Barack Obama Is Not The First Black President
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Barack Obama is not the first "Black President"
Abdul Karim Bangura
Department of Political Science
Howard University
Washington, DC.
That every election has its own share of myths is hardly a revelation, and this year's American presidential election is no different. One of the most pernicious of the myths during the campaign was the one that Barack Obama will be the "first Black President" should he win. Around 10:30 P.M. Eastern Standard Time on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, every radio and television station repeated ad nauseam the myth that "America has elected Barack Obama as its first Black President in what is its most unprecedented historic election." The following morning, the print media repeated the same myth. But is Obama the first Black elected to be President of the United States? The answer, of course, is no. A corollary question then is why do the media (White, Black and others) keep repeating this myth? There may be at least two plausible answers to these questions. The first answer is that the media do not know that there had been at least one "Black President" of the United States, if by Black we mean a person with African blood. This is not a plausible answer, since there are many folk in the media, particularly the Black media, who are well read in African American history. The second answer is that the Black media did not want to dampen the excitement of voters who wanted to be part of an "unprecedented historical event" in electing the "first Black President of the United States" while the White and other media did not want to acknowledge a very important aspect of American history that is Black. This second answer seems the most tenable to me. A related question then is the following: Why did Black professors who know better not step forward and nip the myth in the bud? While I do not know what was going on in other Black professors' heads, I did not attempt to correct the myth because I did not want other Blacks to pounce me in their belief that I tried to dampen the enthusiasm of those voters who were excited about electing their "first Black President." My experience on several listserv discussions when I made it public that I was a supporter of Senator Hillary Clinton during the primaries was quite bitter. I was called an "Obama hater," an "Uncle Tom," a "Sell-out," a "House N_ _ _ _ _," a "Closet McCain-nut," and so on. A Black person could not even offer an opinion that contradicted that of Obama in a Black medium without being insulted with all sorts of hateful monikers. Now that the election is over, it is time to educate those who do not know and those who need to be reminded that Obama is not the first Black elected to be President of the United States. I am quite sure that any such attempt at the height of the election would have received very little attention or simply characterized as at attempt to suppress the enthusiasm of those who were gung-ho about electing their "first Black President." There are several sources that have discussed the notion of the "first Black President" of the United States. These sources range from the ridiculous to the interesting. Toni Morrison, for example, called Bill Clinton "the first black president" in her October 1998 New Yorker article. Her condescending characterization is that while Clinton is White, culturally, he "displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas." There is also the story of John Hanson, a "Black" man, a Moor, who is said to have been the "first President of the United States from 1981 to 1782 under the Articles of Confederation," making George Washington the first President under the United States Constitution.
Another rendering is the one using C. Stone Brown's article titled "Who were the 5 Black Presidents" that appeared in a February 2004 edition of Diversity Inc magazine, ophthalmologist Leroy Brown's book titled Black People and Their Place in History, J.A. Roger's book titled Five Black Presidents and William Herndon's book titled The Hidden Lincoln. These sources together yield six American Presidents believed to have had "Black blood": Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Dwight David Eisenhower. These sources, however, do not offer compelling empirical evidence to support their claims. A more empirically grounded source is the article titled "Harding was first 'black president'" that appeared in the Baltimore Sun on October 7, 1998 (p.2A) written by Theo Lippman. The following is a retelling of Lippman's findings.
