The Darker Side of the “Obama” Effect
I try to be an optimist, but I think I’m really a pessimist at heart. When Obama got inaugurated I was in awe. I can’t lie, I never thought I’d see a black man as president of the USA during my lifetime. This country’s come a long way, but I hadn’t seen anything to make me think we’d come that far.
So when it happened I just felt strange. The best (but craziest way) to describe it was the opposite of what I felt like when watching footage of the people suffering at the Super Dome in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.
My fiance thinks Obama’s election is going to change the course of black manhood. ‘Think of what it means for all the young boys’ she says, believing that they’ll be positively influenced by the images of a black president. I grunt, change the channel, and she swears I’m a hater jaded by my childhood in Boston. If you don’t get it, look for any references to black people in The Departed.
But what my lady and so many other people never think about is the other side of what Obama’s presidency has done to our country. Bush had to weather the storm of late night hosts criticizing him, nightly, but he never had the likes of the Tea Party. Has race ever been such a hot button issue when people weren’t rioting over assassinations or verdicts? Not that I recall.
The darker side of the “Obama” effect is the reality of how far we truly are from a post-racial society. Today, ANYTHING involving race is big news. The New York Times has an editorial about how Obama doesn’t have enough black people in his white house that can keep him in touch with the black people that his racist critics think he represents, but that educated folk know the pres knows little about.
All of this hyper-sensitivity cant be good for the kids who were supposed to see this presidency as a beacon of hope. If anything, all of the criticism will stop them from seeing that the pres has done more than any who held the office since JFK, and make them think they can look forward to marches by people holding signs of them with bones in their noses or Hitler-styled staches.
