BlackLiberalBoomer

Of course 98% of Black people are voting for Barack Obama! But it insults me when people think we’re only voting for him because he is Black. That’s a big part of the reason, but not the only one.

African-American support for Barack Obama didn’t really start in earnest until January of 2008, after he won the Iowa Caucases. Black Americans were rather slow to support the Senator for two main reasons: 1) they didn’t think he had a chance of being elected in America, even 145 years after the Emancipation; and 2) they feared for his safety if he was to be elected; so it may have been better if he weren’t elected.

After Senator Obama won in Iowa, which probably has, like eight Black people (just kidding!), we started to believe that “others” would vote for a Black man for President of the United States. After he kept on keeping on, throughout the brusing Democratic primary season, exhibiting class, style, chutzpah, and superior strategy and vision, AND defeated the Clinton Machine, we started to hope against The Audacity of Hope that it could really happen. This was not “just” a Black man, but a once-in-a-lifetime candidate for all of the people; an exemplary role model for Black people and all people; and he had just one house and one spouse!

Opponents have tried to throw anything and everything at him but the kitchen sink, they have called him everything but a child of God (a child of Allah, maybe…), and have tried and tried to dig up anything to bring him down. But as Barack said at the Alfred Smith Dinner in New York City, the only *real* thing the tabloids could report was that he “had fathered two African-American children in wedlock”! People have desperately attempted to distort his record, misconstrue his policies, slander his name, debase his character, and distract us from the real issues with lies and misrepresentations. While others continue to try to slice, dice, divide, and conquer, Barack Obama has always believed in unity, compromise, diversity, and not just Red states and Blue states, but the United States.

No matter what the *haters* say, Barack Obama has never tried to be the “Black President”; he will be the President of all Americans; he just happens to be Black, and 1/2 Black at that! It is very symbolic that he just happens to be both white and black…think about it!

Since the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 abolishing slavery, the 14th Amendment granting citizenship to former slaves, and especially since the 15th Amendment to the Constitution in 1870 ensuring voting rights to all, people have been lynched, beaten, and killed for trying to exercise their Constitutional right to vote. Even the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had to be signed because voter suppression for people of color continued even one hundred years after the Civil War.

All of that time, all of those problems, all of that fighting and dying for the right to vote; Black people did all that to be able to vote for white people! Except for a few people during Reconstruction, Black people didn’t start being elected to local and national offices until the late 1960s and beyond. So now that there is finally–238 years after Crispus Attucks, a free man of color, who was the first person to die in Boston during the American Revolution, finally another man of color is poised to become President of these United States of America, now people are asking why Black people are so excited?!?!?

What many people don’t realize is that we are not only excited and voting in droves for ourselves. We are voting for:
* our ancestors who died during the Middle Passage, the voyages of enslaved Africans from Africa to the Americas.
* the millions of slaves who never tasted freedom.
* our ancestors who picked the cotton and tobacco and took care of the homes and family of the slaveowners.
* the countless people of all races who marched and went to jail for civil rights for all.
* the people who were lynched, pushed back by fire hoses and dogs, beaten, and killed because they wanted to vote to white people.
* the houses and churches that were burned to the ground because they were owned by people who wanted to vote for white people.
* the four little girls who were bombed to death in Birmingham Alabama because their parents wanted to vote for white people.
* the people who woke up to burning crosses on their lawns because they wanted to vote for white people.

Yes, we are excited to vote for a Black man. Yes, we are proud to vote for a Black man. And yes, we are remembering that this election is not just about us or even just about That One . This election is about much more…

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