This apple has fallen far from the tree

Jun 29, 2008 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,
My friend doesn’t get it. He wants to know if there is a point to me asking why SNs’ cartoonist, Paul Harris seems intent in stressing that Barack Obama is a “black man”.

The point is that Mr. Harris, though he probably means well, is engaging in racial stereotyping.
Who is Paul Harris, or rather what exactly qualifies him, to define what makes a person a “black man”? Is Mr. Harris trained to conduct such racial profiling?

As I pointed before, Mr. Obama’s mother was a Kansas born Caucasian woman and he was raised by his maternal grandparents.

An online discussion with The Washington Post’s political reporter Jonathan Weisman just this week shows why Mr. Obama’s effort to transcend racial tagging is important.

Question from a reader in Virginia: Obama’s new ad (which plays a lot in Alexandria) shows pictures of his mother and grandparents, playing up his white family. Until now he’s been “African American”; now suddenly he’s a white Midwesterner?

During the primary Hillary was criticised for changing her image too many times. Won’t Obama be criticised for doing the same thing?

Jonathan Weisman: I haven’t heard that criticism, but it is striking. Not a single picture of his father. Now, that really is consistent with his upbringing.

He really did not become immersed in black American culture until he left college and went to Chicago. The great irony is that he is much more white than black, beyond skin colour.

Mr. Obama (who incidentally is my candidate for president) is trying to rise above the kinds of racial labeling that Mr. Harris gleefully caricatures in the SN.

In taking another look at the cartoon I realise that Mr. Harris is making another (not very subtle) point with the specific racial characters he chose to portray.

But here again he is commenting on racial issues and practicing a kind of racial stereotyping for which he is evidently not qualified.
This apple has indeed fallen far from the tree.
Justin de Freitas