I have a firm understanding of how dirty politics can get. I understand that there is mudslinging from both sides. I understand there is the occasional low blow. I also have a very firm understanding of this nations history, especially when applied towards African-Americans in this country. What isn't acceptable under the banner of 'Country First' is the idea that a presidential candidate, his running mate, his wife and the far right deem it fair game to promote fear and thus inciting violent rhetoric among their supporters in this day and age.
In case you forgot Mr. McCain, the politics of fear and intolerance took the lives of many prominent African-American leaders. Since it seems that you have forgotten the history of our country, let me remind you. In August of 1955, a fourteen-year-old Chicagoan Emmett Till was visiting family in Mississippi when he was kidnapped, brutally beaten, shot, and dumped in the Tallahatchie River for allegedly whistling at a white woman.
In May of 1963, during civil rights protests in Birmingham, Ala., Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene "Bull" Connor used fire hoses and police dogs on black demonstrators. A month later, June 12 1963, Mississippi's NAACP field secretary, 37-year-old Medgar Evers, is murdered outside his home. Following two months later Martin Luther King Jr. gave his historic speech at the Lincoln memorial, asking that we move past the politics of fear and hatred. That we as Americans see each other as fellow citizens regardless of that persons race, religion or gender. Not even a month later, at the 16th street Baptist church, four young girls Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins all attending Sunday school are killed when a bomb explodes. Riots erupt in Birmingham, leading to the deaths of two more black youths.
August 4th 1964, in Neshoba Country, Mississippi the bodies of three civil-rights workers—two white, one black (James E. Chaney, 21; Andrew Goodman, 21; and Michael Schwerner, 24) are found in an earthen dam. They had been working to register black voters in Mississippi, and, on June 21, had gone to investigate the burning of a black church. They were arrested by the police on speeding charges, incarcerated for several hours, and then released after dark into the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, who murdered them. In February of 1965, Harlem NY, Malcolm X, founder of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, is shot to death while giving a speech in front of his supporters, his wife and young daughters.
The problem with the New Yorker cover isn’t that it is satirical or that it reaffirms the whisper campaign regarding the Obama’s. The problem with the cover is that this is the first time there has been a Presidential nominee that is of another race other than Caucasian. I’ve read many of the news articles, blogs and watched many of the cables news programs regarding this issue and more pointedly the issue of who is Barack Obama. The problem I see in all this reporting is not that the general public doesn’t know who he is but rather, for one reason or another, the general public is unwilling to accept who he is. Is it race? Quite possibly. Is it his name? Again, quite possibly. I understand the fact that in the Washington political structure, he is the new kid on the block; nationally he isn’t as well known. But the way I see it is Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, and their two children do not fit the pervasive stereotype of what black is. Here is a man, who is intelligent, has a strong an un-abiding faith in God, who is actively parenting his children with his wife, who is also intelligent with a strong and un-abiding faith in God. In America the idea of what is black did not include these characteristics. Only within the last two years have we seen a broader scope of African-American life portrayed in media, entertainment and fine arts. Again I say it isn’t that America doesn’t know who Barack Obama is, to me it is more that He in his historic bid is coming up against hundreds of years of unfair, inaccurate, biased and hurtful stereotypes of what it means to be black in this country.
"the Negrois a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted withsecond sight in this American world, -a world which yieldshim no true self-consciousness, but only lets him seehimself through the revelation of the other world. It is apeculiar sensation, this double consciousness, this senseof always looking at one's self through the eyes of others.The veil is a metaphor for the separation and invisibilityof black life and existence in America and is a reoccurringtheme in books about black life in America. ~ W.E.B DuBois