President Harding's Black origins are traced to the President's great-great grandfather, Amos Harding, "a West Indian Negro" who pioneered and settled in Blooming Grove, Ohio. Each generation of the Hardings after Amos, as they grew up in Ohio in the 19th Century, was teased and presented by schoolmasters as "part black" and other racist descriptors. Race consciousness was widespread and cruel even in the non-slave states in the North and West. To ease his grandchildren's anxiety, Amos Harding late in his life told them that the story about his Black lineage was the lie of an enemy. Nonetheless, Warren Harding told one of his friends that the story was true. The rumors persisted into his generation and into his adult life. When Warren, as a newspaper editor in Marion, Ohio, had a feud with a rival paper, its editors dismissed him as a "kink haired youth," a reference to his race. The rumors circulated widely in the state when Harding rose to prominence in business and civic life in Ohio and decided to run for office. The rumors' impact was minimal and did not circulate beyond Ohio until 1920 when Senator Harding was being considered among others for the Republican presidential nomination. The story became widespread when Professor William Estabrook Chancellor of Wooster College arrived at the party's convention and made the rounds of delegations with fliers stating that Harding had not one but two lines of Black ancestors. Chancellor revealed that in addition to Amos Harding being Warren's great-great grandfather, he also had a "Negress" great grandmother. The pamphlets were distributed widely in Ohio, but they were having very little effect outside the state until a Dayton newspaper editor attacked them in print. That led to a number of stories about the issue in other national newspapers, including the New York Times. Chancellor went national with a pamphlet he titled "To the Men and Women of America." In a decade that saw the Ku Klux Klan exert a great deal of political influence, the pamphlet was as racist and demeaning to Blacks as anything the terrorist organization ever issued. Democratic leaders, including President Woodrow Wilson, were urged by some of the party's advisers to publicize the pamphlet and its content more widely, but the leaders declined. Nonetheless, some Democratic supporters paid for the printing and distribution of numerous copies of the pamphlet outside Ohio. This action prompted Wilson to directly order the United States Post Office to confiscate copies of Chancellor's pamphlet. In his essay, "The Election of 1920," that appeared in the book edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. and Fred L. Israel titled History of American Presidential Elections (1971), Professor Donald R. McCoy states that political historians are in agreement that the rumors about Harding's racial genealogy had no impact on the vote outside the South, as he was elected President by a landslide. He received 60 percent of the popular vote to 31 percent for James Cox, his Democratic opponent who was also a newspaper owner.
Abdul Karim Bangura(photo) is professor of Research Methodology and Political Science at Howard University in Washington, DC. His brief biography and contact information can the found at the following Web site:
http://www.studentservicesdr.org/Promocion/Bangura%20Brief%20Bio%20For%20Howard%20University.pdf
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www.thepatrioticvanguard.com
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Farooq A. Kperogi
Thursday, July 10, 2008
Six past American presidents part Africans? (I)
By Farooq A. KperogiTalk of the "suppressed" racial identities of past American presidents has been grist in the rumor mills of members of the fringe in America for some time now.
In light of declarations that Barack Obama could become America's "first black" president, there has been a resurgent buzz of insinuations in the Black American community that six of America's past presidents were indeed "black," implying that Obama would only be the first self-identified "black" president but actually the seventh "black" president if/when he wins in November.
Who are these past American presidents who are allegedly "black"? And what kinds of evidence have been proffered to justify the allegations?
Although discussion about America's closet "black" presidents became more manifest in the black American community after Barack Obama became a serious contender for the American presidency, it actually began to gain currency about four years ago. In February of 2004, a certain C. Stone Brown wrote a widely circulated article for the New Jersey-based DiversityInc magazine titled "Who were the 5 Black Presidents?"
Brown's article was inspired by three books written on the subject by fringe African American historians: Dr. Leroy Vaughn's Black People and Their Place in History (Vaughn was actually an eye doctor), Joel A. Rogers's The Five Negro Presidents from 1966, and Dr. Auset Bakhufu's Six Black Presidents: Black Blood: White Masks USA. These books claim that at least six former presidents of the United States trace parts of their ancestry to West Africans enslaved to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries and are therefore "black."
The past American presidents often alleged to have tints of African blood in their Caucasian veins are presidents Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Dwight David Eisenhower.
Thomas Jefferson
Black American conspiracy theorists claim that Thomas Jefferson, America's third president and chief drafter of its Declaration of Independence, who served two terms between 1801 and 1809, was black—that is, in the bizarre way "blackness" is defined in America, which I will discuss in some detail later.
