On June 9, 2009, while performing at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, comedienne Wanda Sykes
quipped: "The first black president!
I’m proud to be able to say that. That’s unless you screw up. And then it’s
going to be, 'What’s up with the half-white guy?'" Upon which the
audience exploded in uproarious laughter. Why so intense a response? What
was so funny?
If you accept the explanation of the American
Psychological Association's Sadie F. Dingfelder, "Research suggests
that the critical ingredient for a chuckle is incongruity. But if you can
also point to some unspoken truth, you'll hit humor gold." The rationale
certainly seems to apply to the joke in question. First, Sykes is female, black and openly-gay, a
member of the three staunchest Obama support groups. At the time of the White House Correspondents' Dinner, it
literally was laughable to imagine such persons deriding the President.
Second, Wanda had tapped into the journalist audience's unconscious
awareness that prior to his election Obama's black identity and capacity to
represent blacks had been openly and vociferously debated in the African
American community. For instance, as early as March 17, 2000, Illinois
Democratic Representative and former Black Panther, Bobby Rush mocked Barack's
racial identity credentials saying, “Barack is a person who read about the
civil rights protests and thinks he knows all about it. He went to Harvard and
became an educated fool.” And on October 17, 2007, CNN reported
that "Among black registered Democrats overall, Clinton had a 57 percent
to 33 percent lead over Obama" in the Democratic Presidential Primary.
January 28, 2013, the Washington Post ran a piece summarizing Obama's first term entitled “NAACP
president: Black people worse off under Obama” Ten months later, a
similar opinion was proffered when on October 10, 2013, while appearing on Fox
News's Hannity show, Tavis Smiley, a black talk show host, asserted that
"The data is going to indicate sadly that when the Obama administration is
over, black people will have lost ground in every single leading economic
indicator category."
In a December 16, 2013
article, speaking of African American young adults, Tom Allison of Huff Post’s
Black Voices writes:
The situation is actually getting
worse for 25-to 34-year-olds. Black workers in that age group actually suffer a
worse unemployment rate than they did a year ago. New data released today by
the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that in November 2013 black workers aged 25
to 34 had an unemployment rate of 13.6 percent. In November 2012, the rate was
12.7 percent. This is more than double the rate of white workers in the same
age group who face a 5.9 percent unemployment rate.
We see then that Barack Obama is not the black messiah. As Wanda Sykes’s joke underscores, Barack
Obama is not even authentically black. Every cell in Barack’s body always
was and always will be as white as they are black. Black and white
Americans know that the President is biracial, but they, like he, choose to play
racial games in order to declare him the first black president. He won the office because of his false racial identity. Obama did not have and
does not have either the personality or the leadership qualities to effectively lead our
nation. Having given Barack 92 percent of their vote in 2008 and 91
percent in 2012 and having received nothing in return, black America has learned that
lesson the hard way.
The reality is that Barack Obama is a half-white man and a
half-black man. Maybe we need to think of him merely as a human. A
half-white president is not black and being black or white is no relevant
criterion from which to vote. Being black or white does not qualify
anyone for anything, leastwise the presidency. Next time, let’s take Martin
Luther King, Junior’s advice and judge our presidential candidates not by the color of their skin by the
contents of his or her character. Competency to serve, rather than race,
seems like a good standard.
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