Honolulu, we have a problem...

I’m sure that most of us have read about or are at least familiar with the controversy surrounding President Barrack Obama’s place of birth and birth certificate. As I listen and read about this subject, I ask myself, “Would this conversation be taking place if Obama was not 1) an African American man, and 2) if his father was not a Muslim and of African heritage? I will talk about these issues to try to get answers to this double faceted question, or if not actual answers, at least to openly discuss the issue.

One of the citizenship requirements for becoming the President of the United States is to be a natural born citizen, as in born in one of the United States or one of its territories. Our current president clearly fits that requirement or he would not have been able to run for the highest political position in the nation in the first place. I am quite sure that the responsible parties did their due diligence prior to Obama even being considered to run for the Democratic seat, and already had squared that away already. However, there are those who are not only unsatisfied with his job performance thus far, but are also opposed to having a man of African descent in the leading position in this country, and these are the folks who are pushing this “birther” controversy. So much hateful, negative, and disrespectful propaganda has been allowed to circulate about Obama, including signs and slogans promoted by various Tea Party groups and members, and their ideological supporters. I do not think that this level of discourse about our political leader would be tolerated if this man was not an African American. There have been so many instances of this, that neither Obama nor other democrats have said very much about publicly, that this has now become a norm in our political culture. It has even gone to the point of questioning his place of birth, his status as an American, and even as a believer in Christianity. This kind of language, propaganda, and political wordplay was not used towards John McCain, who was actually born in a civilian hospital in Colon, Panama. Hawaii is one of our United States, and Obama’s birth certificate, short and long forms, shows that he was born in a Honolulu maternity hospital. This makes Obama to be a United States citizen by birth, as was his mother, who is Caucasian and was born in Kansas.

So what’s the issue? Is it Obama’s father, who was born in Kenya, and is a Muslim by faith? Or is it the fact that Obama is a Black man and some people who take issue with that will spin any kind of false propaganda that they can in an attempt to discredit him? I think that it’s a combination of these two factors that are driving this negative and disrespectful propaganda machine against our President, and the American media rarely speaks out against it. I do not agree with everything that Obama says and does so far, and we all have the right to agree or disagree and to voice that opinion respectfully. However, we should respect the office of the President that we elected and not smear his family and name with false propaganda, media hype, and political wordplay.

Pushing The Limits

Imagine if a person who was absent from the current American, and even worldwide, media scene for the last 20 or more years suddenly returned and decided to turn on the television. I think that person would be shocked and overwhelmed by all of the changes that have taken place in this relatively short frame of time. We have gone from a standard of television culture that was extremely conscious of what it said and displayed, maybe even overly so in some cases, to one that seems to have no boundaries or standards whatsoever. In the 1950s there was The Lucille Ball Show, where a husband and wife were unrealistically shown as sleeping in separate twin beds. The standards that were to be promoted on television, which was a relatively new media at the time, were not supposed to show men and women even sleeping in the same bed, even if they were husband and wife. Fast forward to the 1970s, with the television show Three’s Company, which was considered risqué at that time. This show featured a plot where a man was roommates with two women, but had to pretend to be gay in order to satisfy the landlord’s aversion to co-ed living situations. Again, this was considered a highly risqué comedy for the time, even though it was set in the “free-spirited” 1970s, and featured no nudity at all or any language that could be at all considered provocative or vulgar. Keep fast forwarding to the 1990s, when cable television was the norm in most American households, and we start to see explicit crime drama shows such as The Sopranos, The Wire, and Oz on HBO. These shows displayed extremely explicit language and graphic images, showing Mafioso- style gangsters in New Jersey, drug dealers and narcotic officers in Baltimore, and even the wild exploits of inmates and guards in a fictional prison. With these shows and a slew of others like them, television seemed to have reached its peak level of its use of explicit material.

The 1990s era of cable television has had an effect on the type of content material is accepted on television today. The content has become filled with murder, sex, scandal, and in many cases, extreme foul language is used to describe these things. The HBO shows mentioned above are from a premium channel, granted, but they are extremely popular and have had great influence on not only cable television non-premium programming as well. So much more is allowed today. The kind of material that would have never been allowed on television when I was a child is now a normal thing on cable television. In addition to the cable channels like HBO or Showtime, much of prime time, non-premium channels play the same type of content in the movies and other shows that they program, but many of them will mask out most of the “curse” words. In addition to the shows mentioned above, other “reality” shows such as Jerry Springer and MTV’s Real World ushered in the current era of Jersey Shore and Bad Girls Club. All of these television shows continue to push the limits on what type of language and content is allowed on television today.