The principal evidence that the Black American authors invoke in the service of their gossip that President Jefferson was "black" is an 1867 book on him by a certain Thomas Hazard titled The Johnny Cake Papers. I have not read the book myself, so I can neither independently vouch for the facticity of the claims in the book nor the accuracy of the information quoted from it.
Well, the authors said Hazard interviewed some man named Paris Gardiner who reportedly said he was present during a 1796 presidential campaign rally when one speaker publicly declared that Thomas Jefferson was "a mean-spirited son of a half-breed Indian squaw and a Virginia mulatto father." (Note that "Indian" refers here not to the people in India in the Asian continent but to the native peoples in the Americas before the European conquest of the territory, and "squaw" is the generic term for all American Indian women).
If we believe this chain of apocryphal testimonies, then Jefferson's father was half white and half black while his mother was half Native American and half white. By the perverted logic of the "one-drop rule," which holds that a person with even the vaguest scintilla of African blood in his/her pedigree cannot be considered white, President Jefferson was "black" or at least non-white. As Madison Grant wrote in his racist book, The Passing of the Great Race, "The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a negro is a negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew."
Another book that the authors reference to support their case that Jefferson was "black," which I have also not read, is Samuel Sloan's The Slave Children of Thomas Jefferson. In the book, Sloan is quoted to have said that Jefferson destroyed all of the papers, portraits, and personal effects of his mother, Jane Randolph Jefferson, who died on March 31, 1776. "There is something strange and even psychopathic," Sloan is quoted to have written, "about the lengths to which Thomas Jefferson went to destroy all remembrances of his mother, while saving over 18,000 copies of his own letters and other documents for posterity."
However, I thought Jefferson should have been more concerned with destroying all records of his father rather than of his mother's since it was his father who was allegedly a "mulatto." In any case, historically, the notion of invariable membership in a "racial" group on account of remote genetic connection with the group has scarcely been applied to people of Native American ancestry. The concept has been largely applied to people of black African ancestry. That is why the story doesn't strike me as credible.
Again, President Jefferson looked as typically Caucasian as any white American I know. Of course, this is not necessarily a guarantee that he doesn't have a tincture of African blood in his ancestry. But I would have been more persuaded to believe this rumor if its evidentiary proofs were derived from authentic archival records, although archives can be destroyed and/or manipulated too.
The only relationship Jefferson had with a black person, which has been confirmed by historical records and even acknowledged by his own descendants, is that he had affairs with a slave girl named Sally Hemmings on his plantation and had up five children with her. By America's convoluted racial classification, those children are "black." So the best or worst thing (depending on where you stand) that can be said about Jefferson, according to extant records, is that he was the "white" father of illegitimate "black" children—in addition to his legitimate "white" children.
Andrew Jackson
President Andrew Jackson, fondly called Old Hickory, was America's seventh president. In American history, Jackson is remembered for successfully defending New Orleans (the city recently irredeemably devastated by Hurricane Katrina) from the British in 1815 and for expanding the power of the American presidency. African-American historian J. A. Rogers who wrote the Five Black Presidents claimed that President Jackson's putative father, Andrew Jackson Sr., actually died over a year before President Jackson was born and therefore couldn't be his biological father.
He further claimed that upon the death of Jackson Sr., the president's mother moved to a farm where there were African slaves. One of the slaves, Rogers claims, sired President Andrew Jackson. Again, this story stretches one's credulity to the limit. Apart from the fact that the story is of questionable authenticity, there is nothing in President Jackson's physical features to suggest an immediate African stemma. But, well, they say appearances can be deceptive.
Vaughn takes his claim of the part African parentage for Andrew Jackson even higher. He cites what he says was an article written in the 29th volume of The Virginia Magazine of History which allegedly stated that Jackson was the son of an Irish woman who married a black man. The magazine also allegedly asserted that Jackson's oldest brother had been sold as a slave because of his more obvious African features. Other Black American authors cite David Coyle's 1960 book titled Ordeal of the Presidency as having provided evidence that Jackson's brother was sold into slavery.
