Blacks Support Obama, In Spite Of The Fact That He Is More White Than Me

Racism is defined by Webster as "a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race."

The term bigot is defined as "a person obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance."

Think about those definitions every time you hear somebody throw around the word racist. Except for maybe democracy, probably no other word in the English language is misused more often. Based on the true definition, most white Americans are not racist. They may very well be bigoted, but a closer look reveals that they are more intolerant of a certain culture than they are of skin pigment.

I don't believe that most black people are racist either. In fact, I believe many black Americans suffer from an inferiority complex, resulting in a new form of bigotry, a new form of preference based solely on skin pigment and nothing else.

Why I am I talking about this, you might ask? Well I guess I am intrigued by the candidacy of Barack Obama and the fact that he already has gotten the support of people like Jesse Jackson. I guess what intrigues me is that culturally and historically, Senator Obama is not "one of them". Obama was not descended from slaves. His father was a Kenyan and his mother was white. He didn't grow up in Chicago or any other predominantly black American city. He grew up in Hawaii around white people, and attended a private prep school. He didn't go to Howard or Tuskegee. He went to Colombia, and later Harvard Law, with a bunch of rich white kids.

As far as culture is concerned, I probably have more in common with Jesse than he does with Obama, but that doesn't matter to Jesse though does it? All that seems to matter to people like Jesse is skin pigment. A few days ago we celebrated Martin Luther King day. It was King who said to judge people by the "content of their character" and not their skin pigment. How ironic that the very people who repeat those words over and over have a tendency to not practice them.