On Ending the Series on Obama Inspired Articles

I am ending my articles on Obama and the effect of his presidency and moving to other issues. I intend to keep this blog open and might update it after this.

I will soon post a link to the follow up blog and series of articles that I will be posting.

Bruck

By the Content of their Charachter..

....and not by the color of their skin (or how foreign their names may sound...)


When the News Networks called the election for Obama, the crowd that I was surrounded by began to chant "Obama" repeatedly. Some of them were jumping up and down, some clapping and others were clenching their fists in victory. What got my attention was all the people, strung from all the races and places in the world were chanting, what Obama himself called 'a funny name'. Immediately, something struck me.


I imagined millions and millions in the world seized in that historic moment and chanting the name of an african man, from an obscure village in Kenya, whose son now carries his name and has made it a household name across the world.


Dr. Martin Luther King's dream of a time "...that they will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their charachte...." had come true. It could also be interpreted to mean or include not just colours of skin but also name.....something like " ... not by the wierdness of their name, but by the content of character..."


Obama's victory is for all those people whose names are not Jackson, Henderson, Smith and Jones. It is for all those living in cultures where their name, no matter how meaningful and beautiful may sound in another language beyond the horizon, sounds weird and warrants a repetition or spelling at every office and infront of every clerk.


I remember all my ethioisraeli friends in Israel who had taken up Israeli sounding names as kids. Some by the decisions of their parents others by the decision of their teachers. One friend ahs even told me how the teacher had let other students choose a name for her, as she foudn her ethiopian name to hard to pronounce. 'Ordinary' sounding names were thought to usher their assimilation in Israel society. Almost all of them had reverted to their Ethiopian names once they had grown up and their experience had shown them that the key to assimilation was not in their names.


That night, when the students went shouting "Obama, Obama" on their way out..... For me it was the same as if they were chanting any african name or any asian name. It might have been the same if they were shouting Abebe, Li, Huan, Hailu or "______".



Caveat
Ofcourse one should note that Obama's name is simple to pronounce. Even babies say it easily, it has O, ba, and ma (sylables easy enough for kids to say and remember). Names which are hard to pronounce don't make an easy chant line nor do they fit in the name memory slots of human brains easily. Imagine a crowd of europeans chanting "Gebreegzihabher".....in Berlin on Senator Gebreegzihabher (D-Il) world tour. Somehow it sucks out all the excitement out of it.

White, Red, Brown and Black

White, red, brown and black?- if you have to choose.

The concept of skin color has been on my mind ever since I had moved out of my country of birth, and started living in a country where the majority of the people have less pigmentation than I do. Obviously, this had not disturbed me back in Ethiopia. Once I was in Israel, though it was the first thing that I discovered about myself, I look darker than most people. It is not that I never knew that,  I did know that but it did not seem important then. I remember the first two or three weeks in Israel, my skin looked darker to me than it ever was. Call it culture shock, or increase in self-consciousness but it really did make me notice that for most people that might be the first thing they notice about me.

In Ethiopia, people refer to skin color as white (reserved to yes! You guessed it- white people), red (key- someone like Barack Obama), teyim (brown skinned—let us say Mandella) and black ( meaning dark complexioned). There were connotation to skin color embedded in the language, culture and history, that tended to associate, the red complexioned people to nobility, and the dark complexioned people to lower status in the society. Yet this was nothing automatic, there were light skinned kings and dark skinned kings. Poor people of “red” complexion of the skin and wealthy “black” people.

So most Ethiopians, undergo the transformation of being reclassified as black once they come to countries where the color code is quite different to the one they were familiar with. I, for one, never was fooled by this sub-classification. I was the darker than most of my siblings, my mother and I were brown skinned. My sister and brother, are light skinned and so is my father. Some among my country men learn that they are really black and not 'red' or 'teyim', in the land beyond the seas. There they meet a whole different rule of classification, where it could be more of “ if it ain’t white, it is black”.

I am not going to go into the discussion of black-white dichotomy. I am sorry to disappoint, if there are who are disappointed. I guess I am just reminded on how language and words on the meanings they carry. The phrase ‘black man’ as used in English seems so outdated and hopefully is becoming less and less politically correct. The term white man is no more politically correct.

In a way the greatest political incorrectness in the use of the word black man or white man is not the color we attach to it, but it is the way we classify the world into white, yellow and black. Like all dichotomies the removal of one part of the dichotomy defeats the dichotomy as a whole. Perhaps that is why we should drop the use of the word black man first. Soon the word, white man will be a reference that is as meaningless as the word black man.