Black day for the White House

[WhiskeyGirl]

Black day for the White House

Jack Marx

Wednesday, November 05, 2008 at 03:40pm 

For some 30-million African Americans – 12% of the population of the United States – today is as momentous as the day man walked upon the moon. A black man is in the White House, and suddenly it seems as if he crept in while nobody was looking. A black man is in the White House! Barack Obama was barely three years old when African Americans finally, incontestably won their Federal right to vote, and now he’s President of the United States, the most significant African American since Martin Luther King, his presidency promising to tend to a wound that’s been open in America since the 60s closed. It’s a symbolic decision for sure, but the first one America has made in a while of which it can be proud – one that tells the world that the USA, the big white cop in a multi-coloured world, no longer has absolute faith in her whiteness, either at home or, most importantly, abroad. 

Barack Obama is not the first African American to contest the Presidency of the United States – Shirley Chisholm mounted a failed campaign back in 1972, as did fellow Democrat Jesse Jackson in 1984 and 1988. A century before Jackson, at the 1888 Republican convention, one solitary vote was cast for Frederick Douglass, an American so thoughtful and eloquent one could argue today’s celebrations have come a full 120 years late.

There are those who claim that Obama is not the first black president at all, America having inadvertently elevated Warren Harding, the “great-grandson of a black women”, to the presidency in 1921. Other less reputable sources claim Obama might in fact dawdle across the line at fifth or sixth in the African American race for the White House (Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Calvin Coolidge and Abraham Lincoln were black, apparently), the inference being that America had to have colour film before she could admit to herself that she had a coloured president. What we can say for sure is that Barack Obama is the first overtly, unashamedly African American to assume the post of commander-in-chief.

http://blogs.news.com.au/jackmarxlive/index.php/news/comments/obama/44002

In some families, the US is a nation of mutts, it's just some, imho that only see life through black and white lenses.