shortformblog: brooklynmutt: Fear of a Black President As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration. Read: The Atlantic Three lines that really grab you in this piece: 1) “The moment Obama spoke, the case of Trayvon Martin passed out of its national-mourning phase and lapsed into something darker and more familiar—racialized political fodder. The illusion of consensus crumbled.” 2) ”The president’s inability to speak candidly on race cannot be bracketed off from his inability to speak candidly on every­thing. Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story. It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.” 3) Regarding Shirley Sherrod: “In her new memoir, The Courage to Hope, she writes about a different kind of tears: when she discussed her firing with her family, her mother, who’d spent her life facing down racism at its most lethal, simply wept. ‘What will my babies say?,’ Sherrod cried to her husband, referring to their four small granddaughters. ‘How can I explain to my children that I got fired by the first black president?’”

shortformblog:

brooklynmutt:

Fear of a Black President

As a candidate, Barack Obama said we needed to reckon with race and with America’s original sin, slavery. But as our first black president, he has avoided mention of race almost entirely. In having to be “twice as good” and “half as black,” Obama reveals the false promise and double standard of integration.

Read: The Atlantic

Three lines that really grab you in this piece:

1) “The moment Obama spoke, the case of Trayvon Martin passed out of its national-mourning phase and lapsed into something darker and more familiar—racialized political fodder. The illusion of consensus crumbled.”

2) ”The president’s inability to speak candidly on race cannot be bracketed off from his inability to speak candidly on every­thing. Race is not simply a portion of the Obama story. It is the lens through which many Americans view all his politics.”

3) Regarding Shirley Sherrod: “In her new memoir, The Courage to Hope, she writes about a different kind of tears: when she discussed her firing with her family, her mother, who’d spent her life facing down racism at its most lethal, simply wept. ‘What will my babies say?,’ Sherrod cried to her husband, referring to their four small granddaughters. ‘How can I explain to my children that I got fired by the first black president?’”