Why Race Mattered in Barack Obama's Re-election: Editorial and Poem (part 1 of 2) - by Aberjhani

                                President Barack Obama on the cover of TIME Magazine.

“Beneath the armor of skin/and/bone/and/mindmost of our colors are amazingly the same.” --from ELEMENTAL, The Power of Illuminated Love (Aberjhani)

Despite the Associated Press’s recent gloomy poll on racial attitudes in the United States, most Americans would probably agree that race should not have played as powerful a role as it did in the 2012 presidential election campaign resulting in the ultimate re-election of Barack Obama. But there are at least two good reasons that it did.

First, consider the approximately one million African-American men and women currently either imprisoned, on parole, or rushing blindly down a path likely to lead to prison. Too many of them grew up, during any given decade of the last half century, believing they were either destined to go to prison as some form of rites of passage, or they should expect to die ––as Trayvon Martin and my brother Robert Lee did––young. What were the predominant images that led them to define themselves as they did?

As powerful as the legacies of individuals such as Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Oprah Winfrey and others are, for many people they comprise little more than fairy-tale-like legends with minimal bearing on their individual existences. Despite the greatness of such cultural icons, much of their lives seemed but a different version of American slaves’ battle for freedom a century and a half ago.

For four years, the image of Barack Obama presence in America’s White House has embedded itself in the minds of many young black males––just as that of Michele Obama has done the same in regard to many young black women–– as a living symbol emblematic of very different possibilities for their lives. It would not have been difficult for historians who may have been so inclined––with the assistance perhaps of certain eager Republicans––to guerrilla decontextualize a single Obama term to such a degree that his phenomenal accomplishments could all but disappear from the history books. 

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Why Race Mattered in Barack Obama's Re-election: Editorial and Poem (part 1) - National African-American Art | Examiner.com