Abraham Lincoln
Abraham Lincoln, America's 16th president, served between 1861 and 1865. He is most remembered for saving the Union during the American Civil War and for emancipating slaves with his Emancipation Proclamation.
J. A. Rogers cites Lincoln's mother, Nancy Hanks, as having once allegedly confessed that Abraham Lincoln was the love child from her affairs with an African man. No independent documentary evidence has been adduced to authenticate the alleged quotation from President Lincoln's mother.
But other Black American authors eager to prove that Lincoln was "black" reference another book titled The Hidden Lincoln written by a certain William Herndon, Lincoln's alleged law partner, which purportedly averred that Lincoln had a darker than normal white skin, thick negroid hair, and that his mother was Ethiopian. The author is also alleged to have argued that Thomas Lincoln could not have been Abraham Lincoln's father because he was barren from childhood mumps and was later emasculated.
Another indication of the acknowledgement of his "blackness," according to the authors, was that Lincoln's political opponents allegedly made newspaper drawings that caricatured him as an African American, and derisively labeled him "Abraham Africanus the First."
To be continued
Wednesday, July 23, 2008
Six past American presidents with African blood? (II)
By Farooq A. KperogiPresident Warren Harding
Warren G. Harding, the 29th president of the United States who served between 1921 and 1923, is probably the only truly previous "black" president of the United States, if the white historian William Estabrook Chancellor was correct. And he probably was, given the unusually heightened frenzy and flurries of denials—and endorsements—that his 1920 book about the hidden African ancestry of President Harding generated.
Note that I am using the word "black" in its peculiarly American context, which is scandalously hidebound, hopelessly essentialist and, yes, notoriously out of step with commonsense notions of "blackness" worldwide. The American notion of blackness—encapsulated in the so-called "one-drop rule" which I briefly discussed in the first part of this article—conceives of blackness as an inerasable genetic stain, so that the remotest ancestral connection with Black Africa defines one as black. This preposterous logic would make most Europeans "black" since recent DNA evidence suggests that about 75 percent of Western and Southern Europeans have vestiges of African blood in them.
Well, Chancellor's book, which was published while Harding was alive, asserted that Harding's great grandmother was an African-American. Several historical sources said all but five copies of the book were bought and burned by Harding's supporters and by agents of the U.S. Justice Department.
Chancellor also lost his job as a professor of politics and economics at Worcester College in the state of Ohio, where Harding hailed from. Although the book was decidedly a politically motivated screed designed to lower Harding's standing in White America (in 1920s America, to be called black was a political death sentence), it contained treasure troves of circumstantial evidence that were, and still are, difficult to dismiss with a shrug.
Chancellor, for instance, proved that Harding was educated at Iberia College, a school specifically designed to train runaway slaves. It is also said that Harding's in-law strongly disapproved of his daughter's marriage to Harding because he reportedly didn't want his bloodline to be blemished with what he considered baseborn African ancestry.
Similarly, aged residents of President Harding's hometown of Marion, Ohio, had sworn affidavits that Elizabeth Madison, Harding's great grandmother, was African American. And African-American historians claim that Harding himself was never forceful and categorical in his denials of his African ancestry.
According to African-American historian J.A. Rogers, when leaders of the Republican Party, Harding's party, called on him to refute allegations that he was a closet "Negro," he reportedly said, "How should I know whether or not one of my ancestors might have jumped the fence?"
Significantly, unlike the previous American presidents we have discussed in the first part of this article, there is demonstrable proof that Harding and his immediate ancestors actually had to confront and live with rumors of their alleged suppressed African ancestry. In fact, President Harding's official biographer, Francis Russell, devoted several pages to this issue in his 1968 book titled The Shadow of Blooming Grove.
