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This is my first post @ BlogHer in about two years. I'm still writing at Marian's Blog and sometimes elsewhere. I'm also struggling through working on my first book. Today I'm writing about experiencing negation and censorship, as if the past 300 years (predating existence of the USA) weren't already enough for any tri-racial Black American woman (or man).
Taking a short but related sidetrack from all this: Did anyone else here also note that Barry/Barack Obama never mentioned his own mother (who happened to be White American) during his presidential inaugural address?? They tell me he mentioned his (Kenyan) father at least twice. Is that odd, or what? Tell me it wasn't so...
As a Black American woman who is now mature (over 50), as a family member and now a grandmother, too, I find myself confronting attitudes I haven't experienced for almost forty years, and some I'd only heard of and had never before directly experienced in my own life. A few of the cogent facts (some of which I have been censored for even mentioning): not long ago Cynthia McKinney was one of the most dynamic elected leaders of the Democratic Party. A Black American woman, Cynthia was a veteran member of U.S. Congress, elected six terms, and the first Black woman ever elected to Congress from the state of Georgia. Then suddenly, by early 2006, she was marginalised. Before long both she & her years of elected public service (including four previous years in the Georgia State legislature) were deliberately eclipsed by someone unknown to most Americans before 2004. That would be now-U.S. president Mr. Obama (aka Barry Obama Soetoro). For "the first black president" we now have a person who not only does not come from the Black American People, but in reality is the direct descendant of various White U.S. slaveowning families. Let that sink in for awhile, sort of like a really tough math problem. Genealogists and a few U.S. media also have reported he's related to Dick Cheney.
Don't believe me - read the March 2007 NY Times article, Obama Had Slaveowning Kin
What is extremely disturbing is that today, because the U.S. and most of the other countries which enslaved Black people (this was modern history, thank you very much) - most of these countries do nothing throughout the entire year to acknowledge their deep and abiding national ties to Black slavery. So we arrive in the 21st Century, on Election Day 2008 and Inauguration Day 2009, with people literally saying "there's no difference!" between being a descendant of the millions of women and men who were enslaved and their descendants, versus being a descendant of slaveowners (who simultaneously were rapists) This latter group, which includes Mr. Obama, does not refer to the majority of we Black Americans who happen to be from mixed-race families created by the rape of our Black women and girl ancestors by the very same white male slaveowners, along with their friends, colleagues and other male family members). Yet another 'tough math problem' to think about.
Barack Obama (Soetoro) is Black by virtue of his father, who arrived in the U.S. around the 1960s, voluntarily, on a jet plane, from Nairobi, Kenya. Just as with his mother and her white slaveowning family history, his father's background also has squat to do with Black American culture and our origins. Meanwhile, thanks to the media blackout on Cynthia McKinney and her presidential campaign by U.S. national and local media and international press (BBC, etc.), even today there are Americans and international observers who have no idea who Cynthia McKinney is, even as a former member of Congress, etc., nor any knowledge of her historymaking 2008 candidacy.
Cynthia McKinney is a descendant of enslaved Black Americans on both sides of her family. She was also the U.S. Green Party's 2008 presidential candidate. Together, McKinney and her chosen running mate, Rosa Clemente, a Black Puerto Rican woman from New York, were the first AFRODESCENDANT WOMEN OF THE AMERICAS to run on the same party ticket for president and vice-president of the United States of America. And yet not even Oprah gave McKinney any interview time. Nor did EBONY Magazine nor any number of other Black American, Latina/o, feminist, or even Continental African (from