RACISM still remains MAN'S UGLIEST TRAIT

The 13 photographs show Obama's grandmother, father, older brother, stepfather, all have skin colour other than white. They show him with a group of his black relatives in Kenya. The photos are accompanied by captions ridiculing and loathing the chequered behaviour of the clan.

They also show photographs of Obama's white mother with her Kenyan husband and then with her Indonesian husband and their daughter. They show Obama with his white grandparents with descriptions that are at best disparaging. The captions also implied explicitly that Obama was a Muslim.

The people who originated these photographs urged that they be sent "to all the 200 million Americans who have the Internet" because, in their words, "CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN, and the New York Times will not show these pictures."

My hat is off to all of the news organisations whose names were therein mentioned.

It was said that race is the original sin of American democracy. That sin, however, is not uniquely American. It is prevalent, alive and kicking, in every part of the world. It is hatred, prejudice and discrimination by another name. 

Adolf Hitler was obsessed with ideas about race even before he became chancellor of Germany. He and other Nazi leaders viewed the Jews not as a religious group, but a "poisonous race which live off other races and weaken them".

During World War II, the Nazi leadership set about their "ethnic housecleaning" policy, which included murder and annihilation of those belonging to the so-called "enemy races". Their "Final Solution" fervour resulted in the deaths of approximately six million Jewish men, women, and children - two-thirds of the Jews living in Europe before World War II.

Ironically, it was the Jewish immigrants driven out of Europe by the racially charged atmosphere to the US who were instrumental in the meteoric rise of this young nation to the forefront of  world economic and military power as well as technology.

The word "genocide" entered the English lexicon in the late 1990s. It is about removing certain ethnic groups from a certain territory either by force or by death. Such cruelty found its manifestation in the mass killing of Kurds in Iraq, and those between Croats and the Serbs, at different

times throughout history, in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, to name a

few.

If there is  one book that tells us everything about the monstrosity of racism in the US with the fewest written words, it is the work by James Allen published in 2000 called "Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America". The book is an anthology of postcards and photographs collected over the years by Allen. They speak volumes about the virulence of "white supremacism" and its violence in America.

In collecting for the book, Allen bought many of these items from families' keepsakes.

"In America", he said, "everything is for sale, even a national shame."

From the book, silent images of race hatred speak vociferously.

And tears came when I looked at the photograph of the lynching of a black man in Fort Lauderdale, Florida that took place in 1935. The brownish gelatin paper showed a group of well-dressed white men and women gathered around the badly beaten corpse of a black man hanging from the tree as if it were an ordinary social ceremony. There were four little girls in the photograph, smiles of simple pleasure spread across their otherwise angelic faces.

Lynching of blacks was first documented in 1882 and still occurred as late as 1981 when two Ku Klux Klan members randomly picked a black 19 year old in Mobile, Alabama, slit his throat and hanged him from a tree across from his house. 

In the 1960s, "coloured" people in America still had to ride in the back of the bus, eat in the back of some restaurants, enter some buildings through different doors, and use separate restrooms.

Racism, hatred, prejudice does not only cut both ways; it cuts in all and every way.

At Penn Station in New York not too long ago, when I was about to board a midnight train back to Washington, a group of black teenagers circled in on me shouting wildly and repeatedly "Go back to China".

A white lawyer who shared the same office space with me, one afternoon called out for me to join him and his white colleagues for a pizza. "You will like it," he said, "It's a dog meat pizza."

Taking into account the US's long and violent history of racism, Obama's rise to

presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2008 presidential race is indeed history in motion. Some scholars admitted candidly they did not expect it to happen in their lifetime.

So Hillary Clinton and the feminist groups can complain as much as they want about the sexism in America they claimed had rendered her defeat. They could claim she had successfully broken the glass ceiling. But nothing compares to what Obama has had to overcome during the primaries, and faces over the next five months, simply because he is black.

So far Obama has managed to rise above the race issue. There are relatively few reports of what his foot soldiers and campaigners have encountered. Those people know first hand it has not been pretty, and it will get less pretty in the months ahead.

All things considered, Obama is a magical example that shows how far Americans have come and how far they still have to go to protect liberty and equality in their country, to truly become "One nation, Under God."

An American writer - Walter Howerton, Jr, in his review of the book "Without Sanctuary" said: "We are human, and sometimes that is a terrible thing to be." 

To trounce the banality and malice of humanness, racism and prejudice must have no place in any society, and never in our heart.