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IGNORANCE, RACISM AND THE PRESIDENT'S PEP TALK TO STUDENTS
09/08/2009
America's strength has always been in its diversity. America's weakness is in how it has always resisted the latest wave of "others" into the mainstream of Americanism.
The most interesting thing about American citizens is how many of them are proud Americans while still celebrating their ethnic heritage. My father, for example, was part Irish. His father's side was both Scottish and Irish, and his mother's English and Irish, but it was the Irish ancestors who held onto their Irish traditions, and so he always identified himself as Irish. He learned every Irish song he could find, memorized Irish poems, visited Ireland where he kissed the blarney stone and located distant cousins, and always had corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's Day. My mother, on the other hand, was a combination of French and German, and as her ancestors did not keep to any specific traditions, once she married my dad, she allowed the Irish label to include her. Both of them also considered themselves 100% American.
My husband's father was Slav with his parents, my husband's paternal grandparents, meeting on the boat coming over from the area that ultimately included both Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. While my understanding is that his grandparents were mostly Czech, the family always referred to themselves as "Yugoslavian" or just "Slav." The older generation is all gone now, but when they were in their heyday, there were interesting foods and traditions, which my mother-in-law adopted. Like my mother, her family was a mixture of many nationalities and so she brought no old country traditions into the family. She simply considered herself an "American" and no matter how proud he was of his Slav heritage, my father-in-law also considered himself a true blue American.
There are many old country traditions that Americans embrace, whether or not that ethnic DNA courses through their veins. Every major city has a "Chinatown" for example, where people of all backgrounds love to visit and dine. Most major cities have a "little Italy" as well, and very few Americans that I know of don't love Italian food. All major cities have St Patrick's Day parades and most Americans, no matter their own ethnicity, wear a little bit of green on that day dedicated to the patron saint of Ireland. Some Greek Orthodox churches have yearly Greek festivals, and in spite of the vitriol directed against "illegal immigrants" from Mexico, Mexican food and décor are among the most popular in the Southwest.
The assimilation of immigrant cultures and their ethnic traditions into white European Anglo-Saxon America has made us both strong and interesting as a nation. But none of it has come without a struggle. The Irish were once considered, mostly because of their abject poverty and Roman Catholicism, to be inferior beings. "No Irish Need Apply" were signs that hung on many storefronts and businesses not so long ago. The Chinese were considered odd and dangerous, many portrayed as opium addicts even as they built America's railroads, and Italians were called "WOPS" (without papers). Even those who were here before the Anglo-Saxon invasion, thsoe we call Native Americans, were treated poorly. Displaced by those Europeans and labeled as savages because of how they dressed and how aggressively they tried to defend their lives, their families and their lands from the encroaching and better armed white man, they were finally decimated, their descendents confined to reservations.
But no ethnicity has struggled as hard as those dark skinned Americans from Africa, whether they are descendents of slaves, like Michelle Obama, or of mixed race like the president, descended from an American parent and a parent from somewhere on the African continent where science tells us the human race first began.
There has been a constant attack on Barack Obama from the right generally, and most viciously of all from the radical right, simply because of his skin color and his ethnic background, no matter how couched in political rationalization that attack may be.
The new president has never tried to hide his heritage. He even wrote a book about trying to come to terms with his own identity, in light of his mixed race. He spoke of being born in Hawaii, where his mother and father met as students, of having his father return to his native Kenya when Obama was two and of not seeing him again (and for the last time) when he was ten years old and his father came to visit him in Hawaii. He spoke of his mother marrying an Indonesian man and bringing Obama to live with her for a few years until she realized that her incredibly gifted son would by held back by the inferior school system in Indonesia. She sent him back to Hawaii to be raised through the remainder of grade school and high school by his white grandparents. Later, after college, Obama went to find his relatives in Kenya, where he was welcomed as their American kin – not as a citizen of Africa, but as a citizen of the land so many of them admire even if so many of their kinsmen and women were forcibly taken there.