He said the official explanation by the Harding family of the factors that led to the birth and maturation of the whispering campaign alleging that his family was "passing" for white when they were indeed black was this: Harding's great-great-grandfather, Amos Harding, once caught and exposed a man who was cutting down his neighbor's apple trees and that the man initiated the gossip in retribution. Interestingly, Russell dismissed this explanation as rather wishy-washy and improbable.
The rumors surfaced again with renewed vigor when Barack Obama emerged on the American political scene. In fact, the New York Times, America's most prestigious newspaper, commissioned Beverly Gage, a well-regarded professor of modern American history from Yale University, to write a piece on the subject.
Writing in the New York Times of April 6, 2008 under the title "Our first black president?" Gage concludes: "[…] many biographers have dismissed the rumors of Harding's mixed-race family as little more than a political scandal and Chancellor himself as a Democratic mudslinger and racist ideologue. But as with the long-denied and now all-but-proved allegations of Thomas Jefferson's affair with his slave Sally Hemings, there is reason to question the denials. From the perspective of 2008, when interracial sex is seen as a historical fact of life instead of an abomination, the circumstantial case for Harding's mixed-race ancestry is intriguing though not definitive."
This cautious admission of President Harding's "black" parentage says a lot, especially coming from a white historian from an Ivy League university.
Calvin Coolidge
President Calvin Coolidge was elected vice president and succeeded as the 30th President of the United States when President Harding died in 1923 while on a speaking tour in California. If Harding is the most probable past American president with an African ancestry, Coolidge is perhaps the least probable. However, many African-American historians think otherwise. Auset Bakhufu, author of The Six Black Presidents, claims that Coolidge was, in fact, proud of his African ancestry, a highly implausible proposition given the dishonor in which blackness was held in 1930s America.
Bakhufu claims that Coolidge's mother was "dark" but that he explained away the darkness of his mother's skin by attributing it to the fact of her mixed Indian heritage. Bakhufu then relies on this alleged explanation to assert that at the time Coolidge's mother was born in New England, the American Indians there had all been intermarried with black people.
This interpretive leap stretches my credulity to the limit. It is not clear to me how a person can simultaneously be proud of his ancestry and strain hard to explain it away, thereby denying it outright.
Black American conspiracy theorists also claim that Coolidge's mother's maiden name was "Moor" and that Moor used to be the generic name for all black people, especially in Europe. Well, if that logic should stand, then white people whose last names are Black must be part African too!
Dwight David Eisenhower
The evidence proffered to support claims of the African ancestry of Dwight David Eisenhower, America's 34th president who served between 1953 and 1961, is also weak and speculative. Black American historians allege that Eisenhower's mother, Ida Elizabeth Stover, was part black and part white, which makes her— and all her descendants— "black," according to America's unique racial typology.
But what is the evidence that Eisenhower who, according to his officual biography was an American of German descent, was "black"? According to one conspiracy theorist, "Interviews made during the 50s uncovered some very old people who long remembered referring to Eisenhower's mother as 'that black Links gal'."
Another piece of "evidence" is the picture of Eisenhower's mother on her wedding day published in his autobiography. Someone claimed the woman "would not have been able to eat in restaurants anywhere in the South before the end of segregation." Well, I saw the picture myself and the woman looked lily-white, as Americans like to say.
Of course, in my studies of American presidential rhetoric, I discovered that Eisenhower was more obliging to African-Americans than many past American presidents. He was, for instance, the first president to deploy federal force to desegregate schools in the South. He was also the first president to invite African-American leaders to the White House, and the first to appoint a black person into an executive position in the White House.
But it's not a persuasive argument to assert that a president's complaisance to a historically oppressed people is an outward manifestation of his suppressed genetic relationship to the group.
But why should it matter if any past American president was part African? Why should this interest us in an age when scientists, scholars, and DNA analyses continue to explode the myth of racial exclusivity? Well, it is partly because while these progressive developments are taking place, we are also witnessing what appears like the recrudescence of nineteenth-century scientific racism on the fringes. But that's a topic for another day.
