"Welcome to our world," writes Sophia A. Nelson of the Washington Post, as she describes how the "sliming of Michelle Obama" echoes the experience of many professional black women, like herself. In her Sunday, July 20, 2008 OpEd piece, Black. Female. Accomplished. Attacked, Nelson writes of the terrific hardships Mrs. Obama has had to endure - allegedly because of her skin color - while on the campaign trail.
What else could it be but because Mrs. Obama is black? She's had to face recent "campaign travails" such as "being called unpatriotic for a single offhand remark, dubbed a black radical because of something she wrote more than 20 years ago and plastered with the crowning stereotype: "angry black woman."
AND THEN, to top it all off, "being forced to undergo a politically mandated 'makeover' to soften her image and make her more palatable to mainstream America."
Oh, the senseless hardship and cruelty!!! I need a hanky.
Apparently, this "is nothing new to professional African American women." Oooh noooooo, ah ah. They've been brutalized by the way white people look at them before. You know those looks, the ones where they're "being looked at, as black women, through a different lens from our white counterparts, who are portrayed as kinder, gentler souls who somehow deserve to be loved and valued more than we do."
Nelson actually digs back 157 years ago in order to equate Sojourner Truth, a former slave, abolitionist, preacher and advocate of women's rights, with the agony of today's black women. Nelson had the audacity to write, "Her [Sojourner Truth] ringing question, demanding why black women weren't accorded the same privileges as their white counterparts, still sums up the African American woman's dilemma today."
Nelson should bong herself over the head with a "get real" stick, and pretty damn hard.
Please, somebody, tell me that black women haven't become this whiney-ass insecure?
Tell me that this Nelson person is an isolated case? Somebody? Please?
For purposely race baiting, for disrespecting the memory of Sojourner Truth by comparing her trials with such petty-ass garbage as "being looked at," for even suggesting America's opinion of Mrs. Obama should NOT be based on the quality of character reflected by her words and deeds but instead on the color of her skin, today's "Bird Award" goes to Sophia A. Nelson, who has shamefully earned it.
In Honor Of Sojourner Truth
