Thursday, January 14, 2010

See mom, I told you I was too dark to be President!

See mom, I told you I was too dark to be President! What a shame. Degree from a major southern university, editor of the college paper, a mastery of the King’s English with a secondary skill for talking street jive yet lacking the one trait that separates the best colored people from the rest - Light skin.

That’s right. I used the term Colored! Any Black American that has lived long enough knows that Negro and Colored were terms used interchangeably to describe what we now call Black Americans. Of course, to call a person ‘Black’ in 1960 was an indescribable insult. In my lifetime, people who claim African Negroid persuasion have been called Colored, Negro, Afro & African American and now it is politically correct to simply say Black. Of course there’s a gray area between each of these terms and some rather offensive variations. Where would the term ‘epithet’ fit into society without the term Negro.

In an effort to respect the delicate sensibilities of my readers I offer this simple disclaimer: This text will offend some, engage some and enrage others but please understand that the information is offered to broaden perspectives and contribute to the debate that is obviously just beginning. One of my heroes, Dr. Vernon Johns, was known to say: “When you come up on a good fight - get in it!” This posting would be my first salvo into one of the silliest disagreements of our modern culture. Light-skinnededness.

My first day of school 44 years ago followed the 1954 Supreme Court ruling on Brown v Board of Education desegregating public schools. On that very exciting first day, I sat with all the other children in tiny little desks as moms completed paperwork around the room. I’d never noticed my mother as being particularly light-skinned. At age 6, I probably figured that because my dad was dark, mother was supposed to be light.

As I think back on that day, my mom appeared to be even lighter than the white moms. I had no idea that white people intentionally laid out in the sun to darken themselves. My attention quickly turned to the fact that there were so few dark faces in the class which made me a little uncomfortable. Truth be told, I was already a little homesick after an hour. Two other dark children were in the class but little Jimmy looked like a boy sized doll and Greta was the daughter of a local minister who’d been recently elected to the school board. Little Jimmy and I figured out pretty quick that Greta was somehow more ‘precious’ than we were. Little Jimmy and I hated Greta.

When scrap booking 1966 photos of Santa’s surprise visit to our first grade Christmas party there were several shots of moms who were darker than mommy on the first day of school but now lighter. I began to question why mommy appeared to be whiter than some of the other moms sometime but not at other times and how she was my mom and I was not-so-light and so on… I remember this took up the better part of an afternoon and my sense was that she was being overly delicate for a reason that I could exploit. The afternoon ended with a trip to the new sandwich shop that everyone was talking about. It’s still called McDonald’s all these years later. On the way home she did what all good moms do, she reassured me that I was special whether I was light, dark or something in between.

I was a generally happy kid whether in the company of whites or blacks so when moms was sure the pressure of such a new situation or my being one of so few colored children wasn’t troubling me she seemed more at ease. I never could get across to her that the source of my real pain was that monkey-faced Greta.

During the summer following first grade, mom recalled that I spoke very properly for a six year old and credited the school as being better than the Black school that an older brother had attended. He is the darker of us and speaks the Negro dialect exclusively. He never had a chance at the Presidency. Thankfully I still speak properly when appropriate and do a mean imitation of a white male over the phone but alas, I am still too dark to be elected President of the United States according to Senator Harry Reid of Nevada.

Now comes Barack Hussein Obama. Light-skinned enough to be elected President and without the burden of a Negro/Colored dialect. Harry Reid’s racial remarks set off a firestorm that will fester for a few days and be replaced with another public distraction. The real reward for Mr. Reid’s deeds will come on national ‘OUST A DEMOCRAT DAY’ to be celebrated all over the country on election day 11/2/10. November 3rd 2010 will find Democrats planning their departure from Washington two by two.

While we wait for election day, someone needs to warn everyone else who crossed Bill and Hillary Clinton that heads have already rolled and more are subject to roll. In the old Clinton days, Hillary ‘The Black Widow’ Clinton did not leave survivors when someone crossed the first family of POTUS 42. We all know the Clinton‘s don‘t discriminate when meting out retribution.

Ron Brown had some bright ideas for sharing about Bill upon his return from abroad but after a mysterious plane crash and an unexplained .45 caliber size hole in his head, Brown had no more stories to tell. Vince Foster was verging on Whitewater disclosure only to find assisted suicide in the offing. I visited the park where a Ranger found him and watched the History Channel account of his death. His was no suicide.

Tom Daschle and Bill Richardson are present day Clinton memories and in November, Senator Harry Reid will join his brethren on the junk heap of saps who had the temerity to cross the Clintons. As the main lynchpin in the coup that secretly delivered super Dem delegates to Obama, Ted Kennedy faced a slow and deliberate death which some would argue he deserved for leaving that poor pregnant girl in the water to drown but those of us who think we know Hillary Rodham Clinton sense her satisfaction that Ted Kennedy is gone no matter what took him out. To Hill, dead is dead and crossing a Clinton is almost certainly going to lead to the death of something or someone. Mind your manners future son-in-law cause accidents do happen.

With the Democratic party in shambles following declining poll numbers, retirements and a bad healthcare bill latched around their necks, party head Obama is left wondering what happened to all the political capital he had only a few months ago. Also looming on the political horizon is the distinct possibility that he has fallen so far from the grace of the American people that he’s unable to win another four years. Right about now he could be questioning whether anything that he’s been speechifying about around the clock will ever really happen. Questions about his skin color, given his day to day failures as President, must make Obama wonder if Americans aren’t stupid as well as gullible.

I have always suspected that Obama married Michelle Robinson in part because of her father’s connection to the Daly Crime Family but also because he needed a dark-skinned woman to assist with his transformation into an ‘acceptable-to-black people’ American Black Man. Barry was already as close to white as he needed to be according to the Reid Standard. He could just as easily have married Elin Woods’ twin sister but his ‘racial dynamic’ would have been far less formidable and he would have had no blackness mentor.

Occasionally, Barack and Michelle have inadvertently disclosed that she instructed him on what music he had to listen to and how he needed to act to eventually convince the Harry Reid’s of the world that he was an ‘acceptable’ Black to present to the unsuspecting black and white American Electorate. Remember that Obama made his transition to full Blackness when he joined Rev. Wright’s Trinity Church. This step cemented his blackness but unfortunately cost him his memory of any Wright sermons.

Michelle taught Barack courses in Blackness 101 and 201 on just how to convince the world that he was really a ‘black‘ black American. My guess is that Barack was an abject failure at trying to be Black so off to Trinity Church they went. There he saw and heard the kind of Blackness that serve as the foundation for the fraud that he’s presently perpetrating on the American people. It’s also the reason that he screwed up the Gates arrest comment so badly. He tried to comment on a Black issue as a Black man and failed horribly as frauds often do.

Harry Reid had it right and the authors of Game Change should be given a pat on the back for providing America with a reason to laugh during an awfully tough time. Barack Obama was once skilled at convincing people that his brilliance would deliver us and solve America’s problems. The main problem is that Harry Reid found us a Light-Skinned ‘Pitchman’, not a ‘Statesman’. For this reason and others too numerous to mention, Barack Obama can’t possibly succeed with his agenda because absent speeches, he has no real skills that will serve him in the Oval Office. It’s a shame he can’t really call on his experience as a Community Organizer.

Where is Colin Luther Powell when you need him?! He’s everything we need right now and he’s light enough just like Obama.



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