Is it just me or am I the only one that can see Barack Obama’s true colors? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Barack hater or anything because I support him and what he’s for in this country. Many of his former running mates including his main competition, Senator McCain, have called him inexperienced but I just think they’re using the wrong word. His ideas are considered to be radical (at least by me, moreso than them). I applaud his efforts and I think he has been a senator long enough to know and plan out his courses of action for when he does become president of this country.
However, it seems like he’s ashamed of a part of him black. This Father’s Day, the senator went to a black-oriented church to speak to the black fathers about how to step up and be men for their children. We as black people, know that a lot of black men aren’t as present as they once were. However, like a reporter mentioned on an episode of Inside Edition today, he said Obama was appealing to his white voters, that he too can critique black people. I just so happened to agree with him because this is not the first time that Obama has decided to appeal to white voters, and now, it’s starting to piss me off. It’s beginning to piss me off because Obama tries to give all of his poignancy to the part of him that is white.
When the Jeremiah Wright situation first hit the airwaves, he gave a speech on race, he told his supporters that his white grandmother looked out for him but she was also the same grandmother that cringed or made racial slurs about black men as they walked around the neighborhoods. Can you imagine what she must have said about him, her grandson, when he was around her, playing outside, and when he spent the nights with her?
In Obama’s first book, Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, (I haven’t read it yet but it’s on my reading list) was published before his first run for political office. In it he recalls his childhood in Honolulu and Jakarta, college years in Los Angeles and New York City, and his employment as a community organizer in Chicago in the 1980s. The book’s last few chapters describe his first visit to Kenya, a journey to connect with his Luo family and heritage. In the preface to the 2004 revised edition, Obama explains that he had hoped the story of his family “might speak in some way to the fissures of race that have characterized the American experience.” In a 1995 review, novelist Paul Watkins wrote that dreams “persuasively describes the phenomenon of belonging to two different worlds, and thus belonging to neither.”
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