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Fear of a Black President. The irony of President Barack Obama is best captured in his comments on the death of Trayvon Martin, and the ensuing fray. Obama has pitched his presidency as a monument to moderation. He peppers his speeches with nods to ideas originally held by conservatives. He routinely cites Ronald Reagan. He effusively praises the enduring wisdom of the American people, and believes that the height of insight lies in the town square. Despite his sloganeering for change and progress, Obama is a conservative revolutionary, and nowhere is his conservative character revealed more than in the very sphere where he holds singular gravity.
But then, last February, George Zimmerman, a 2. Trayvon Martin, in Sanford, Florida.
Zimmerman, armed with a 9. The possible intruder turned out to be a boy in a hoodie, bearing nothing but candy and iced tea.
All photographs taken at the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University. Credit Nicholas Nixon for The New York Times. Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. To link to this poem, put the URL below into your page: <a href='http:// of Myself by Walt Whitman</a> Plain for Printing.
The local authorities at first declined to make an arrest, citing Zim. Protests exploded nationally. Skittles and Arizona Iced Tea assumed totemic power. Conservatives either said nothing or offered tepid support for a full investigation.
As civil- rights activists descended on Florida, National Review, a magazine that once opposed integration, ran a column proclaiming . Obama is not simply America.
He is fully versed in the works of Richard Wright and James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass and Malcolm. But with just a few notable exceptions, the president had, for the first three years of his presidency, strenuously avoided talk of race.
And yet, when Trayvon Martin died, talk Obama did. When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids, and I think every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this, and that everybody pulls together.
I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness it deserves, and that we. The illusion of consensus crumbled. Rush Limbaugh denounced Obama. The Daily Caller, a conservative Web site, broadcast all of Martin. Business Insider posted the photograph and took it down without apology when it was revealed to be a fake. John Derbyshire, writing for Taki.
In April, when Zimmerman set up a Web site to collect donations for his defense, he raised more than $2. Although the trial date has yet to be set, as of July the fund was still raking in up to $1,0. Before President Obama spoke, the death of Trayvon Martin was generally regarded as a national tragedy. After Obama spoke, Martin became material for an Internet vendor flogging paper gun- range targets that mimicked his hoodie and his bag of Skittles. After the president spoke, Zimmerman became the patron saint of those who believe that an apt history of racism begins with Tawana Brawley and ends with the Duke lacrosse team. This irony is rooted in the greater ironies of the country he leads. For most of American history, our political system was premised on two conflicting facts.
In warring against that paradox, African Americans have historically been restricted to the realm of protest and agitation. But when President Barack Obama pledged to . He was not appealing to federal power. It did not matter that the president addressed himself to . It meant nothing that he declined to cast aspersions on the investigating authorities, or to speculate on events. Even the fact that Obama expressed his own connection to Martin in the quietest way imaginable. It is, after all, one thing to hear .
Hearing it from the commander of the greatest military machine in human history is another. Beyond that, he has displayed enviable dexterity at navigating between black and white America, and at finding a language that speaks to a critical mass in both communities. He emerged into national view at the Democratic National Convention in 2. There was no talk of the effects of racism. Instead Obama stressed the power of parenting, and condemned those who would say that a black child carrying a book was .
It is, more often, broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye.
Hence the old admonishments to be . And hence Barack Obama. The election of an African American to our highest political office was alleged to demonstrate a triumph of integration.
But when President Obama addressed the tragedy of Trayvon Martin, he demonstrated integration. And even then, full acceptance is still withheld. The larger effects of this withholding constrict Obama. Meanwhile, across the country, the community in which Obama is rooted sees this fraudulent equality, and quietly seethes. It would be nice if this were merely a reaction to Obama. But the greatest abiding challenge to Obama.
As a candidate, Barack Obama understood this. His is the perfect statement of the Obama era, a time marked by a revolution that must never announce itself, by a democracy that must never acknowledge the weight of race, even while being shaped by it. Barack Obama governs a nation enlightened enough to send an African American to the White House, but not enlightened enough to accept a black man as its president. Before Barack Obama, the . White folks, whatever their talk of freedom and liberty, would not allow a black president. They could not tolerate Emmett.
White folks shot Lincoln over . The comedian Dave Chappelle joked that the first black president would need a . A black president signing a bill into law might as well sign his own death certificate. A long- suffering life on the wrong side of the color line had denuded black people of the delicacy necessary to lead the free world. In a skit on his 1. TV comedy show, Richard Pryor, as a black president, conceded that he was .
More recently, the comedian Cedric the Entertainer joked that a black president would never have made it through Monicagate without turning a press conference into a battle royal. When Chappelle tried to imagine how a black George W. Racism would not allow a black president. Nor would a blackness, forged by America. Just beneath the humor lurked a resonant pain, the scars of history, an aching doubt rooted in the belief that . And so in our Harlems and Paradise Valleys, we invoked a black presidency the way a legion of 5- foot point guards might invoke the dunk.
It strained credulity to think that a man sporting the same rigorously managed haircut as Jay- Z, a man who was a hard- core pickup basketball player, and who was married to a dark- skinned black woman from the South Side, could coax large numbers of white voters into the booth. A corollary myth posits a direct and negative relationship between success and black culture.
Before we actually had one, we could not imagine a black president who loved being black. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama describes his first kiss with the woman who would become his wife as tasting .
There is often something mawkish about this signaling. And they are all the more powerful because Obama has been successful.
Whole sections of America that we had assumed to be negro. This is a function not only of Obama.
The Obama family represents our ideal imagining of ourselves. Throughout the whole of American history, this kind of cultural power was wielded solely by whites, and with such ubiquity that it was not even commented upon. The expansion of this cultural power beyond the private province of whites has been a tremendous advance for black America. Conversely, for those who.
For as surely as the iconic picture of the young black boy reaching out to touch the president. Citizenship was a social contract in which persons of moral standing were transformed into stakeholders who swore to defend the state against threats external and internal. Until a century and a half ago, slave rebellion ranked high in the fevered American imagination of threats necessitating such an internal defense.
Thus Congress, in 1. All free white persons who have, or shall migrate into the United States, and shall give satisfactory proof, before a magistrate, by oath, that they intend to reside therein, and shall take an oath of allegiance, and shall have resided in the United States for one whole year, shall be entitled to all the rights of citizenship. By the 1. 9th century, there was, as Matthew Jacobson, a professor of history and American studies at Yale, has put it, . Senate seat in Illinois in 1. Stephen Douglas asserted that . It is the glory of white men to know that they have had these qualities in sufficient measure to build upon this continent a great political fabric and to preserve its stability for more than ninety years, while in every other part of the world all similar experiments have failed.
But if anything can be proved by known facts, if all reasoning upon evidence is not abandoned, it must be acknowledged that in the progress of nations Negroes have shown less capacity for government than any other race of people. No independent government of any form has ever been successful in their hands. On the contrary, wherever they have been left to their own devices they have shown a constant tendency to relapse into barbarism. As the nation began considering integrating its military, a young West Virginian wrote to a senator in 1. I am a typical American, a southerner, and 2. Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throw back to the blackest specimen from the wilds.
The sobering answer is Yes. It holds that blacks feel no anger toward their tormentors.
White people like Byrd and Buckley were raised in a time when, by law, they were assured of never having to compete with black people for the best of anything. The nicest restaurants turned them away. In large swaths of the country, blacks paid taxes but could neither attend the best universities nor exercise the right to vote. The best jobs, the richest neighborhoods, were giant set- asides for whites.