I have something to add to my last post. Trying to understand why the hatred of Obama is so vicious, I think I made a fundamental ... (sorry) ... basic error. I ascribed the attitude to irrational fears about the Constitution, which is thought of as scripture by a certain portion of the illiterati that dominates talk radio and cable commentaries.
Now, my thinking has, please pardon the expression, evolved. I noticed that Mr. Obama's uniqueness lies not in his political philosophy or his policies. Let's face it: he is not simply our first African American president. That in and of itself would be enough to set certain segments of the American electorate to boil their teapots.
But he is more than that. He is of mixed race heritage: an African father and a liberated midwestern latter day hippie intellectual white mother. As I have noted previously, his mom, Ann Dunham, was a product of the 1960's, a true believer in the notion that a better world could be created if people gave up biases based on race and gender.
I think that this fact blows minds of many whites, especially in the south and midwest ... and Alaska. It is the worst nightmare of those who were on the wrong side of the civil rights movement. The white supremacists always feared that "integration" (remember that notion) might result in mixed "mongrel" races.
That the races have been mixing ever since the beginning of time was an inconvenient fact ignored by the racial purists, many of whom have never accepted the outcome of the Civil War, much less the Supreme Court opinions, government policies, and societal evolution that resulted in people like:
Tiger Woods, Halle Berry, Derek Jeter, Blake Griffin ... and Barack Obama.
As Churchill noted about the Nazis, certain attitudes are so extreme and wrongheaded that they leave no ground for debate.
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Add to this that he is probably the first US president of the Idealist personality type (on the Myers-Briggs indicator he is probably an ENFP or ENFJ). Apparently, there wasn't a single American president whose personality type was the "Idealist" (not in the literal sense, but in the Myers-Briggs context). And people always resist and mistrust the unfamiliar.
ReplyDeleteWow. I grew up in post war Germany and my parents were Nazis, full fledged Nazis. I grew up with the lectures about superior and inferior races. I ran as quickly as I could when I went to college and ran into a black GI I knew that not only did I want to live in the "occupiers" country but also have children with this black GI to revenge some of the sins of my parents. So I have the most beautiful and intelligent mixed race children. We now live in Hawaii, came here before we learned of Barack Obama, but when I read his book and compared his experiences with those that my children describe, yes there is something about growing up in Hawaii. You will forget what you are, for everyone here is mixed with something or another. My children do not carry these mental shackles that unfortunately so many AA kids are carrying growing up on the mainland. So, to understand Obama please come to Hawaii and hang out with the people, and see for yourself.
ReplyDeleteAloha