Sunday morning, I noticed a post on Barack Obama's facebook page featuring the photo above of Barack and his mother. While browsing the comments on the post, I notice something disturbing that I had never been aware of before. I found that in addition to the birthers who insist Barack Obama was born in Kenya, there are also people who insists that any photo of Barack Obama with a white relative must be photoshopped ( admittedly, there is probably a huge overlap between those people and the birthers ).
For the purposes of this post, I'll call these people "shop-ers". The fact that these shop-ers exists at all, is more disturbing to me than the existence of the birthers, the truthers, any of those other crazy conspiracy nuts out there. I don't know any shop-ers ( thank god ), so I don't know what their motivations are, but I've got to imagine that the shop-ers are white racists who can't conceive that the black President they hate could be half white. So, they make up ridiculous theories to "prove" that Obama does not have any white ancestry at all. For example, see the photo below; do you see anything wrong with it?
Of course you don't, because there's nothing wrong with it. It's just a nice photo of young Barack with his mom, his grandfather, and his sister. However, to the shop-ers, the photo above is proof of something nefarious. Shop-ers point to Obama's mother's right hand, the hand that is obscured by Obama's right arm. To an ordinary person, the hand in the photo shows up being darker than the rest of her arm because the hand is clearly in a shadow. To a shop-er, on the other hand, the "black" hand under Obama's arm is proof that this photo has been photoshopped.
The shop-ers are also not above photoshopping a real photo ( such as the photo of Obama with his grandparents below ) and claiming that the original photo was photoshopped.
This is all rather depressing, and it got me thinking about what this all says about race relations in the USA.
As a white person, I've never experienced racism directed at me, so I have no direct way to know whether racism has gotten better or worse over the course of my lifetime. However, I've certainly been a witness to racism at times, and the things I've witnessed have changed over the years.
As a adult, you largely choose the people you associate with, but as a child, the group of children you interact with is based mostly on proximity. I grew up in an area that was almost a 100% white and had a racist reputation. My neighborhood ( Ozone Park, New York ) was right next the the infamous Howard Beach. I interacted with kids from both Ozone Park and Howard Beach over the years ( school, little league, etc. ) and plenty of the kids I knew from Ozone Park had racial attitudes that probably were not very different that the attitudes of the teens who perpetrated that horrible racist beating in Howard Beach. Now I'm not saying that the majority of people in Ozone Park and Howard Beach were racist. Most people there were ( and are ) good people, and some of them are still among my best friends to this day. However, I'd be lying if I told you that I didn't hear a lot of racist stuff growing up.
As I adult, I very rarely hear any of that kind of racist stuff in person for two reasons ...
1) As an adult, you have more of a say in who you associate with, and I choose my friends wisely.
2) Society has now gotten to the point where most white people would want to hide their racist attitudes from other white people. I have no doubt that some of the people I know ( while you can choose your friends, you can't choose everyone you need to interact with ) have racist attitudes, but people do their best to hide such attitudes. ( Also, I don't want anyone to think I'm claiming to be guiltless here. I was raised to love all people, and I always got sick to my stomach growing up when I heard fellow students spew racists garbage, but children are sponges, and I'd be lying I told you I didn't absorb at least some of the racist bile that was occasionally spewed. I try my best each day to excise myself of that bile, but I'll never be completely free of it. ).
However, reason #2 often doesn't apply on the Internet, because people can be anonymous. Still, I didn't really notice a lot of racist stuff on the corners of the Internet I frequented until Barack Obama was elected; right after that happened, the racists started to come out of the woodwork.
I guess the point I'm making is that while I don't think the election of Barack Obama made the country more racist, I think it exposed a lot of racism we couldn't see before, like a UV light revealing body fluids at a crime scene. Ultimately, revealing that racism is a good thing, even if seeing it out in the open might make us uncomfortable.
In the end, I'm still optimistic. After all, Barack Obama is right when he says the the USA is the only country in the world where his story could have happened. Where else could a country consisting primarily of of people of one race, elect a leader who belongs to another race? OK, sure Obama, is half white, and Peru elected a Japanese president, but you get my point. The Germans are not going to elect a Chancellor who is not ethnically German, the Japanese are not going to elect a Prime Minister who is not ethnically Japanese. The Barack Obama story could have never happened in those places, but it did happen in the USA, because there is no such thing as an ethic American ( Well, except maybe Native Americans, but that's a can of worms to open on a different day ). The USA is still a special place, warts and all, and there is no better proof of that than President Barack Obama.
Rich
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