Last month, the Berlin Wall did not come down. We did not put a man on the moon. We did not defeat the Japanese. Yet for all the festivities and hearty celebrations, we might as well have done one of those things. We instead did something arguably more momentous: we elected the first African-American president of the United States. Think about that for a minute. A nation has come full circle from denying African Americans the right to vote to putting an African-American in the highest office in the land. Barack Obama has forever shattered a racial barrier as old as the republic and in doing so has given new meaning to the word hope itself.
Yet every time I turn on the TV, I hear some combination of the following words in any given sentence: Obama, first, African-American, president. The mainstream media is almost acting as if we all have amnesia and have forgotten who our new president is. Their constant reminder of our new president’s skin color is not only irritating but degrades the magnitude of his victory as well.
Every four years, Americans elect to the presidency the candidate they’d be more comfortable seeing in their living rooms for four to eight years. As the president’s term progresses, regardless of the success of the president’s policies, Americans grow accustomed to seeing their president’s face on television, in the newspapers, on the Internet, etc. By continuously calling Obama “the first African-American president” as opposed to “the president” or “President Obama,” it is almost as if the media is saying to the public on a nearly constant basis: “Hey guys! Can you believe you elected someone president who’s different? He’s not like us, isn’t that refreshing?!” This unnecessary prefix to Obama’s title that the press has given him reminds us of his “otherness,” albeit in a nicer way than the Republicans’ nasty advertisements, and prevents a country that once grappled with the morality of slavery from being conditioned to viewing its first African-American president as any other president. If we continue to view Obama as our first African-American president instead of simply our 44th president, then the potential will be limited for other “skinny kids with funny names” to follow in Obama’s footsteps.