Perceptions and Obama
Barack Obama, still facing perceptions in the African-American community that he is not "black" enough (his mother is white and his father is from Kenya and he comes from a life of privilege), the Illinois senator is facing a new problem. An amateur genealogist is advancing the theory that a couple of Obama's ancestors owned slaves. I can see the enthusiasm for the nation's first "African-American" president being decidedly muted should the theory be proven true, can't you?
Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Obama would be the first "American-African" president–though that doesn't quite have the same ring, does it? Maybe the simplest solution is for Obama to pay reparations ... to Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
posted by Stan Guthrie at 9:49 AM
StanGuthrie.com
1 Comments:
If researchers traced Barak Obama’s African lineage they would undoubtedly discover that he has black as well as white ancestors who owned slaves or participated in the slave trade in Africa. In the United States, virtually everyone, regardless of race, has ancestors who owned slaves or participated in the slave trade. This includes African Americans. Free blacks prior to Civil War also owned slaves (one of the South’s largest slave owners was a free black man) and many—probably most—African Americans have whites in their family trees. The percentage of freed blacks who owned slaves was small, but so was the percentage of whites who owned slaves.
Slavery was also practiced in all Northern states and was still legal in some Northern states at the time of the Civil War. Most Americans have ancestors who fought for the North as well as ancestors who fought for the South. Hispanic Americans also have ancestors who owned slaves (more than two-thirds of slaves transported from African to the Americas went to Mexico and South America). American Indian tribes had both before and after the arrival of Europeans (the largest slave market that every existed in the Americas was one the Aztecs maintained near Mexico city prior to the Spanish conquest). Slavery continued to be legal on tribal lands inside the United States after the Civil War. The United States finally ended slavery within its borders by purchasing slaves from the Indian tribes and setting the free. The Cherokee was the last to give up their slaves.
Most Americans of European descent also have ancestors who were slaves as well as ancestors who were slave owners. The word "slave" is from the word "Slavic," meaning people of Eastern European descents. Easter Europeans were being sold into slavery at the same time Africas Americans were being sold into slaery,
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