What’s left to say about the 44th President of the United States that hasn’t already been said? The man won re-election last month by a larger margin that anyone (but Nate Silver) would have predicted. He was recently named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year (a title he also won in 2008). And there’s the little matter of him being the first democratically-elected racial minority on the planet. You know, no big deal…
Except that Obama is a very big deal to a lot of different people. He’s not just a hope and inspiration to the black community, but a pushback against prejudice of all sorts. He’s not just fighting racial prejudice, he’s fighting Islamophobia (his dad was Muslim and many bigots have called Obama a closeted Muslim), he’s fighting xenophobia (all the “birthers” that believe he’s born in Kenya, the mere fact that his name is Barack Obama instead of, say, Herman Cain or Clarence Thomas), and he’s fighting homophobia as the first president to openly endorse gay marriage and make gay rights a big part of his agenda.
But not only is he fighting all of the major, white-hot prejudices of our time, but there’s the subtler campaign against what is, arguably, the most quiet-yet-important fight for tolerance in history: interracial couples and children. With all the talk of what Obama means as a symbol to minorities everywhere, whether they’re racial, religious, sexual, cultural, etc. few people mention that his election means a very great deal to any interracial couple or children that have faced bigotry, and, trust me, all of them have.
As the product of the love between an African man and a white (American, no less) woman, he’s probably pushing more buttons than if he could fit in a cozier, easier-to-classify box. Not only do bigots have to accept that a black man is the leader of the free world, they have to accept that he’s the product of an interracial couple that they fought tooth-and-nail to make illegal. A couple that couldn’t have gotten married in Alabama until the year 2000. No, that’s not a typo, even though the supreme court (through the miraculous decision of Loving v. Virginia) overturned laws that said black and white people couldn’t marry each other in 1967, Alabama was the last holdout until the year 2000. [The significance of waiting until we’re literally into the next century isn’t lost on me.]
Interracial couples will save this planet. They will turn the old hatreds and hostilities and clannish attitudes (that every culture indulges in) to relics, and the old divisions into past atrocities that are no longer a part of the world. They get harassed today——the majority of the time by whatever race the woman is, as women are still unfortunately viewed as property to a large extent——but they don’t have to tomorrow, and tomorrow is what Obama represents better than any human being on the planet.
His campaign slogan was “Forward” and he’s taking us there, bit by bit, prejudice by prejudice. We’ll know race is truly a non-issue when Obama can be married to a white woman and still become president. Or a candidate like Mia Love can win, Mia being the black republican married to a white man that ran for a congressional seat in ultra-conservative Utah, yet somehow lost to a Democrat…yeah, race had nothing to do with that.
But for now what Obama does is help interracial children by flying in the face of one of the oldest, nastiest (yet rarely challenged) stereotypes out there. The ugly chestnut (said by white people and black people) that “Interracial kids will never be accepted,” meaning that black people will never consider them fully black and white people will never accept them as anything. Well, the current POTUS, the leader of the free world, is BOTH, and it hasn’t hurt him one bit.
Love that Obama guy :)
You bring up some interesting points