Another reason why this is important is that America is a nation that is heavily invested in racial symbolisms. It will elevate the sense of self-worth of African-Americans if they can convince themselves (even if they can't convince others) that some past American presidents share an ancestral linkage with them.
I also think it's a creative inversion of the logic of one-drop rule. Most so-called black Americans are not simply African; they are an embodiment of a multiplicity of racial identities. They are "black" only because a racist power structure pronounced them so. As Langston Hughes, the eminent "African" American poet, once wrote, "You see, unfortunately, I am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But here in the United States, the word 'Negro' is used to mean anyone who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure. It means all Negro, therefore, black. I am brown."
However, even though in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court unequivocally invalidated the one-drop rule, it continues to be employed in self-definition and the definition of others.
Concluded
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"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
Tony Agbali
Racial construction in the U.S, and for the most part the rest of the America's is much more complex than most of our African conceptualization. For us African we often predicate our pedigree along a patrilinear basis, whereas in America, some pedigree are claimed matrilineally. Therefore, some Americans can claim their geneogram through matrilineal lines, while others do so using their patrilineal linkages. More so, many Americans have white, Indian, and black bloods within their pedigree, and that the racial admixture becomes highly complexified. The way toward racial construction today has become more a subjective matter of how individual identify themselves rather than any objective categories out-there. Nonetheless, in spite of this, the dominance of the one-tenth rule that defines blackness in some places cannot be missed, as equally
the fact that some who actually knows where they fall on the one-tenth scale actually pass for whiteness.
Race is not only subjective but it is equally relative. That, however, does not diminish the role of race, in mapping domination and even access to certain opportunities. Only a stranger to American society will only be so blind to underestimate the role of race in structuring one's structual and institutional environment, and of course with ramifications for certain individuals in terms of their chances to either rise or fall, succeed or fail. Which, in large measure, is one of the real cause for celebration of an Obama victory, though again, it would be naive to assume that with an Obama Presidency issues of race and racial problems will soon be mulched and thrashed.
The issue of whether Obama is the first black President or not, reminds one of the story of the first black priests in the United States' Roman Catholic Church. While, Fr. Augustine Tolton, born in Missouri and buried in Quincy, Illinois, was acclaimed as the first full blooded black priest ordained in Rome in 1886, there were others before him, whose blackness were submerged and deliberately eclipsed for them to pass and be promoted within the dominant white Catholic establishment. That was the case of James, Alexander, and Patrick, sons of Michael Healey, a Georgian Plantation owner and a slave woman, Mary Eliza. James and Alexander were ordained for the Archdiocese of Boston.
James went on to become the first Black Catholic Bishop in America as the bishop of Portland, Maine in 1875. Patrick who was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1854, concealed his African ancestry and went on to become the President of Georgetown University in 1874.
These historical replay and recasting is not new. In essence, as I understand racial construction in American society today, as much as its historical underpinnings at still manifest and focally at work, one's race is what you call yourself. It would be interesting how the next census (now at the corner) will categorize racial taxonomy.
Definitely, Karim Abdul and Faroogi's texts are factually interesting. However, whether Obama is the first African-American president, really matters little, what matters is the fact that he claims and projects his blackness, and even when others question where within the racial trajectory he belongs, he defines himself as black, without hiding, and courageously ready to face the consequences-for good or bad- his racial self-ascription.
--- On Fri, 11/14/08, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooq...@gmail.com> wrote: |
|
Mobolaji ALUKO
QUOTE
Abdul Karim Bangura(photo) is professor of Research Methodology and
Political Science at Howard University in Washington, DC
Am I being told that Abdul Karim Bangura is a colleague of mine here
at Howard University, and we have never met, except when he was
spewing un-niceties against Barack Obama - and for Clinton - during
the primaries?
"Wanders", as they say, will never "seize."
