Obama's rise proves America's greatness

If you are an American citizen whose ancestors were African -- which is practically all of us -- and if you are planning to vote for Barack Obama to be our new president, then you might appreciate something that our forefathers used to say: "An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile--hoping it will eat him last."
 
To me, that is what the office of the presidency of the United States really represents. I don't see it as a position of "actual" power. The Elected One is at the mercy of a congress, a senate, and the wholly unpredictable mood swings of the people. He attempts to implement his vision for the country and is praised or blamed for whatever portions of his vision he's lucky enough to sneak through. Virtual chaos materializes from mid-air and he has four short but sleepless years to keep said baton from touching the ground.
 
We, the people, are the crocodile, and he, who sacrificed himself to the water's edge, is someone who always comes out of it with gray hair and a post-White House memoir filled with Monday morning quarter-backing. It doesn't really matter what race he is, what his religion is or in which ways he may have used sex to ease the monumental stress of being World Commander--the crushing reality is that no matter how noble, cunning and brilliant he is--the Presidency by its very description is nothing more than glorified figurehead.
 
And it's with that opinion that I would like to explore why I, personally, am so passionate about electing Obama.
 
Throughout this campaign, people I greatly admire have advanced the ridiculous notion that Black Americans, a group that have been nothing more than a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of Captain Washington's boots for 500 years, shouldn't vote for Obama "just because he's black" and should be prepared to hold him "accountable." But I ask you what self-respecting human being wouldn't vote not to be at the bottom of their own foot for once? And what mistakes could Obama possibly make that Clinton, Carter, Reagan and Bush haven't already made?
 
What White candidate was as American or anywhere near Obama's level of strategic and charismatic brilliance?  Tell me who has as much heart!

I don't even consider Obama a Black Man.
 
To me, he is an African Half-Caste; a Biracial. But at this moment in time, he is also my favorite person in the world.

Human beings are visual creatures. And just as I came to adore President Bill Clinton via "repetition" of my human eye waking to his handsome face guiding the world day in and day out, just as I was forced to acknowledge White people's validity via endless images of Queen Elizabeth's face plastered across the "Official Stamp of Sudan/Official Stamp of Kenya"--now millions of White children may wake to the image of a Black family "repetitiously" engaging their little White lives, whether they like it or not, day in and day out. And by default, this repetition will chip away at the "social construct" that says Blacks aren't just as human as everybody else.
 
How any black critical thinker could dismiss the enormity of such a revolutionary visual is beyond me. It really doesn't matter what Obama does in office if you want to know the truth, because for teenagers bleaching their skin all across Africa the notion that their inferiority is innate and not self-imposed will now be seriously questioned, not just by the Obama generation of Black children, but by the coming generation of the whole world's children.

One of my most famous poems, "Mysterium," contains a line that many Pan-Africanists criticized me for. It goes: "America is my husband now...and he is good to me."
 
What they don't realize is that the line refers to my sons, both of whom are Black Americans. It refers to my freedom in America to reject someone who wants to marry me and to write books containing my true thoughts. It refers to my much criticized admission that I would not personally give birth to a mixed race child, though I deeply love them as fellow humans. It refers to the fact that though "race" is a social construct, "color" is not a social construct.  And though I did not become an American citizen until 1993, it refers to the fact that I am raised by Black Americans and that I have lived off and on in this country for almost 30 years.

Like so many African immigrants who despise B.E.T. and the NAACP--organizations that employ the words "black" and "Colored" while subconsciously calling for our erasure by denying the "physical blackness" in black people--I appreciate that Barack Obama is not asking me to erase myself.
 
I appreciate the fact that Obama does not discuss the subject of his blackness or Africa the way one of his most famous detractors discusses it--like some grave site to be lamented and lined with a warm reef as he strolls the boulevards of Paris and graces the light skinned pencil-nosed upper crust Spoon-heads of Ethiopia, but never once sets foot in the land "his people" came from, West Africa, even after being paid seven figures a year to Professor the professed. But, of course, romantic Black professors always fancy themselves as being from Egypt and Ethiopia--two overrated dumps they never speak of in the manner one regards a grave site.
 
Obama's message, however, is quite different. His promise is that my beautiful black sons actually have a future..."as themselves."
 
Obama is not asking the White lady in Ohio to move to an all-Black neighborhood.  He is not telling gay people that they need to be "tolerated" instead of fully loved. He is not saying that Japanese must eat in Mexican restaurants if they don't want to. He is not claiming that Black schools are incapable of educating Black children.

Brave, beautiful Biracial Barack Obama is taking the ugliness of America 's past and proving the greatness of America by saying that everyone should be accepted as themselves!

That we must all respect and try to understand each other's differences and work together for a common hopefulness that our children will inherit, differences included.  And that is why I and the rest of America are passionate about Obama. Not because he's got a tan.
 
My vote for Obama is my prayer that the beginning of the end of the B.E.T. Era is at hand!