During one of his campaign stops last year, then-democratic candidate Barack Obama gave a rally speech that was interrupted by a group of hecklers holding up signs in the balcony of a college gymnasium.
Nothing seemed to be out of the ordinary until the television cameras focused on the group. They were black people shouting out anti-Obama slogans, holding up signs decrying Obama for, among other things, not being "down" with black people. I remember thinking what do they want black people to do? Vote for McCain and keep bitching?
So now, a group of brothers calling themselves the Black Is Back Coalition staged a demonstration declaring the president, "white power in blackface." I wonder if these are the same dudes in the gym who got quickly shuffled off by security.
The coalition said:
We recognize that Barack Hussein Obama is white power in blackface," civil rights activist Omali Yeshitela, chairman of the Black is Back coalition, which arranged the protest, called into a megaphone as the group marched outside the mansion's gates. "He is a tool of our imperialist enemies, and we demand our freedom. And we demand that Obama withdraw all the troops from Afghanistan right now.
I remember cats like this in college, whom we jokingly called the "blackness police." Their mission was to serve as a barometer of who was being black enough, as though there were a set of black standards and practices that all African Americans had to follow, lest they run the risk of being called out.
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