DISQUS

Well I don't know about white Americans, I keep thinking I am one, but I'm half-Arab, half-white-Southerner, 100% liberal feminist West Coaster...

But I just LOVE their relationship and it makes total sense to me. Where is the contradiction? Who is complaining? People just complain too much. Hilary was also the lawyer mama supportive wife. People gave her a hard time about it, too. The difference with the Obamas is that he's really devoted to Michelle in a way that ole Bill with his fidelity issues is not devoted to Hilary.

I just loved how when the Obamas got out of the limo at the White House last week, Barack jumped out, then said "wait a minute" and turned to help Michelle get out of that awkward enormous car. His triumphal moment greeting the sitting President had to wait while he helped his wife out of the car. THat says it all to me. He loves her and he puts her comfort ahead of his moment of glory.

I live in Oakland CA and we already have lots of beautiful Obama on black tee shirt expression here. Everybody was wearing them on Saturday, too. Unusually warm summer-like weather so no jackets to cover up the images. Lots of folks have Barack AND Michelle tee shirts; I like those the best. The pride and happiness just make me smile.

In the Middle East when I was growing up, all through the 1970s, you saw prayer carpets, machine made, with JFK, RFK and Martin. Weird because JFK & RFK were not very good for the Arabs, especially Palestinians. Whatever. I assume we are going to see prayer carpets with Obama pretty soon. No I don't want to see him up there with Malcolm and Martin, our martyrs. I prefer to see him with Michelle - alive, not memorialized.

THere was a post by a white, gay, ex-Mormon Californian at Daily Kos last week, like Thursday maybe, in which he laid out the numbers proving why Black people did not make Prop 8 happen. He also questioned the exit polling big time. His larger point was what folks are saying here, that the No on 8 forces just didn't organize or reach out to the community. But I found his explication of the polling numbers very helpful.

Basically, black people did not make the difference on Prop 8. THere aren't enough black voters in California to make the difference .... white anti-gay voters were so numerous that even if Black community had voted just like white Democrats (the largest support base), 8 still would have passed. That's the summary as I recall it.

Here it is:

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/11/6/194...

To repeat, the point is that scapegoating is not helpful and doesn't make sense if you look at the numbers.

Also, if you want folks to change their minds and support your issue, you might need to find out how they are thinking and why, rather than jump to conclusions, blame and resent. That way you will understand better how to get across your point.

Hey, I'm a half-Arab, and I am here to tell you that Obama's father is no Arab. Not that it matters to Limbaugh and his ilk. Look, my Arab cousins had to stay out of bars in North Carolina for the whole of the Iranian hostage crisis of the 70s because people wanted to kill them for being ragheads. Doesn't matter that A) Iranians are not Arabs and actually hate Arabs and B) my cousins are CHRISTIANS. Arab Christians. Doesn't matter. A raghead is a raghead even if he doesn't wear a rag on his head.

Back to Obama as Arab - the trouble is that most Arab societies are incredibly tribal and prejudiced against outsiders (like Palestinians and Lebanese distrust each other, Egyptians make fun of Lebanese and vice versa, the conflicts go on). They are REALLY prejudiced against non-Arab Africans. Forget about it. I am ashamed to talk about it but go read the Angry Arab if you want to know more. It's shocking and makes me not want to claim the tribe of Arab too eagerly. Anyway. Obama's father was Muslim (but didn't his grandpa convert back and forth a couple of times?). Limbaugh is just conflating Arab and Muslim again, which is like saying they're all ragheads.

I get harassed by lefties for staking out that my family are Arab Christians, but I want to keep publicizing the existence of this minority, because it messes up the sweeping generalization that Arab=Muslim and Muslim = Arab. In the USA as of 2000, 60% of Arab-Americans were of Christian Arab origin. And only 25% of US Muslims were Arabs.

However facts never got in the way of Limbaugh's ranting so why bother with him. I'm just saying to you all.

I consider Obama in MY tribe, because like him I'm a skinny kid with a funny name. OK I'm not skinny anymore but my name is still funny. Just like him I have a 3d world grad student father married to a heartland America white mother. We have a lot of cultural tribe in common and I identify with him. I just wish he could be more fair to the Arabs in public... but that's politics in the USA.

I just posted about how Barack focuses on the positive outcome he wants to achieve - much more than he fights against the negative outcomes he doesn't want. Basic spiritual principle. So I put up a link to his economic plan, with a couple of points I like in particular.

The positive spin on 'don't hate' is:

LOVE!

We Arabs have had our moments with Pat before, where we say - huh? The world is really crazy when Pat Buchanan is the only one making sense. Somebody said that about Israel/Palestine at least 5 years ago, when P came out with something nobody else would ever say. Buchanan is an unreconstructed so-and-so (I don't want to start calling names here) but.... sometimes he surprises. However this moment is really not to be believed.

