White Like Us?
By Anonymous Intel on July 8, 2008 at 10:47 PM in Current Affairs
I have been following the furor over Barack’s reticence to provide a bona fide copy of his birth certificate with some interest. I have a different take. I think the genuine certificate shows his race as “White.”
Which means there may be another way of looking at Obama.
Everyone seems to be looking at the guy as the first black presidential candidate, assuming that his Kenyan heritage is the dominant part of his experience and culture; a throwback to the quadroon and octoroon days. But his recent statements, which take for granted that African Americans will always vote for the black candidate, when considered with his upbringing and more recent past, suggest another, more complex explanation of the man.
Let’s face it, Obama is not some kid from the hood. He was raised as a privileged guy by white grandparents (from Kansas no less) in a largely colorblind Hawaiian society. Until he entered college being half black was irrelevant. He discovered, first at Occidental and later Columbia, that he had a unique power: even though he was raised thinking “white,” people “thought he was black,” and he learned how to use that perception to his advantage. He was an undercover white guy with beautiful chocolate skin, and no one realized who he really was. At Columbia, he fell under the tutelage of liberal white mentors and he accepted their value system while learning how to use his outward African appearance against both blacks and whites.
Obama could have gone any place after Harvard Law, but he chose to go back to Chicago, where concentrations of highly politicized, working class blacks awaited a charismatic leader. Funded by white liberals (once again), he waded into this milieu, gaining street creds by being a community organizer and going to Reverend Wright’s black liberation church. Kind of like an old style Soviet illegal (e.g., someone who hid their past and made people believe they were something else) building his cover before conducting operational activity. He marries a well-educated radical black lady who comes to realize who he really is, a white boy “reverse passing” as black. But she also comes to realize the potential for power in this.
In Wright’s church, Obama wasn’t drinking in hatred of whites. He was looking around and figuring out how to use his blackness to fool the suckers around him. He convinced the other parishioners that he was genuinely one of them. Perhaps he began to identify with them a bit, but he never lost sight of his superiority over them and how this allowed him to unwittingly manipulate them. Just like an old style Soviet “illegal.”
Now, between black pride and white guilt, he’s faked them, and us, out. He can even allow himself the luxury of arrogance in claiming that he can redraw the political map because all blacks will vote for him.
Far fetched? Perhaps, but this explanation makes a bit of sense when you add it all up. Why is he hiding his grandmother? Why does he totally disown his mother and grandparents and write a book about his father, a bigamist who deserted him as an infant, as an inspiration for his life? And now, with the Presidency in his grasp, he resurrects his Kansas grandparents, his single white mother, and says nothing about his absentee, polygamist Kenyan father. Can you say, “bamboozle?”
NOTE FROM LARRY JOHNSON: I do not think that comments about the children of Barack and Michelle are appropriate. Barack is not competent at this time to be President, but he and Michelle appear to have done a good job as parents. We respect them for that. He is not the first candidate to employ his children in his campaign. Leave them alone.
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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