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Since the issue has come up again, I thought I’d raise, again, O’Bama’s pandering to the African American community.
As you know, we need yet another museum of the African American experience on the mall–the Stalinist statue of King emerging from the rock isn’t enough. Let’s just keep harping on this issue to the exclusion of everything else. So now we have the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, which, I guess, will take its proud place near the new National Museum of Irish American History and Culture, the National Museum of Serbo Croat American History and Culture, the National Museum of Irish American History and Culture, the National Museum of Aleut American History and Culture, and so on and so on and so on. The museum of Jewish culture is the Holocaust Museum, consistent with the general global consensus that Jews are more interesting dead than alive.
In any event, O’Bama will attend the groundbreaking of the new museum, and the AP headline reads “Black history museum to break ground with Obama.” The entire purpose of course is “to tell stories from the 19th century including slavery and Reconstruction” a time when O’Bama’s father’s family was living the good life in Africa and his mother’s family was whupping slaves and selling cotton. Look away, look away.
But the AP article, once again, blurs the distinction between African American heritage and African heritage, and the distinction between African American and “black” and once again O’Bama will be highlighting his non-existant African American heritage during an election year. I hope Americans could be smarter than that, but would it have killed AP and the other news sources to have included at least a paragraph noting the point that O’Bama is not an “African American” as the phrase is used in this country.
Last week, an ESPN reporter in writing about Linn used the headline “Chink in the Armor” which was considered an ethnic slur against Chinese origin. Many American newspapers wouldn’t even reprint the words, and others used “***** in the Armor,” as in, we can’t print the word nigger and now we can’t print the word chink.
You would think that Black History Month, if nothing else, could deal with the fact that racial color blindness now means that we kid ourselves about race in America, and that we’ve achieved racial harmony by whitewashing our history and language.
