Yep.. his name is Barack Hussein Obama and he should note this proudly. As the writer points out.. these are the behaviors of 3rd graders. The difference between those giving a free pass to the rather immature(and over 50 yar old) and most people is that we learn NOT to gang up on people and tease them sometime before we turn 10 years old or we become conservatives. Language is not just about definition but also about tone and nuance. And if the writer claims not to know anything about this let’s just hear one of her children say something in an insolent manner and suddenly she’ll become quite expert at interpreting these signals and if one her kids used the same arguments against her that are supposed to suffice in this case she’d send them to bed with hides tanned!
Just as Dan Quayle used a badly pronounced Maarrrreeeeeyooo KoooOMO to make issue with Mario Cuomo’s italian name so too do conservatives hostile to Barack’s non anglo heritage. And to claim that this reference is MERELY anti-Islamic and not anti-black is more know nothingism. There are muslims in every race and stripe but conservatives are not going to ever come straight out and call Barack the “N”word. They’re going to merely point out that Barack is “different” or “foreign” and let the minds under their spell fill in the rest. It’s too bad.. it’s silly.. it’s immature.. but whenever the right wing asks “gee why do da blacks always vote overwhelmingly with the Dems.. after all didn’t we invent the flat tax and charter schools??” THIS is why. The belief that the only “normal” names are English Anglo-Saxon and the thinly veiled contempt for any other race or culture truly disgusts those of us who are not white and this laughing behind your hand “hey it’s a tuff world get over it” crap is fortunately going the way of the generations as the kids of the next generation are putting a lot of this behind them. I’m glad that Barack no longer feels the need to call himself “Barry” and he damned sure shouldn’t be ashamed of his middle name “Hussein” anymore than Omar Bradley should have been ashamed of the name Omar! We’re going to see a full fledged flowering of subtly disseminated white racist thought in this campaign and we might as well make ready for it now. We who are foreigners in our own homeland need to stand up and proudly claim our names, our ideas, and our freedom in the face of the cleverly argued know nothingness of the right wing blogosphere.
