colored” water fountains at the Birmingham Zoo. Had a still-smaller Barack Obama tried to drink from the same one I drank from, he would have been stopped, and his adult guardians possibly arrested. When I visited my mother at work, at a large bank in downtown Birmingham, she would take me around the corner to Krystal for burgers; and had the young Obama entered and tried to order food, he would have been refused, and again his adult guardians would possibly have been arrested.
This morning on NPR there was a story about a 109-year-old African-American woman who calls Obama’s candidacy a “blessing.” The story doesn’t say that she voted for him — she probably didn’t make it to the polls — but she could have voted for him — and her father was an emancipated slave. History sometimes seems to move with excruciating slowness, and sometimes with dizzying rapidity; but the genuine experience of historical change is always disorienting.
God bless President Obama.
I respectively disagree. Obama is just as much white as what he is black. If he had been with his white mother, he would have been allowed to sit wherever he wanted to. His mother is white! What makes him more of a black man just because his father was black? At best, he is the first mixed race president. I will concede to that. But he is NOT the first black president. I will never consider him as such either.
— Mobea · Nov 5, 03:48 PM · #
If only we’d behaved as Europe behaved towards its minorities within living memory (that is, towards Kulaks and Jews) then America would be as respected and loved as Europe is, a model to the world. God damn America. So, where is that Black-Jewish chancellor in Germany? France? Poland? I’d like to meet her.
— tehag · Nov 5, 03:51 PM · #
Mobea, you can call Obama whatever you want, but if you think a little dark-skinned nappy-headed boy — ever seen any childhood pictures of Obama? — could have been served in a white-only Birmingham restaurant in the early 1960s, even if he was with fifty white women, you are sadly and sorely mistaken. In the pre-Civil-Rights-era of the South, Barack Obama was socially, culturally, and (most important) legally black. Just like all the other Southern black people who were and are of mixed racial ancestry themselves. As Bob Dylan says, “Things have changed.”
— Alan Jacobs · Nov 5, 04:02 PM · #
I respectively disagree. Obama is just as much white as what he is black. If he had been with his white mother, he would have been allowed to sit wherever he wanted to.
Yeah, this is just historically wrong. I recommend you research the “one drop rule”.
— Freddie · Nov 5, 04:04 PM · #
I couldn’t vote for him because of his position on abortion, but am happy, for the sake of the country and the darker-skinned people I love, that he won.
Images from Cincinnati’s Underground Railroad Freedom Center have been passing through my mind this morning. A small, preserved two-story cabin where slaves were held while waiting to be auctioned off. Ankle-irons. A film dramatization of slaves crossing the Ohio River to get to a house of refuge atop a hill on the other side.
God Almighty. Free at last.
— Julana · Nov 5, 05:08 PM · #
“God bless President Obama.”
Amen.
— Klug · Nov 5, 07:50 PM · #
Obama believes himself perfect as he is, so he would reject blessings from you or from any deity. A messiah has to believe in himself, and Obama believes only in himself. Well and good. All this pontificating is pointless.
When the feces hits the rotating blades anyone who is still nursing illusions about Obama’s fitness will be badly spattered, in more ways than one.
— Obamarama · Nov 6, 06:08 PM · #
Mobea is not just technically way off the mark—a biracial person most certainly would have been considered “colored” in the Jim Crow South—but breathtakingly ignorant of the nature of the taboo against miscegenation. Black men were tortured and hanged for looking the wrong way at white women. Marrying one? Having a child with one? The whole point of Jim Crow was to prevent such things. A president with a white mother and black father is a far greater affront to white supremacy than a more typical African American would be. (As an aside, my 1960 North Carolina birth certificate carefully notes the race of both my parents.)
— Virginia · Nov 6, 06:49 PM · #
I am curious to hear from other people who are of black/white mixed race. Were you always considered black?Does it say “Black on your birth certificate or white or both? Did you choose to be considered black because of the neighborhood or did you prefer to hang around black kids rather than white kids because it was easier to be sociably acceptable as a black? Were any of you raised as white? Was it because you were lighter skinned? What made the difference between how you considered yourself black or white? I would just like to hear from mixed race people and their reasons. I am ,by the way, in no way prejedice either way. I promise you that. It wouldn’t bother me at all if he was the first black president. I was just trying to make the point that he is of MIXED race, that’s all. I mean, that is a fact. Not something that is just my opinion.
— Mobea · Nov 10, 11:52 PM · #