America’s Anxiety About Obama Is Mostly Skin Deep

TransGriot Note: My latest piece for Global Comment:

While many people in the United States, across the African Diaspora and around the world celebrated the November 4, 2008 election of Barack Obama as our president, there were elements of my country that greeted the news with fear, paranoia, apprehension and gloom. That happens with every presidential election, but in this case, the historic nature of the event only elevated the fear levels among a certain aspect of the population.

Thanks to our original sin of slavery, the United States still has major problems when it comes to race relations. It’s been almost 150 years since the emancipation of my ancestors from chattel slavery and relations between Blacks and Whites are still as contentious as ever. If you think I’m kidding, go to any U.S.-based online discussion group and watch the sparks fly whenever race gets injected into a discussion.

It’s no surprise that a sizable slice of the electorate saw the election of Obama as their worst nightmare.

Gun sales increased immediately after the election. We’ve had the rise of the ‘birthers’, people who laughably claim that the Honolulu, Hawaii born President Obama was not a ‘natural born’ citizen of the United States and thus ineligible to be president. Never mind the fact that American citizenship is automatically conferred on any child born in the United States and elsewhere in the world as long as one parent is an American citizen.

The president’s birth certificate has been online for several years now, along with the original birth announcement published in both Honolulu newspapers. That’s still not enough evidence for the reality-challenged sore losers, though.

One of the things that was constantly parroted at liberal progressive during the Bush misadministration was ‘you lost, get over it’ and ‘you need to respect the office’. Well, what’s stopping right wingers from taking their own advice they contemptuously spat at us in this instance? I’ll tell you what: it’s the color of the president’s skin.

These people are apoplectic that an African-American presidential candidate decisively beat their GOP man and the former runner-up beauty queen from Alaska. Not to mention the fact that the conservative sheeple were infuriated that they lost to an educated Black man. President Obama is a cum laude graduate of Harvard law school who taught constitutional law, and he freely admits his wife Michelle is smarter than him.

Read the rest at Global Comment