Keep Race out of it

I was originally going to blog about some Republicans referring to Hurricane Sandy as an Act of God in one breath then saying it tilted the election to Obama in the next breath. They should have referred to Hurricane Sandy as a natural disaster. Calling it an Act of God then blaming it for shifting the election back to Obama kind of implies that God didn’t want Romney to win and I know that is not what they were trying to say. I was going to do a whole diatribe about it, but something else caught my attention this morning. A young woman from California made a racist comment on Facebook about President Obama and now the internet is in a tizzy.

I’m here to tell Americans to wake up. Racism is alive and well. There are racist people of all races, it isn’t just a white/black issue. I don’t understand why people are so surprised by this young woman’s comments. She used the n-word in reference to President Obama and wrote that maybe he would be assassinated. When she was interviewed later she was unapologetic, but she did want the world to know that she wasn’t racist. I don’t think she understands that she can have friends of other races and still be racist. She could have used lots of other words to describe Obama, but she picked arguably the most offensive word in the English Language. That was not an accident. 

This young woman is not alone. Facebook and Twitter are full of racist anti-Obama messages. The sad truth is that to some people that’s all they see when they look at Obama. They don’t see a man who rose from humble beginnings or a black man who contradicts every major stereotype about black men: he is well educated, married to a black woman and (as far as we know) he only has two children and both were born in wedlock.

You can disagree with Obama’s policies all day, but you cross the line when you make it about his race or wish harm on him. I greatly disliked Bush’s policies, but I never wanted any harm to come his way. I never wished that someone would assassinate him. Hell, I was upset with the Secret Service when they let a man throw a shoe at him. If Romney had won the election, I wouldn’t have wished harm on him. He wasn’t my candidate, but I would have respected him as my president because the president of the United States is elected by the people. Sometimes your candidate wins and sometimes your candidate loses. As an American, you have to learn to live with it.