A name

What is in a name? What is the language of racism? George Washington Carver was born a slave. His mother named him after the first American president when she and he were still slaves. A woman who thought more of her country than it thought of her and her son. George Washington Carver was a brilliant scientist. He worked with Booker T. Washington another brilliant scientist born into slavery and bearing the last name of our first president.

Barack Hussein Obama should be our next president and perhaps he will be, but the hoop he has to jump through caused by racism has been cast upon him by generations of flag waving, bible toting Americans who are as unfamiliar with what is really in the Bible as they are with what is in the Constitution of the United States of America. The real issue with Mr. Obama is not whether he’s qualified. The real issue is his race. He’s more than qualified. He’s brilliant and charismatic too. He’s assembled a brilliant team of advisers and he will make a great president, but his biggest problem is that he lives in the United States of America where a black man is still just a nigger. They won’t use those words on the news or political advertising. They are just below the radar.  They tip-toe around hot button words like that, but the implication is there. Mr. Obama dignity as a man and a brother in our human race is further denigrated because his middle name is Hussein. Barack Hussein Obama is named well as the name Hussein translates to “handsome,” and he is one handsome man.

Barack Hussein Obama is my brother and we are all brothers and sisters of the same father and mother. We are not Arabs, Jews, Catholics, Protestants, Irish, Polish. Those are terms that divide us. They may have been appropriate at some time in our past but they are not germane now. We all have hearts, brains, eyes, ears and mouths. We all need to eat. We all have blood and we all need air. Some of us are women and others men. Some of us are obese, some are slim, but we share the basics. We are all children of the same creator. We may have different names for the creator but that doesn’t change the central fact that we’ve all sprung from the same source.

Epithets like nigger, wop, polock, spic, gook, mick, rag head, haji fill our language. Epithets are the verbal expressions of fear and prejudice. They divide us. In any other country that may be acceptable, but here we are the United States of America and it must end now.