Bolaji Aluko
Shaking his head
>> <http://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com/>
>> *Analysis* <http://www.thepatrioticvanguard.com/>
>> 2008.
>>
Moses Ebe Ochonu
---Mohandas Ghandi
Farooq A. Kperogi
Farooq Kperogi
Tony Agbali
| Sorry. You are right. There should be no reason why something so apparent like that can be muddled up. Accept my sincere apologies. I was writing in transit and some of those spaces yield their own mental logic at time. Next time, I shall be more circumspect. Sorry for whatever inconveniences this may have caused. Ditto for Abdul Karem Bangura (the god of books of Osifo Kwabena). Some incense may hopefully pacify his beaming rage! |
Cornelius Hamelberg
reiterate that it’s meant to be funny, not serious and no one asks for
repentance, except from a prodigal:
So what do we have here? Is it self-exoneration?
Kotoh Bangura claims that he took some flack. He says,”when I made it
primaries was quite bitter. I was called an "Obama hater," an "Uncle
Tom," a "Sell-out," a "House N_ _ _ _ _," a "Closet McCain-nut," and
so on."
Clinton" was all that he had done or made public!
He has studiously omitted to confess that when Mrs. Clinton failed to
win the nomination, he then switched his allegiance over to Senator
McCain and that in spite of the socialism that he had previously so
ardently claimed was his essential baggage, for the remaining months
of the campaign, with increased ZEAL he then continued to curse,
denounce, vilify, denigrate, belittle, ridicule, mock, demonize and in
every way possible try to humiliate our Brother Obama, on a daily
basis, for a good twenty months without pause or letup telling us that
Brother Obama was a slow thinker, that he was a poor speaker and
debater who couldn't even talk without a script, that he was not a
"real African", that he was not a Black Nationalist ( as if his Uncle
McCain is) - indeed he said unprintable things and they are all
stored in the archives of the Leonenet discussion Forum in which
Kingdom of the “less qualified” he reigns as the resident Papa Doc of
political science omniscience
On the night of November 3, 2008, he wrote to the (Leonenet) Forum
that Brother Obama would wake up to reality on the night of November 4
because through profound & erudite anal-ysis he was sure that the
Bradley Effect was going to prevail. That sure is a strange reason
for Dr. Bangura’s incessant cursing of Brother Obama and
unadulterated support for supporting his great white hope, the old
"war hero” Senator John McCain and Sarah Palin.
However it is not my purpose to rake up all the concrete supporting
evidence that I could serve us here to give character to Dr.
Bangura’s political behaviour or to tar and feather him here, when he
has already - indelibly - tarred and feathered himself elsewhere
and almost everywhere, to the consternation of us all and anyway if
anything, I suppose that with such great empathy beating in his chest
he could be crying with his defeated candidate or surely be feeling
sick should Uncle John be feeling sick ( smile) hopefully will not
be mis-leading any of us to vote for him to lead us at home now or in
the near future in Sierra Leone or in Oyiboland.
Indeed some of the insights from Fanon's "Black Skin, White Masks" are
wholly applicable to some of the behaviour and unmasked and demasked
pre-election antics and positions of our Dr. Bangura.
His article ”Barack OBama is the not first Black President," is
almost a cover-up. That's the way I interpret it.
About Blackness. The Secretary of the Treasury to George Washington is
supposed to have been this:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rls=com.microsoft%3Aen-gb%3AIE-SearchBox&rlz=1I7ADBF&q=Alexander+Hamilton+was+black
> >> --
> >> Gibril Koroma
> >> Editor/Publisher
> >>www.afri-can-mag.com
> >>www.thepatrioticvanguard.com
> >> 1-604-308-6087
>
> > --
> > 1 Park Place
> > Suite 817C
> > Atlanta, GA, USA.
> > 30303
> > Cell: 404-573-9697
> > Home: 404-501-0638
> > Office: 404-413-5638
>
> > Blog:www.farooqkperogi.blogspot.com
>
> > "The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either
>
> - Show quoted text -