Well, for the most this week when ever I had managed to get my hands on the newspaper or watched TV, one man has been all over the news i.e., Barack Hussein Obama. I could not lay more emphasis on his name than this (Forget about the fact his name rhymes with Osama, there were even jokes linking him to Osama). Four years ago, no body could have dreamt that a man with a Muslim middle name, who is black with a Kenyan father who had spent his childhood in Indonesia, could be posted to the most powerful job in the world. Obama has many firsts to his name; the first black man to get presidential ticket nomination from any party in the US, the first black man to be elected has the president of US. The roots of his success were laid four decades ago. If it were not for a fifteen-year-old school girl, Claudette Colvin who refused to get down from the bus for a white man, Martin Luther King would not have launched the civil disobedience moment against discrimination against blacks. If Martin Luther hadn’t delivered the famous “I have a dream “ speech which made , then the President Lyndon Johnson sign the Civil Rights Act which outlawed the racial segregation, Obama would not have been able to run for the US Presidency. The Neo Conservatives always define a typical American to be a white educated Christian with a catholic background. By electing a black president Americans, have shattered their own myth. This is very relevant to India, where I find so many people have an obsession to look white. Especially those face cream ads in TV where a dark skinned woman always looses and the white colored woman is always looked upon as a winner. I consider those ads racially demeaning that try to create an inferiority complex among women. What’s even worse is people falling for those Ads, buying these products. I guess things like this happen only in India.
