{"id":46020,"date":"2016-03-13T21:48:03","date_gmt":"2016-03-13T21:48:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=46020"},"modified":"2016-03-13T21:48:03","modified_gmt":"2016-03-13T21:48:03","slug":"whose-president-was-he","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=46020","title":{"rendered":"Whose President Was He?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Whose President Was He?<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Politico Magazine<\/a>
\nVolume 3, Number 2 (January\/February 2016) [The Obama Issue]<\/p>\n

Michael Eric Dyson<\/strong><\/a>, Professor of Sociology
\nGeorgetown University, Washington, D.C.<\/em><\/p>\n

Barack Obama brushed aside the critics who hated him for his skin color\u2014but failed to see the racial confrontation they foretold.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cIf I spent all my time thinking about it, I\u2019d be paralyzed,\u201d Barack Obama<\/a> told me. \u201cAnd frankly, the voters would justifiably say, \u2018I need somebody who\u2019s focused on giving me a job, not whether his feelings are hurt.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

We were sitting in the Oval Office in the summer of 2010, and I had asked the president about the persistence, since the early days of his 2008 campaign, of viciously racist attacks against him. Millions of ordinary white citizens and right-wing critics didn\u2019t cotton to our first black president\u2019s chutzpah in capturing the highest office in the land\u2014and they have been unleashing venom ever since. Signs<\/a> at early protests spoke volumes: \u201cObama\u2019s Plan: White Slavery\u201d and \u201cThe American Taxpayers Are the Jews for Obama\u2019s Ovens.\u201d Some played on racist stereotypes: \u201cObama: What You Talkin\u2019 About, Willis? Spend My Money.\u201d Others tagged him \u201cTraitor to the Constitution\u201d and \u201cSambo,\u201d or played on his ancestral homeland: \u201cKen-ya Trust Obama?\u201d<\/p>\n

This last message was, of course, a hallmark of the birthers<\/a>, who formalized racist attacks into a movement by claiming that Obama, despite his Hawaiian birth certificate, was born in Kenya<\/a>\u2014or that he was really a citizen of Indonesia<\/a>, or that he had dual British and American citizenship at birth. The sick attempt to paint Obama as un-American\u2014a closet socialist, a secret Muslim and a hater of democracy, no less\u2014didn\u2019t stop there, echoing over the years in the feverish rantings of figures like Dinesh D\u2019Souza<\/a>, who claimed<\/a> Obama was motivated by \u201can inherited rage\u201d against American wealth and power from his anti-colonialist Kenyan father. On TV, Glenn Beck<\/a> asserted that Obama had \u201ca deep-seated hatred for white people,\u201d while Rush Limbaugh<\/a> spewed a steady stream of invective on his radio show, from playing a song<\/a> dubbed \u201cBarack the Magic Negro\u201d to claiming that Obama wanted Americans to get Ebola<\/a> as payback for slavery. The most infamous birther, Donald Trump<\/a>, questioned, without basis, not just Obama\u2019s birth certificate, but his college transcript and whether he had truly deserved a spot at Harvard Law School…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Whose President Was He? Politico Magazine Volume 3, Number 2 (January\/February 2016) [The Obama Issue] Michael Eric Dyson, Professor of Sociology Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. Barack Obama brushed aside the critics who hated him for his skin color\u2014but failed to see the racial confrontation they foretold. \u201cIf I spent all my time thinking about it, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,8,20],"tags":[11229,14578,19629],"class_list":["post-46020","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-michael-eric-dyson","tag-politico","tag-politico-magazine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46020","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46020"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46020\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46021,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46020\/revisions\/46021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46020"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46020"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46020"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}