A few years ago Halle Berry was feted as the first black actress to win an Academy Award.
While tearfully accepting her award, she spoke of being black and thanked her mother, who was sitting in the audience. Mom was white. We wondered why Berry called herself black when she had been abandoned by her black father and apparently still identified so strongly with her white mother.
Barack Obama’s story is very similar. Abandoned by a black father, raised by a white mother. Yet the white half of the equation is somehow brushed aside and he has become America’s First Black President.
Unfortunately, as Esquire Magazine explains, that first black president thing is not working out so well for the rest of America’s blacks:
Nobody wants to hear it, but this fact is too important to ignore: So far, the first African-American presidency has been one of the worst ever for African-Americans. The economic crisis has predominantly hit non-white working class men; the collapse of the auto industry is threatening to destroy the basis of the Midwestern black middle class. Key matters for African-Americans languish — the overincarceration of young black men that makes a mockery of American justice being the number one example. Government aid? That goes to bankers in Connecticut. If the President were white, there would be riots. In this contradictory atmosphere — pregnant with the tension between symbolism and reality — the Henry Louis Gates Jr. scandal has landed with a force out of all proportion to what may or may not have happened in Cambridge. While the bizarre story of his arrest in his own home may seem like an anomaly, it has emerged from a deep national confusion evident everywhere in popular culture. Call it the Obama Discrepancy: Race is much less prominent as a subject while its effects are no less toxic.
And all of this came before the GatesGate fiasco of the last two weeks.
So far, Obama has managed to maintain remarkably high levels of support among America’s black voters. But at the rate he’s going, blacks may soon stop referring to him as America’s First Black President and begin calling him America’s 44th White President.
Source: Esquire
This post was last modified on October 18, 2023
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It needs to be pointed out that it was WHITES who started the 1/16 - 1/32 rule of who was regarded black vs. white, which was in force as late as the 1980s, so let's not act like there's no societal context for why Halle Berry and President Barack Obama are regarded as black and consider themselves so. It MUST be a new day in America, if white folks are now claiming folks who they previously would've never claimed in a million years.
How has Obama's white side been brushed under the rug? Everyone knows that his mother was white, and that he was raised by his white grandparents. He mentions that he is a "mutt" in his speeches. If not mentioned, I wouldn't have even known that Obama's mother was white. About 1/3 of my family is lighter-skinned than he is (one of my aunts can't stand Obama and says he's not black; she gets upset when I gingerly point out that he's darker than she is).
Also, Obama's mother strikes me as somewhat derelict in her parenting duties as well (although nowhere as foul as Obama's father), dumping him on her parents and such.
I guess theres no cache in being America's first mulatto president. Apparently there isnt much cache in being America's 44th white president either.
I suspect he will have to settle for being the first president run out of office on a rail for all the blunders, gaffes, miscalculations, and racial faux pas.