{"id":48045,"date":"2016-07-03T01:38:23","date_gmt":"2016-07-03T01:38:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=48045"},"modified":"2016-07-03T01:53:35","modified_gmt":"2016-07-03T01:53:35","slug":"what-black-america-wont-miss-about-obama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=48045","title":{"rendered":"What black America won’t miss about Obama"},"content":{"rendered":"

What black America won’t miss about Obama<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Cable News Network<\/a> (CNN)
\n2016-07-01<\/p>\n

John Blake<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

(CNN) President Barack Obama<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> of South Carolina<\/a> yelled, “You lie!”<\/p>\n

Linnyette Richardson-Hall<\/a>, an African-American event planner, watched Wilson’s outburst on live television in disbelief.<\/p>\n

“My alter-ego, the hood-chick<\/a>, 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.”…<\/p>\n

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<\/a> 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:<\/p>\n

I didn’t know how racist America was until it elected its first black president…<\/em><\/p>\n

…Change No. 3: He’s become ‘my brother from another mother’<\/strong><\/p>\n

It may be hard to remember now, but Obama wasn’t actually considered the first black president — Bill Clinton<\/a> nabbed that honor. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison<\/a> described him that way in a 1998 New Yorker<\/em> essay<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“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<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

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<\/a> persona didn’t fit the traditional black leader mold.<\/p>\n

Some black intellectuals said Obama wasn’t even African-American because his father was from the east African nation of Kenya<\/a>.<\/p>\n

“Obama isn’t black. Black, in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African<\/a> slaves,” Debra J. Dickerson<\/a> wrote in a 2007 column for Salon<\/em> magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n

If Obama wasn’t black then, he sure is now — because he’s been treated with such racial contempt, some blacks say…<\/p>\n

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

What black America won’t miss about Obama Cable News Network (CNN) 2016-07-01 John Blake (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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,63,8,26,20],"tags":[9447,3142,3143],"class_list":["post-48045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-barack-obama","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-cable-news-network","tag-cnn","tag-john-blake"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48045","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=48045"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48049,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48045\/revisions\/48049"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}