Prejudice is all around us...

There are many examples of prejudice in the world, including those that are based on a person’s race or ethnicity, some that are sexist-based such as sexual preference or gender, and others that are rooted in opinions about social class or age. Different forms of social media are sometimes responsible for the growth and perpetuation of these kinds of prejudices by using certain language or images that support them. Some of these are rather blatant and obvious, such as the statements made by Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, as well as the demonstrations of some of the members of the Tea Party at their rallies. In my opinion, these all use language that spread the growth of racist ideology and deliberately support certain negative racial stereotypes that go back many generations.

Other examples of prejudice in our media that are much more subtle and can fly right past you if you are not conscious of them are found within books, music, movies, and television shows. These are all forms of entertainment and culture that do not always intend to support prejudice, but quite often do. For example, I sometimes watch Jersey Shore just like many of us, and I realize that the behavior shown by these folks does not automatically reflect the quality of all young Italian-Americans. However, I feel that the behavior displayed in this show can unfairly lead to some people having bad perceptions of all people that are within this certain ethnic group and can help the growth of negative stereotypes about them. The same applies to many music videos that display women as only one dimensional sexual characters, or that show images of Black and Latino males as “thugs” or criminals. Freedom of speech and expression are important values, but while we enjoy and exert these freedoms we should be mindful that dangerous negative opinions can be the result of our expressions in many cases.

In addition to news and different forms of media, there are certain laws that also show blatant signs of bias or prejudice towards certain groups of people. Three felony “strikes” equaling life imprisonment (for non-violent offenses), mandatory minimums on drug sentencing (even for first time offenders), illogical and unfair crack vs. powder cocaine laws, and the general over-policing of many people of color and their communities, are laws and policies that are overtly racist and classist. These racist laws and practices have been devastating to many Black and Latino families as well as entire communities, and have the potential to have a lasting effect on these people for generations to come. Over the last 20 years or so, this has led to American prisons being filled with many people that do not belong there that American tax payers have to support. America now leads the world in the incarceration of its own citizens by a huge margin. Just like many examples of images and language found within our media, these laws and policies need to be re-examined to ensure that prejudice and bias are not perpetuated.

Counting my blessings...

The United States is only one small place in this great big world that we all live in, and many of us here cannot understand the idea of not automatically having certain rights or freedoms. These include things that seem so basic to us, such as worshiping and believing as we individually choose, as well as the right to choose to not believe in anything if our hearts and minds don’t guide us that way. Since some people in other countries may not have the same freedoms and rights that we have here in America, we have to be careful not to take these for granted. Instead, especially when we are thinking on the worldwide scale, we should view these kinds of rights as advantages. Even here in America, these freedoms were not always granted to all people. My great grandparents lived in a society where the color of their skin and their ethnicity prevented them from basic freedoms that include, but are in no way limited to, marriage, owning property, or learning to read and write. As much as we may complain about conditions of equality in America today, I’m sure that my grandparents and great grandparents would view the rights that my children and I enjoy today as an advantage over what they had to deal with in their time.

Nafisi is from a community where women are not just expected to cover their faces with a veil to honor a local religious tradition; women are mandated by law to do so. This seems to be a theme that flows throughout the book and is of great important to the plot as well as Nafisi’s character. I wonder what my outlook on life and freedom would be like if I lived in such a society where my rights and freedoms were restricted because of my gender. I can at least comprehend certain restrictions that are based on race and ethnicity, as these are familiar to me from listening to the lessons of recent history that I receive from media and older family members. However, legal restrictions based on gender are not exactly the same as those that are based on a person’s race, and this experience is not familiar to me at all. It is very difficult for me as a male, even as a Black man in America, to understand a female’s perspective of discrimination, which carries different a stigma than race. Men here in this nation, as well as those in other countries around the world, are in positions of power where there are no laws that restrict us based on our gender. While it is preferred and somewhat expected for a man to wear a beard in certain Islamic countries, it is not a law that has a punishment if it is not respected. This is expected for religious and traditional reasons, the same as the wearing of the veil, but no law has been passed by women against men for any reason. In the same way that my foreparents would view my rights as an advantage, I must be careful to not take for granted my own level of freedom as an American male, and realize that I have an advantage over folks in many other countries, especially the females in those countries.