Dear Editor,
I really don’t get what is the big deal about the cartoon portraying Mr Obama as a black man who wants to play a game of basketball. The truth of the matter is Mr Obama is in indeed a black man and does play a serious basketball game. Maybe that is what Cuba and America need to improve relations — a basketball game!
Are we so preoccupied by our own self-worth that we seem to think that everything revolves around us? Or is it our own subconscious fear that blurs our vision? We really do need to stop such trivial rhetoric.
Mr Obama calls himself a black man, and if you may not think that he is black, then Mrs Obama certainly puts him over the top. Even Senator Clinton calls him a black man! So what is the big deal if Mr Obama is being portrayed by his dominant ethnicity? In the country of his birth, his race is black or African-American.
My white friends who voted for Mr Obama in the primaries were voting for a black man or an African-American, and my African-American friends were certainly voting for one of their own. Yes, Mr Obama was raised by white grandparents. But morals are morals and they transcend culture and race. Mr Obama, however, has portrayed himself as a person of colour and not as an ethnocentric black, and that has been the underlying difference between him and other stereotypes.
This should be the lesson learned as we analyse the whole race issue from both sides of the spectrum. To be ethnocentric is to think that one’s race or culture is superior to that of another. This kind of thinking only creates disunity and seeks to further isolate.
On the lighter side, a friend who happens to be a super delegate and vice-chairman of the Democratic Party of his state makes no apology that he will be supporting Mr Obama because he is a “brother from a different mother.”
Yours faithfully,
Pastor Daniel Singh
