In his book, Africa Must Unite, the great African scholar and politician Kwame Nkrumah explored racism and determined that in order to be a racist, you have to be in a position of power to subjugate other races to adopt your standards. That as opposed to prejudice, which can be equal across all individuals.
In politics though, it seems nothing that involves African Americans can get around the issue of race. It’s obvious that people do not know what racism is, judging by the way they throw the word around as if it just means hating someone because of their skin color, which is not the case. However, the fact remains that no matter what is accomplished politically, whenever it involves race, the race card gets played.
A new poll released by the Gallup Corporation illustrates my point: Gallup Daily Tracking shows that President Obama’s job approval rating averaged 88 percent among blacks and 38 percent among whites in July of this year. This is the first time that African Americans’ approval of the job Obama is doing fell below 90 percent. In comparison, whites’ approval of Obama is down 24 percent from the high of 62 percent in January 2009. These findings are based on data collected via telephone interviews with a random sample of 15,467 adults, age 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia.
The query should be what does this data tell us? First, it is emblematic of the political ambience that we exist in as Americans. Today’s landscape of unconscious bias demonstrates the influence of its real-world application. And although some Obama detractors are African Americans, the vast majority are white people who develop nugatory beliefs based on simple and extreme claims like if he wears an American flag on his lapel or the belief that he was not born in America. Even his slight bit of color has the capacity to prompt negative associations among white Americans.
But the only reality is that Obama is the president of America, even though for many whites he is just another black man, and is accorded the historical and negligible respect that African American men have received since this great and hypocritical nation was founded. –torrance stephens, ph.d.