Regardless of those well established facts, a valid certificate of birth, numerous articles supporting Obama's valid citizenship, a small group of "birthers" continue to insist Obama is not a citizen of this country. They have various conspiracy theories, which is what makes it so ludicrous. There is no one consistent claim and no evidence at all about Obama's supposed foreign birth. Some seem to think Hawaii is not part of the United States. Others say he was born in Kenya and there was a plot by his white grandparents to put a fake announcement in the newspaper (and apparently manufacture a fake birth certificate) because they wanted their infant grandson to someday be president. Still others have concluded that because he once lived in Indonesia, he must have been born there. The absence of facts and logic boggle the mind.
All of this could be dismissed as silliness, as nonsense, were it not obviously based on one thing, one thing which all of these birthers have in common: an absolute inability to accept that Barack Obama, black man, is a real American and deserves to be president. All of this is racism. All of this is an attempt to de-legitimize a democratically elected president because they see him as black and therefore inferior, undeserving of the office, just as their ancestors once thought Africans were inferior and could be treated as sub-human slaves.
Why do I say this? Because we have proof John McCain was not born in this country. He was born in Panama. No one denies this, but no one ever claimed he was unfit to be president based on the land of his birth. In fact, once the word got out, Congress passed a unanimous resolution to pre-empt any possible questions, declaring him eligible to be president because he was born on a military base where his father was stationed. Congress didn't do that for Obama because there was no question about his citizenship. At least not until he was actually elected and the birther-racists went bananas with delusions of foreign birth and conspiring grandparents, things they would not have considered doing with respect to the white McCain.
Most of the controversies that have arisen around Obama, in fact, have to do with his race, even if the radicals pushing these theories protest otherwise. Calling Obama a socialist, communist, and fascist all at the same time (especially since these ideologies all contradict each other and can't co-exist in the same person or administration) are ways of saying "he's not one of us; he's foreign; he's exotic; he's black."
In fact, the terms socialist, communist, and fascist are the new dog-whistle words for "black" just as the terms "states' rights" and "activist judges" are dog whistle words that had their origins in Southern states being irate that the federal government, including the federal bench, might tell them they couldn't have Jim Crow laws, couldn’t continue segregation, and couldn't deny black citizens the right to vote.
There is a large group of Americans, strongest in the South, that refuses to see any black man as legitimately qualified to be president. In their minds, blacks are inferior and that is the reason some of them still feel their ancestors where completely justified in kidnapping them and buying and selling them as property so many years ago. Today, we even hear some in Texas calling for secession to return to those days. For some in the South, the Civil War imposed laws of civil rights and equality on them, the premise of which they have never accepted: that skin color has nothing to do with how qualified, how intelligent, how talented and how deserving of equality and justice all human beings are.
Today, the president gave a speech to school children, a speech that a large number of highly ignorant and uninformed and yes – racist – parents refused to allow their children to see or hear. Those parents who were interviewed threw up words like "socialist," "propaganda," "mind control" and other odd words they never used when Saint Ronnie and George I spoke to school children. President Obama's speech said nothing about policy or ideology. It was inspiring and tough. He told kids to assume responsibility for their own education and their own future. He told them to set goals and never give up. No ideology, no brainwashing, no policy statements, unlike Saint Ronnie who touted the benefits of tax cuts in his speech. But then, Saint Ronnie was as white as a KKK sheet.
I am so saddened by this attitude. Sad that, though we have come so far, we still have so far to go to be a civilized and fair people. Sad that some parents in this generation are raising another generation of closed minded, prejudiced and hateful Americans.
I'm also scared for the safety of our president and his family. I have read that death threats against the president are up 400% since he came into office. I see stories about men bringing guns to presidential events. I hear people like the certifiably mentally ill Glenn Beck (yes, I am a licensed therapist and I know psychopathology when I see it, and Beck is truly ill) and the sociopath Rush Limbaugh pray for the president's failure and spread lies about him and his policies that only serve to fire up people who might be crazy enough to be the next John Wilkes Booth or Lee Harvey Oswald.
Yes, America is strong because it is a nation of immigrants. And it is weak because too many of its citizens still see black skin as something to be condemned, afraid of, something that disqualifies a person from being president or from having the right to speak to their children as president.
America, some of your citizens make me truly ashamed!
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
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