Does Obama's Audacity Carry Lessons for Britain? (2)

(This is a comment on my article below on Barack Obama and my reply to it.)

Elaine, I agree with everything you have said. This article is on the ball. It also goes to show that you don't always have to marry outside of your community to be successful. To me that is the most salient point. While love is more important than race, the fact that he has chosen a Black woman to be his wife speaks volumes. A lesson that Black leaders in the UK need to embrace as opposed to scorn in the name of acceptance. Delroy Constantine-Simms


Thank you so much for taking the time to read and comment on my article, Delroy. It is appreciated.

While I see the point you are making, and thank you for making it, about Barack's choice of a wife, White members are 'his community' too. We cannot disown one half of his heritage to suit ourselves. Just because he looks more 'black' than 'white' does not mean he should just relate to the Black part of his life. He is both Black and White, and disowning the White part means disowning his dear mother! We seem to expect this kind of action from any mixed-heritage, successful person in our community. They are then put in an unenviable position of being treated negatively, as extraordinary beings on probation of 'acting Black', instead of ordinary humans with their own feelings. Yet we do not lay this extra emotional burden on White peers. They are not judged by their choice of mates. They are just left to prove themself.

I think it is time for us to leave such colour codes out of love. People fall in love for all sorts of reasons across personal, professional and geographical lines. Though he obviously gravitates towards a Black wife, with a White mother as a role model he could equally have settled for a White wife too. Would that have made him less of a passionate, caring human being to other Blacks? Would you have marked him down for that and treated him with less respect? Are we still feeling so inferior as a group that we can still regard any mixed partnership as a threat? I am speaking as the product of a White grandfather and the ex-wife of a Sikh. That has not made me any less conscious of being a Black woman in my world, neither has it tempted me to disown my very fair mother to show how 'black' I am!

Time to extricate ourselves from superficialities in the 21st century, Delroy, if we are going to fight the real battles of exclusion that we still face. We are too wrapped up in colour when we should bear it in mind, yes, but realise that colour is only one major part of our make up: the rest are gender, religion/beliefs, class, self-love and aspiration. In fact, self-love, aspiration and self-confidence are far more important in our life journey than colour because they have given us successes like Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Denzel Washington, Halle Berry and, above all, Oprah Winfrey, the richest Black woman in the world. Her colour did her no favours, along with being the victim of violence and sexual abuse, but she rose above it to show that, no matter what colour you are, achievement, money and power speak far above that.


Main Reasons Behind Failure
The same absence of self-love, confidence and aspiration has incarcerated millions of Black brothers and sisters in prison. People who would rather blame their White peers for their current underachievement while they deal in drugs, rob, kill and maim, instead of raising their aspirations and getting an education to progress their life in a more self-fulfilling and self-empowering way. We love to show how 'black' we are at certain times but loathe ourselves at quiet moments- like our hair, our physical features, our luck - because years of slavery, repression, imposition, exclusion and confusion have robbed us of our identity and our soul. Our obsession with failure, blackness, and discrimination is what has kept us down. They have stopped us from seeing what is possible and blighted our success. We fail to see a balance in our life by always pointing out the negatives when they should also accompany the positives in some way.

People like you can change perceptions, Delroy, but you have to adopt a new approach for a new millennium. Not still harking back to the past and living there, judging everything on negative colour lines while the present rushes past us and denies us a future. Point out discrimination and grievance, by all means, but let's stop turning on our brothers/sisters and give them some slack. We cannot return to the past to change a single thing but we can learn from it in some way to make our present and future more glorious than anything before them. Barack Obama has done that. It is all about the present and the future for him.

But that choice is ours. Only by changing our way of seeing the world, those personal perceptions which harp on negativity and seek scapegoats, can we even begin to take advantage of the opportunities available, let alone fulfil our true potential.