Racial Smearing of President Obama

Racial Smearing of President Obama
By Saeed Qureshi
The white population of United States should understand that president Barrack Obama is not wholly black. He is half white and half black. Which means that on this account, he should be spared of a full blown racial smear storm against him that is sweeping across America in the past several weeks: caricaturing and buffooning him and his wife? He has been equated with Hitler, Federal Castro and Stalin among other villains, under the delusion that he was socializing America through his otherwise far reaching healthcare reforms.
A president has been called names, ridiculed, maligned and slandered obviously for no cogent reasons except that his pigment is not as fair as that of majority citizens. Does that entitle him to denigration and vitriolic blitz? There seems to be a bulging deluge of vilifications and cat calling let loose against him so much so that some of the posters demanded of him to go back to Kenya where he spent his early childhood. Such is the deplorable intensity and gravity of racial onslaught against Obama. This vicious campaign, in essence, more than Obama as a person, undermines the dignity of the office of the presidency. It means a segment of the white populace has not accepted him as the president of this country symbolized with equality, liberty, freedom and justice irrespective of gender, race, ethnicity and religion.
This sordid situation is pregnant with horrifying and equally bizarre forebodings as in retaliation; the black community in future could adopt racial postures against a non black president. And thus there would ensue a racial bad blood that might cut across the very foundations of this country, known for being free from discrimination and racial prejudices .The American constitution negates discrimination or bias or prejudice in any form, be it a job offer or grant of social benefits. It is the hang up of a particular hate filled chunk of white conservatives that raises hell and heaven in the name of color of the skin. They perhaps still look at the black community with an inborn disdain as the slaves of yester years. Human narrow obsessions can be as obdurate as to spawn over two hundred years among a community that calls itself the leader of modern liberal civilization (white man’s burden).
America is being dented from within by show of reckless and unwarranted narrow-mindedness of a section of the society that would have otherwise proudly demonstrated to the world at large, “look we are the followers of Jesus Christ who spoke and succored the lowly and the downtrodden, black and white alike.” Incidentally Jesus, the spiritual fountainhead of Christian faith and for them the son of god was not a white human. He was from the Middle East where the color of the skin is not as milky white as of those who hailed from the Britain and descended upon America as colonists. But before the advent of white races in North America, the natives living here were not white either.
Does color really matter in determining the faculties and genius of a human being? Does a color other than white really subverts or stymies the performance of a person? Does it really make him an intellectual dwarf and scum of earth to be hated? If the color is the benchmark for intellect and intelligence then we have to disown the pioneering yet mammoth creative and inestimable research work of the non-white scholars and scientists in diverse branches of human knowledge at a time when white Europe was sunk into “Dark Ages.” Based on that patrimony of knowledge, the Europeans scholars and men of merit took a queue and advanced the enlightenment and knowledge to dizzying heights, that is still continuing.
The Healthcare reform issue is being used as a handy tool to spur the antagonism of the anti Obama intelligentsia and the conservative section of society to such an extent, that he would not be able to run for the second term. It is also an attempt by Obama bashers to paint and portray him as a failed or a hamstrung president whose performance fell much short of his electoral pledges. If the healthcare reforms are essentially good and if his retreat strategy from Iraq is sagacious, his detractors would still not like him to take the well deserved credit for these sterling accomplishments. He is winding up a war that was an unbearable burden and fruitless parasite for America. He is trying to revive the endearing image of America by eschewing the path of war and blind belligerency and rerouting America’s March on a path of peace, understanding and mutual respect with the rest of the world. The question is how long American forces can fight in foreign battlefields for fuzzy and freakish reasons? Iraq is an example where America had no justifiable reason to penetrate militarily and remain caught up in a nightmarish spell for eight years.
To hold a country under the jack boots, no matter how small she might be, is a tall order in the present times. It was possible in the colonization eras of the past but not now when the world is integrated and when it is not possible to isolate a country by occupation armies. If, of late, there are signs of receding friction between USA and the rest of the world, it is because of Obama’s new thrust and ambition to douse the anti-American flames and to win the antagonists by a process of pacification. Let him do his commendable job. If his opponents could win in the next elections, let them reverse his policies and restore the blighted Bush era. That is how democracy should work. To completely blacken a semi black yet a visionary head of state by scurrilous attacks on his person, is a self-defacing propensity that would stand in good stead for president Obama but backfire against his hate mongers. It would also defile a cosmopolitan and ideally democratic America’s fair image.