What black America won’t miss about Obama |
What black America won’t miss about Obama
Cable News Network (CNN)
2016-07-01
(CNN) President Barack Obama was delivering a speech before a joint session of Congress when a white lawmaker jabbed his right index finger at Obama and called him a liar.
The heckling came during his September 2009 address on health care. Obama was telling lawmakers that his plan wouldn’t cover undocumented immigrants when Republican Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina yelled, “You lie!”
Linnyette Richardson-Hall, an African-American event planner, watched Wilson’s outburst on live television in disbelief.
“My alter-ego, the hood-chick, came out of me,” says Richardson-Hall. “I said, ‘I know you just didn’t do that.’ To see him get disrespected so badly, it gut-punches you.”…
Richardson-Hall has restrained herself more than she ever expected in the past eight years. She fumed when she saw a poster of Obama dressed as an African witch doctor, online images of First Lady Michelle Obama depicted as a monkey, and racist Facebook comments by white people she thought she knew. Now, as Obama approaches his final months in office, she and others have come to a grim conclusion:
I didn’t know how racist America was until it elected its first black president…
…Change No. 3: He’s become ‘my brother from another mother’
It may be hard to remember now, but Obama wasn’t actually considered the first black president — Bill Clinton nabbed that honor. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison described him that way in a 1998 New Yorker essay.
“After all,” she wrote, “Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.”
Obama wasn’t a beloved figure in the black community when he first ran for the presidency. Civil rights leaders were slow to warm to him. Others said he wasn’t black enough. His mixed-race heritage, exotic upbringing overseas and professorial Ivy League persona didn’t fit the traditional black leader mold.
Some black intellectuals said Obama wasn’t even African-American because his father was from the east African nation of Kenya.
“Obama isn’t black. Black, in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves,” Debra J. Dickerson wrote in a 2007 column for Salon magazine.
If Obama wasn’t black then, he sure is now — because he’s been treated with such racial contempt, some blacks say…
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Tags: Cable News Network, CNN, John Blake