BARACK OBAMA

Several weeks ago the Wall Street Journal had an editorial with the headlines "Is Obama Black Enough?" The gist of the non-WSJ columnist's message as I recall was that Barack Obama is biracial with a West Indian father and a caucasion mother, brought up in a middle class oriented environment. The article cited straw presidential polls of African Americans who would be voting for Hillary Clinton instead of B. Obama by a wide margin. The editorial went on to say that the reason for not voting for potentially the first African American for President of the USA, was that he did not have the ancestry of slavery so central to the culture and thinking of today's African Americans. What reminded me of the WSJ editorial of several weeks ago were two articles today: 1) A New York Times article regarding a follow up story on the fire in the Bronx also several weeks ago where 9 children and one women died. The owner of the home had two wives, is a polygamists, and an immigrant from Mali, Africa. The NYT article was about the practice of polygamy in West Africa as it has been brought to the US. The practice of polygamy has long been imbeded in the West African culture as well codified in the Islamic tradition. The article interviewed a women from Ghana who came to the US legally; met and married a man from Ivory Coast, starting a family. The women came home one day to find a teenager in her house who was her husband's second wife that he had acquired and had imported from Africa. The article went on to highlight issues of legal status in the US of these women as well as the cultural traditions/family, clans practices continuing today. If a women objected to her husband acquiring more wives, she was shunned not only by her community here in US but she was also shunned by her family/clan in Africa. The article likened polygamy as still practiced in Africa, apparently here as well, to the enslavement of women. 2) the second article of today was by the columnist Clarence Page, initially addressing how black immigrants from Africa achieved the highest educational attainment of any population group on a series of national tests. C. Page went on to cite the 2004 black Harvard profesors Lani Guinier and Henry Gates Jr. research on black Harvard undergraduates. Between 1/2 to 2/3 's of Harvards black undergraduates were West Indian or African immigrants, their children, or of biracial couples. The make-up of other Ivy League or other elite universities undergraduates are also of a similar mixure of West Indian, African Immigrants, or children of biracial couples. The high scores on the tests were by this same Immigrant, West Indian, and biracial children. C. Page asks retorically if elite schools are padding their racial diversity numbers with blacks who do not have a history of American Slavery in their families. He questions whether affirmative action fulfills its original intent. C. Page goes on to say that the original intent of Affirmative Action was to provide reparations for slavery and this has morphed into a promotion of diversity irrespective of any American Slavery Ancestory.

I have lived through the 1960's when many of the Civil Rights laws were written and publically debated, editorialized, and discussed amongst people far more knowledgable than myself. From what I recall, affirmative action was a device to recognize that black & women applicants, who had similar qualifications as white males, should be equally regarded in the application process whether admissions to educational opportunities or jobs, etc. The justification for affirmative action was that it was only fair that blacks and women who were equal, be considered equal. Over time, ideas and language has indeed morphed. Instead of using the descriptive "blacks", the substitute word was now "minorities" with the express exclusion of Asians from the minority lexicon. Currently" Minorities" has blacks and latino imbedded in the implication. So, words have morphed and I guess that the concept of "fairness" which had enormous support from the general American public has morphed into "reparations for an ancestry of slavery" in the black community. I see a conflict brewing as several states have reversed their affirmative action legislation. Is affirmative action reparations or fairness now?

I do know from my own ancestry "Honicky" is an Americanization of Honyesky meaning "belonging to the manor or house". The reference to the Slavic (slave) of South Central European or Serf from Eastern Europe or Russia, is one who belonged to the land and was bonded to that land, was bought and sold along with the land/manor prior to 1862. (Read Nikolai Gogol "Dead Souls") At the same time as Abraham Lincoln was declaring the Emancipation Proclamation, Czar Alexander Nikolaievich II, abolished Serfdom throughout Russia, what is now South Central Europe and the territories under the influences of the Orthodox Catholic Church extending to the Mediteranian Sea. By the middle of the 19th Century, in what is considered Western Civilization, slavery emerged from the shadows of feudalism and into the light of Voltaire, Locke, and eventually Jeffersononianism here in our country, and was abolished. I recall the meaning of Honyesky from my mother who was talking about her grandparents and their history in Czeckoslovakia. Today, vestiges of institutionalized slavery exist in the developing world, and, if we believe that the 20,000 number of women in immigrant or Morman polygamy situations here in USA is true, slavery persists here.

I would like to know from you, what is your interpretation of the intent of the editorial question "Is Obama Black Enough?" Has "reparations for previous slavery" been at the heart of affirmative action all along? Do these questions need to be resolved before a black American president can be elected? Are there other questions or issues that need to be raised and resolved before an American President can be elected by a color blind nation?

From my point of view, the Founding Fathers adopted a Constitution that outlined a process to achieve the ideals embodied in the second sentance of the Declaration of Independance. "We hold these trueths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, amongst which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Nothing is mentioned about justice, reparations, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, etc. It seems to me that the intent was to take the situation as we find it, and go from there. We are all born with a clean slate, initially that slate is written upon by our families and our communities. As we grow up, that slate is then written upon by ourselves as we make choices of how we will behave towards one another.