|
go here to buy my stock photography
Alan Creech
 Custom Search
oh my sites & things i like
abbey of gethsemani faith communities christ the king blogs i read
aaron klinefelter
|
November 07, 2008
> 10:05 AM
anthropology question > obama Now I was going to try to write this before anybody else did. I've never heard one person say anything about this during the election or after, about Barack Obama, in reference to his race. Now I've been beaten by an acquaintance/Facebook friend of mine, reporter Randy Patrick. I'm not linking yet, not reading his post yet, because I want to share my own thoughts without being influenced (Update: Link to Randy's blog). I saw on a comment on Facebook that he had talked about this on his blog. OK, a lot was said about Obama being an African-American, a black man, about the historical significance of how far up the political ladder he has gotten in this country. Note, first, that none of this is meant in any way to be negative about him or anything like that. I think it's great. It was emotional watching Jesse Jackson cry like a baby in the crowd Tuesday night - that man who stood next to Dr. King when he was shot, seeing this - you've got to give him a few tears people. It's significant. OK, and I've thought this a few times but am just now sort of trying to work it out. My inner anthropologist starts crankin' about things like this (degree in anthropology - lots of cool knowledge laying around in my head). Technically speaking, Obama is the first "African-American" President of the United States. He's also of mixed race. He's as much European-American as he is African. Of course, if your eyes are open, you'll understand that in this country, being half black is like being half pregnant - you're just black. And certainly, being born in 1961 as he was, he has experienced overt racism in his lifetime as a black American. I haven't interviewed him to ask, but let's just admit that this is just the way it is. Right, so he had some of that experience of being black in America. He did. I wonder, even, if it was exacerbated by being raised in a white family - perhaps. I'm trying to think like a cultural Anthropologist here: Also, he was raised by a white family - only by a white family - mostly his Grandmother apparently. His Father was Kenyan. He was African - from Africa - a foreigner. His Father was not like Jesse Jackson's Father or even Clarence Thomas's Father. His black Grandfathers and Mothers were not the same as theirs, as most African-Americans, even of mixed race, in this country. This gets into family history - family soul, passed down from generation to generation. And the souls of black families in America have a very painful streak running through them. If your ancestors were owned by other human beings who considered them just a little more than cattle, and perhaps your family was in that system of degraded life for a couple of hundred years, not to mention what came after, then this will affect how you think about things, how you react to things, etc. This is really beyond politics. I'm not talking about politics at all. I really want to hear Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s thoughts on this. As I said, I've heard no one mention this. Not that it should have effected the outcome of some election as far as, if people thought about it, would they have voted for him. I wonder how it did effect his life, etc. Did it make white people more comfortable with him, for instance? Was he viewed as not so threatening? He was spoken of, by other African-Americans, as a different kind of black candidate than we had seen before, as not an "angry black man" - of a different generation. I wonder how much these cultural elements of his life played into that. Perhaps because he never had ancestors in America who were a part of the slave culture, who were slaves themselves, his outlook is different. Something that is passed on to American blacks through the culture of their families, wasn't passed on to him. It wasn't there to be passed on. I'm sure some of these things were passed on to him, in a sense, by simply being a black man in America, by being a member of the black community as much as he was. I still can't help thinking it's different. Come on Dr. Gates, start reading my blog and talk about this a little bit. As I said before, as far as a black man being President is concerned, for me it's a great thing. It's an emotional, historical thing. You know I'm a conscientious objector when it comes to voting at this point, so I'm not taking anyone's "side" about policies or politics. It's just fascinating cultural and historical business to think about. Labels: anthropology, history, politics 0 Comments:| permalink | e-mail me | 
|
daily prayer
ordinary time lectionary readings > today
my blog post labels
blogging archives
|
038
