Attacking Malia Obama?: What has the world come to!


I guess racism isn't dead after all. The ubiquitous "Kumbaya" moment that many of us felt after the election of Barack Obama has clearly worn off. And now people feel that it is perfectly fair to attack his children.

Malia Obama, who just turned eleven, was in Italy last week. She wore a tee-shirt that had a peace-sign on it. This picture was posted in many different publications and on many different blogs (mine included). What occurred on one blog (Free Republic) was simply some of the most blatant, in your face, racist vile I have seen since Obama got elected. I won't reprint many of them here, out of respect for the First Family, but the posters used every negative stereotype one could use to describe black women and black families. What was really shocking about these posts is that apparently the website and its posts were supposed to be moderated. This means that someone allowed the posts to go on and did not do anything about it until someone started to complain. How crazy is that?

What really irritated me about these posts was the simple fact that Malia Obama has not even been in the public eye much since her father got elected. In fact President Obama has made it clear from the time he was a candidate that children of politicians should be off limits. Clearly that went out the window very quickly.

I sincerely feel bad for Malia and Sasha. Here are two young children who have not said or done anything to warrant any commentary. Yet they suffer from the plight of a racist segment of American society that views their family as second class citizens, even at the same time that their father is the leader of the Free World. Notice the crazy irony? Its as if slavery never ended, Jim Crow never died and the Civil Rights Movement never occurred. My biggest hope is that Malia didn't see or read any of the comments that her picture caused. And my even bigger hope is that those who posted their comments would come to the surface and make themselves known. But the odds of that are slim. Racists move in fear and darkness because if they came to light, they couldn't handle their own vitriol. The only way to get back at them is to simply continue being America's First Family.

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