Adjusting The Mindset

"I think it is going to be important for all of us to do some soul-searching ... At least you ask yourself your own questions about, am I wringing as much bias out of myself as I can? Am I judging people as much as I can, based on not the colour of their skin, but the content of their character? That would, I think, be an appropriate exercise in the wake of this tragedy."
American President Barack Obama

This is a president of the people by the people. Elected to represent all groups that comprise the huge population of the United States of America. He presented himself as a post-racist, liberated, liberal democrat. He promised a new America, a new future for everyone. And, according to his own agenda, he has made strenuous efforts to achieve what he set out to do. Much of which has not enjoyed the support of a substantial number of Americans.

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Perhaps the fact that his agenda has always been so controversial he might have dedicated more of his energy to patching bi-partisan conflicts before they began to really fester. In failing to do this, partly because of his prodigious energy expenditures in forwarding what he felt was a necessary avenue to guide his country to more adequately reflect social equity, he caused wider divisions between the two political groups, ending up doing no favours to his own.

As the first bi-racial president ever in the United States, an amazingly wholesome and much-applauded leap in faith and trust by enough Americans to give a man of black-and-white ancestry, and who unequivocally comports himself as a Black American the opportunity, President Obama has administered his office in as neutral a manner racially speaking, as possible. There have, however, been several incidents which elicited obvious black-centric comments from him.

Notable mostly because they came from a black man who just happens to be the President of the United States. It is not as though he represents the only president of America who ever took the time, energy and just effort to right the tremendous social inequities of the United States. Dwight D. Eisenhower did that, John F. Kennedy did that, Lyndon Johnson did that, and so did Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, before him. But they were white, and he is black.

What they proposed and what they did and how they managed it, was to change society in fundamentally required ways to better reflect the rights of every American citizen regardless of colour. President Obama's task was less to effect specific changes under the law for that was already done, but more to attempt by mentoring to heal the insufferable wounds between the two solitudes. Perhaps it's an impossible task; he struggled constantly himself with the corrosive pathology of race in America.

But racial antipathy has become a double-edged sword. On the one hand racism, slander, distrust, and fear doesn't want to fade too readily; too many clasp it as a mantra, a precious heritage not to be abandoned. And the black community, understandably, is loathe to forgive the unforgivable. That prejudice and suspicion still exists is a given. And it exists on both sides; on the white side through a sad tradition, and on the black side as an understandable left-over of a miserable reality.

That racial divide certainly is not an American monopoly. Tribalism, racism, exclusion and hyper-bigotry is common throughout the world. And in some black countries of the world, like Mauritania, black slavery is still practised. Black-on-black crime, including murderous atrocities are gruesomely common throughout Africa; take Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, as example. It is not only blacks who are discriminated against, but any people of colour, and Jews as well.

The Trayvon Martin tragedy is a tragedy not because a white American (hispanic) stupidly targeted a young black as a potential criminal and ended up shooting him; not because he perceived him as a black thug, but merely as a thug. It is a tragedy because the sordidly sad event has re-ignited a storm of blame by a traditionally victimized community refusing to surrender its victimhood, insisting that the crime of taking a young man's life was racially motivated.

It was not. Evidence was sufficient to prove to the contrary. It was a mindless reaction to fear, a fear that the accidental killer created of his own suspicious initiative. Not only did he become fearful out of a misplaced sense of community responsibility and erroneous apprehension, but he inspired an existential fear in a young black man who was prepared to fight for his life. And instead lost his life.

A stupid, inexplicable-other-than-anomalous accident. Not racially motivated. When Barack Obama spoke implying that it was indeed racially motivated, stirred by his own wounds and memories of implied and real slurs he suffered as a child and young man growing to maturity in the mixed-race community that is America, he lent his prestige, his honour, his name and his elite executive position to the fiction clasped by his "brothers".

In so doing he stepped down from the presidency briefly, and assumed the mantle of an American Black who admiringly read the works of black activists and civil rights leaders whose struggles aligned with his own experiences to indelibly blaze upon his soul his black birthright. But he also fed the flames of black outrage, validating the claims of the ilk of Louis Farrakhan whose divisive incitements do huge harm to the country and the people he claims to represent.