Obama and the African-American reaction

[howeird]

I am somewhat bothered by the news channels running around interviewing random black people for their reaction to Obama's apparently clinching the nomination. One station did this in a beauty parlor, where at least one of the employees was miffed that Hilary didn't win. IMHO the contest was more between a man and a woman than between a black and a white. Obama was brought up in the white world, and had all the advantages of it except for the stigma of his mother being a single mom. I doubt that he was razzed about the color of his skin in Hawaii, though he may have been on hoity-toity Mercer island. His color certainly didn't keep him out of good schools and he was not economically disadvantaged.

He did choose to move to a black community, change his religion and join a black church, and concentrate on working in the black community. But I know whites and Asians who have done that, and it didn't make them black. :-)

What Martin Luther King said works both ways -

they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

Comments

[howeird]

Context: My original remark was that Obama's color did not keep him out of good schools, because he was born into a white world. My students were born in the ghetto, their parents could not afford to send them to anything better than inner city schools. I wasn't trying to compare his life experiences to theirs, I was only trying to illustrate the theory one's color is not the huge barrier to advancement which your first response to my post implied.

[cmdrsuzdal.livejournal.com]

Ah, ok. I guess we misunderstood each other.

I thought you had said his only stigma was being raised by a single mom.

And what I thought I said was that even black and biracial people raised in relative privilege experience disadvantages due to their race/perceived race.

Naturally, I agree that any one single factor such as race, gender, orientation, nationality, etc. are not necessarily a huge barrier to advancement on their own and didn't mean to imply otherwise.