I read somewhere glancingly ('cause I'm trying to stay out of it in hopes they'll go away) that the PUMAs are being funded by the Republicans or their surrogates.

Really I think it's all overblown, and I think outsiders want to divide the party. Look, every time there's a riot at an anti-war or anti-globalization demonstration, and they say that mysterious black-hooded "anarchists" did it, I assume that these were paid provacateurs from some branch of the government. The FBI did it for years. Why wouldn't the Republicans try to disrupt the convention and the election by promoting this PUMA stuff?

Nobody who really cares about women's issues would be this poisonous toward a person with Barack's voting record.

I am ignoring all of it, just checking in to the internet LIGHTLY so I don't care what Hilary has to say tonight.

But you printed a very flattering picture of her. That's lovely. Well done. Might as well be gracious. Let's not hold her nuttiest so-called supporters against her...

Let me also say that my kid brother, Khalil, and I grew up in the Midwest and then the south in the 1970s, and we got a lot of teasing about our names, even from African-American kids at school. This was before Arabic names became popular. Sometime in about 1991 I was living in Brooklyn and walking down Flatbush Avenue when I heard one African-American guy say to another "well my brother Khalil did something or other" and I thought - your brother Khalil? My brother is Khalil! How cool is that? My little brother's name was finally acceptable on the street.

I really thought anti-Arab racism and anti-Muslim sentiments were getting better in the 90s. Then we had 9/11 and it has been downhill since. Everybody's worst nightmare come true, and those Arabs did it, so they're all terrorists and deserve to die horrible deaths. Nuke the whole continent of Asia, one of my white aunts said to my mother. Yep. Nuke 'em all.

Thank you all. Yes the whole Arabic name thing is a perpetual source of ... interesting interaction. Especially since "I don't look like one." Then I come to this blog and I read experiences from my African-American sisters and I think... hmmm... I can relate to that.

This blog has done more for my half-Arab feminist consciousness and identity than a whole lifetime of Arab politics. I read the above post and I immediately say - nope, I am not a white feminist. ('cause I go 'round and round about whether I'm white or not - look white, raised by my white mom, privileged like white except when people find out my name, etc.).

Really I am done. The *last* group I want to be a part of is the above white feminist crowd. Yes, I have to throw in my lot with the womanists because this other stuff is just nonsense.

I just love this series on African-Americans. I think I have been around and know a lot but I always learn something and meet new people from our shared American history. Thank you.

I followed the link to 5 Black Presidents and was fascinated to see this cartoon of Abraham Lincoln as "Abrahamus Africanus"
http://www.geocities.com/cureworks1/blackabe.htm

He is dressed in Arab garb - the pantaloons, the curved scimitar, the funny shoes. Very interesting in light of the cartoon portraying Obama as a Muslim (equals Arab of course in the essentialist mind - see the head dress and the picture of Ben Laden on the wall).

Leo Africanus was a great Arab historian and traveler who went to Rome, "converted" for a while, and possibly sparked the character of Othello. 19th century readers would have easily recognized "Abraham Africanus" as a satire on Leo. Leo Africanus however went back to the Arab world and "turned" again, playing to that Euro/White fear that those wily dark Muslims who "pass" or take on our ways are actually treacherous and liable to cheat us. People have published scholarly books on the fear in English literature of the "turning" Moor.

http://www.amazon.com/Turning-Turk-Multicultura...

Looks like the fear of Obama's foreign, Muslim and African connections has deep roots in European-American culture.

Oh and p.s., Lady Diana Spencer, mother of the heir to the British crown, was descended from an Indian woman who was mistress of a British colonial in India. The half-Indian daughter was brought to Scotland, raised among white people, and eventually married a white man - in the early 19th century.

Early on Michelle was making jokes at Barack's expense - and in that interview with the daughters they made fun of his shoes and his pants for being too old and beat-up. He took it very well.

And thanks for reminding us about the shoulder brush and the HIlary remarks. I don't watch TV and ignore the debates as much as possible (that's just me) so I missed a lot of that. I did watch the shoulder brush on Youtube and thought it was pretty good even though I am a middle-aged white lady and did NOT get the reference at first. Even without knowing about the song, his timing and delivery made me laugh. All I saw was him brushing it off and that was funny on its own. Then I watched the music video and made the connection. I call that a universal laugh moment if you didn't have to know the reference to find it funny. He then bent over and brushed off his shoes - I thought that was great.

Re: humorlessness and being "angry." This whole conversation reminds me of how much I keep myself in check about MIddle East issues, because if I so much as list a few Israeli atrocities in a calm voice, I get called angry. The only thing more dangerous in America than an Angry Black Person is an Angry Arab. We Arabs have to step very very carefully around non-Arab people (that includes my African-American sisters and brothers, too) lest our talk of oppression make people uncomfortable.

