McCain’s insane VP selection process: http://tinyurl.com/5zr47h

But who knows, I could be the next Aaron Wall…

I find the candidacy and the person of Barack Obama polarizing. I asked myself this question as a black American with family roots in Philadelphia dating back to colonial America where my ancestors were slaves: is Barack Obama right in declaring that he is just like any other black American? Barack Obama has a background that is a blessing to many Americans and especially white America. He is first and foremost a child of immigrant parents, one who happens to be of Kenyan descent. Next, he is the son of a bi-racial marriage between a white middle American woman and Kenyan man. He is black but let’s make a clear distinction, black African and not black American, and the son of a black Kenyan father who was never American. Barack’s father was of Kenyan birth, values and upbringing who only inhabited the states for a short few years in Hawaii and left for Kenya as his roots were not in America. Meanwhile, Barack’s mother was a white American woman who raise Barack in Hawaii after his father left for his native Kenya. Barack’s story is a compelling narrative of an immigrant’s son growing up in America and being raised by a white woman with American values while being reared in Hawaii. He is a blessing to Americans and whites as an immigrant’s son born by a black Kenyan and not by a black American father.
Barack’s curse lay in his roots as a black Kenyan. He is not black American. He was raised and born not by black American parents, who were descended from a generation of slaves dating back to the early colonial America. Barack did not grow up in the black American system nor does he have a history or understanding of generational sufferings that all black Americans have endured in the US. He did not descend from a black American ancestry where people were yoked under the slavery system of the US for generations upon generations. Barack is black but black African; that is a clear distinction. The real reason Jesse Jackson and many of the civil rights movement leaders did not band around Barack Obama was because of his background and upbringing. He did not grow up in the slums and ghettos of black America. His exposure to black America did not exist until probably college which was more about proximity to Harlem as opposed to growing up in Harlem. His years in minority rich Hawaii ( a place filled with a vast majority population of Pacific Asian Americans) where there were no black American communities and his time in Indonesia, paints a picture of man who is not black American by any traditional understanding of what it means to be a black in America. The civil rights leaders did not see in Barack Obama a black American, a descendent of previous black Americans who suffered hardship and slavery under the brutal white slavery system of America. What Barack Obama has and still finds today from the black civil rights leaders is dissonance. Dissonance because here is a black Kenyan man mixed with white ancestry, who is claiming the mantle rights of being a black American and with it, all the contours of hardship, suffering and endurances that real black Americans suffered for hundreds of years in the US. Jesse Jackson is no fool or the civil rights leaders in showing ambivalence to Barack’s candidacy.
In a recent Harvard Magazine article published a few years ago, a black American Harvard alumni returned to a Harvard black alumni gathering in Boston. In that meeting, the black American alumnae noticed something a bit disturbing about the gathering: most of the attendees for the past two decades attending were mainly from Africa. These were not black Americans but black Africans who came to Harvard to study and went back to Africa after their studies. Few remained in the US after their studies. The writer of the article was disturbed and angry by what he saw. What he saw was black Africans using the black minority status as a leverage to get into Harvard. Harvard boasts of a good black minority pool in its student body but many of those students are black Africans. This is unjust to black Americans as black African are using the black minority status as a way of getting into Harvard. Affirmative action is controversial but it was and is needed for black Americans who do not get the opportunities that most white Americans get. It is fair but it is not fair when black Africans are using their ‘black’ status as a means for their own personal enrichment to get into Harvard via affirmative action. They did not suffer under the tyranny of America’s slavery system as black American and raised in an education system that is unjust to black Americans yet they used it for their advantage. Most of all, they did not grow up in black America or inherit the inequalities that all black Americans must suffer.
What this article is driving home is that there is a great gulf between being a black American and black African. Barack Obama is black African and not black American. He did not grow up in the inner cities of America’s great metropolises, the backwoods of the Midwest or the segregated and trying Deep South. Where Barack grew up was in vacationland Hawaii, attended a wealthy white private school, a community lacking black Americans and an area filled minorities (Pacific Asians) in Hawaii. I just do not get his narrative! He says he is black and is just like us black Americans but I do not see it, hear it nor believe it. The only thing black about Barack is that his skin color is black. There is nothing black American about him that I see. I did not see him grow up in a institutional system that denigrates blacks, endure racial discrimination, suffer the shame that comes with the personal history of having a slave ancestry as a black American, face ridicule each day for not being truly human because of the color of your skin, being told you do not have equal access as white people do and not be given a chance to have a decent life because you are just a part of a larger community of black Americans who are treated unfairly and unequally in a system that does not favor black Americans.
Barack Obama is a polarizing figure. He is black and not black. He relies so much on the black vote yet he has not experienced or suffered as we, black Americans have. He is the son of a Kenyan black man and white woman. Barack is resting on and calling himself a black American who supposedly knows what the average black American has endured. He is not black American. He is black African. He does not know what the average black American has endured. I side with Jesse Jackson and the black American civil rights leaders in their ambivalence. Barack’s full name, Barack Hussein Obama, is a telling thing. His name is not a name of any black American friends that I know. Black Americans may not like our past histories but we are by birth, name, experience and mind, patriotic Americans. Barack’s name itself is point of separation for many black Americans. Perhaps white America and the ignorant white media may see this differentiation. White Americans and the white media always want to clump us together as one big black family. Well, just because you are black does not mean you are black American. Just because Barack Obama says he is black American does not mean he is black American. I do hope and wish the white based media would see this clear and very apparent distinction that the black American civil rights leaders and other blacks see. Thus, I stand with Jesse Jackson and others, ambivalent to Barack Obama and his candidacy as President of America.