Angry Arabs are scary to Americans. The US public has been brainwashed for two generations to believe that angry Arabs are going to come and get their mamas. 9/11 made it all too real. Yep. Can't have any Arab anywhere say anything angry because maybe they'll KILL YOU RIGHT LIKE THAT. Because only Arabs kill thousands of people by bombing with airplanes...

Dang. I just want a ticket (RT) to Beirut for my next chemo break scheduled for Sept/October. Hope we can still afford to fly by then.

I like Dimitri Orlov's attitude. Just ignore all of them. In fact I prefer my acupuncturist's attitude: famine, war, environmental disaster - they come and they go. Don't worry about it.

About fourteen years ago I started wrestling with the identity of "woman of color"; I am an Arab-American, my mother is a white Southern WASP, and while I am very identified with my Arab heritage, I have always pretty much felt like a white person. My mother's white middle class influence is quite strong, and I can see how others in the world generally react to me as if I am a white woman of privilege (unless they know me by my Arabic name first, and then they have to do all this work to get past it). Friends in Berkeley began trying to raise my consciousness and "out" me as a woman of color in the closet. I wasn't sure.

The issue has become more salient at times - like after 9/11, but also when working in community with other people of color, especially in grad school. I had just recently come to the conclusion that I have way too many privileges of a white person to call myself a woman of color in honesty (even though all of my friends and peers are alumni of a writing workshop for people of color, and keep telling me to apply).

The Obama cover pushes me back to claiming woman of color identity. This cartoonist uses images of Arabs and Islamic dress to diminish a Black politician, ostensibly to satirize those who would diminish him. The point is, that simply dressing like a "rag head" is shameful and makes you evil. I conclude from this cartoon that as "white" as I think I am, the unconscious of white America will always think my daddy is a (word redacted - I don't use that language). I only have white privilege because I can pass. My Arab self is still shameful in the semiotics of America. My children, who are one quarter Arab and have an Anglo surname, totally pass, but if they carried my name they would still carry the stigma. This cover reminds me that it's stigma.

There's something about the sandals that really bothers me personally, more than the Osama portrait and Michelle as guerilla. Don't ever forget, people, he's the son of a barefoot African -that's what the sandals say. Don't be misled by his Harvard degree and his suits. He is fundamentally backward and not-Western.

If my Arab-American father were still alive to see this, he would just say to me "you see, I was right." We had a lifelong argument in which he claimed that American media and society just want to destroy Arab culture, deny our worth and eradicate anything we have of value. I thought he was exaggerating. Until about a year after 9/11, I thought things were improving and that he was out of touch and paranoid.

Activists in the people of color community say we Arabs must be in solidarity with Africans, Latinos, Asians, because what is done to one of us is done to all of us. I could agree with this intellectually in the past - but this picture spells it out for me emotionally, viscerally. I really, really get it.

Makes me want to start wearing a head scarf (and my Arab relatives are Christians - none of them has worn head coverings since the Catholic church stopped requiring it)

Ron Dellums, former congressman (revered) and current mayor of Oakland (reviled, and justifiably), threw his hat in for Hilary early. But he has lost so much of his political capital and goodwill that Obama really doesn't need to keep an eye on him, because NOBODY CARES. Dellums has really blown it as mayor of Oakland and only the most die-hard of his supporters has a decent word to say about him.

I say he's no worse than Jerry Brown - resting on his laurels.

I don't quite follow. Did you mention that participating in a large (perhaps company-sponsored) healthcare plan means spreading the risk across more people, thus reducing the cost to everyone? And that by requiring everybody to cut their own individual deals, you will give the insurance companies reason to charge everybody the usurious rates they now charge to people who pay for health insurance individually rather than through a group?

This is like that pension lady's analysis of the 401K that I heard on Terry Gross (NPR) yesterday. Privatize and individualize so that the corporations make more money and the workers lose.

Others who are facing cancer - be of faith. I am living with metastatic breast cancer to the liver, lung and spine - 10 months since diagnosis. Every day is a blessing and a gift. Treatment is not easy but living is so sweet. It's natural to have fear in the face of cancer - express your fears - and remember to have faith in God and the natural ability of your body or your loved one's body to heal itself and survive. Love is the answer - love, forgiveness, laughter and prayer.

Also be in communion with nature as much as possible, even if that means sitting in the back yard. Trees, running water, sunshine, physical contact with earth - all of these heal. God works through nature to heal all creatures.

I am so sorry for your loss. I lost my father to lung cancer in 2006 - two months after his diagnosis. We never saw it coming - he was virulently anti-smoking all of his 76 years. I know what heartbreak you must be feeling right now.

My prayers are with you.