Actually, I take that back; there are plenty of good bastards out there. Limbaugh’s just pure evil:
On the September 22 broadcast of his syndicated radio show, Rush Limbaugh baselessly claimed that Sen. Barack Obama is “not black,” and went on to ask: “Do you know he has not one shred of African-American blood?” Limbaugh continued: “He’s Arab. You know, he’s from Africa. He’s from Arab parts of Africa. … [H]e’s not African-American. The last thing that he is is African-American.”
There’s so much wrong with this.
- There’s very little of Africa that can be termed “Arab.” Egypt is really the only part that can be said about, and even that’s debatable — I’ll only give it to Limbaugh based on its abortive attempt at forming the United Arab Republic. Maybe Libya. Any further west and you’re into the Maghreb, which is no more “Arab” than Iran. Which, doubtless, Rush thinks is Arab.
- If one is charitable, one assumes Limbaugh is conflating “Muslim” with “Arab.” And it’s true, most of North Africa is ethnically and historically distinct from Sub-Saharan Africa. The Muslim part of Africa covers a wide territory, from Morocco and Mauritania in the west to the northern parts of Sudan.
- That said, Barack Obama’s dad was from Kenya. Kenya is not in North Africa.
Here’s a handy map to help:
See? Anything not in the orange there is not “the Arab parts of Africa,” not in any way, shape, or form. That doesn’t mean there are no Muslims outside of North Africa — there are Muslims all over the world. But historical and geneological ties to Subsaharan Africa are what we think of when we think of “Black” in American society. Barack Obama, Sr., was undoubtedly from Subsaharan Africa, as Kenya is no more in the Arab part of Africa than Spain.
Of course, Rush is just showing his amazing post-racialism here, days after accusing Obama of using “segregationist” tactics in his bid to be America’s first African-American president. That Obama is undoubtedly the literal embodiment of that phrase, with a father born in Africa and a mother born in America, is evidently no reason for Limbaugh not to try to find another way to insinuate that Obama is really a secret undercover Muslim.
Rush Limbaugh is from the anal parts of vermin.
I have nothing substantive to add to this — I agree with the whole post — but your graphic made me think of this.
I really really want to figure out some way to make a new version of this incorporating Limbaugh’s stupidity and a song lampooning him, but I don’t know Flash. -_-
“Kenya is no more in the Arab part of Africa than Spain.”
Kenya is *even less* “the Arab part of Africa” than Spain.
Spain at least has a history of conquest by “the Moors”, who were nominally ruled from the Arab Middle East. That doesn’t apply to Kenya!
God, Limbaugh is so uninformed that you sort of have to interpret it as malice. well, duh. it *is* malice.
Why does this
manvermincloaca have a nationally syndicated radio show and a huge sycophantic audience? Why why why? I despair of this country.Actually, there are significant amounts of “Arab” genetic material in people from the coastal area of Kenya (eg, the major port city Mombasa has some Arab descendants). The Arabian peninsula traders went all down the eastern shore of Africa, from the Red Sea on down past the Horn to the Indian Sea. Population dispersion thousands of miles long, a quarter mile thick (ie, within smell of the sea).
However, Obama’s father was from the inland population, which has no significant sea-trader inheritance. Obama is of the Luo ethnicity/ language. Most Luo live north and west of Nairobi.
God, Limbaugh and his cronies piss me off so much. “What’s the worst thing we could call someone? Oh, a Muslim! Because everyone knows they’re all horrible anti-American terrorists!”
If they really want radical anti-American theists, they don’t even need to figure out where Kenya is. They should look no further than Kansas. Let’s see Limbaugh say anything about the Westboro idiots.
uhm, not to be nitpicking or anything but in your map what you have labelled as Kenya is actually Tanzania. Kenya would be above and to the right of the area you have indicated. interesting conversation though, just thought i would point that out for the sake of those who would be referring to your map in future.
Also, the Maghreb nations you mentioned identify as Arab at least enough to join the Arab League (Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Mauritania, and Sudan are all members). But Kenya, needless to say, is not.
You’re completely right about Limbaugh’s racism and intellectual bankrupcy, but there are a lot of nits to pick with your discussion. “Arab” identity is much more fluid. There are many people who identify as Arab (and who speak an Arabic dialect as a primary language) beyond Egypt, northern Sudan, and the Maghreb. And that doesn’t even count populations like those of the Swahili coast NancyP mentions or the huge Lebanese/Syrian diaspora across west Africa. But you’re also not acknowledging the thousand years of Muslim empires across savanna west Africa, stretching from Senegal to Chad. The people there are almost entirely Muslim, though for the most part they don’t claim to be Arabs (even if many people do claim some Arabic ancestry). It’s also kind of funny seeing Tanzania identified as being part of southern Africa rather than east Africa.
None of that changes your point, of course.
” Do you know he has not one shred of African-American blood?… He’s Arab. You know, he’s from AFRICA. ”
In addition to all the great points offered in this post… wtf is up with deciding that an American from Africa is not an African American?
I mean, it’s like saying, “Oh, she’s not a texan, she’s from North Texas.”
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The point Rush was making (very badly, from the excerpts – the whole Arab thing is just bizarre) was that Obama is not a black person in the sense that Jesse Jackson is a black person. IE, he is not the descendant of slaves who suffered terrible privation during and after the era of slavery. His black ancestors didn’t live through reconstruction, weren’t hounded out of mainstream white economic society in the early 20th century, didn’t go through the civil rights era as members of the indigenous oppressed class.
Instead, the African portion of his ancestry came as a modern immigrant, someone who had a relatively high status and relatively high degree of privilege. He is “black” in the American racial sense (the stupid “one drop rule”) but his intrinsic connection to the mainstream African-American experience would seem to be somewhat tenuous. He seems to have made that connection as an adolescent and as a young man, but by choice, not because that was the only social milieu he had.
To put it another way, I’m about the whitest guy in the world, but I went to elementary school with a lot more black American kids than Barack Obama did. That doesn’t make me blacker-than-thou or mean that he isn’t black, but it means there’s an interesting twist in Obama’s racial story.
Why does this man vermin cloaca have a nationally syndicated radio show and a huge sycophantic audience? Why why why? I despair of this country.
Hell, why do half the people on TV and radio have the audience they have? I remember when Rush Limbaugh was first gaining national recognition and he ended up on Nightline. Koppel asked him what kind of journalist he thought he was. Rush said “I’m not a journalist – I’m an entertainer!” That was it for me for thinking about listening to Rush. Shit, I’ve despaired for this country after watching 1/2 an Oprah Winfrey show.
I’ve never watched Oprah. Clearly I have led a sheltered life.
That’s an interesting interpretation of his words, Robert.
Do you have a link to a full transcript that backs that interpretation up?
—Myca
Nope. All I have is the same four or five sentences you have. What I do have that you don’t have, probably, is access to the back-channel conservative gab that this talking point percolates up in once in a while. So I’m reasonably confident that the whole Limbaugh segment – of which this is a shard – is at least in part making the point that I allege. Can’t prove it to you, and don’t need to. ;)
The Arab thing is silly (as anyone with eyes can see for themselves), and is probably generated from the fact that Obama Sr. was born Muslim. (He later became an atheist.) Muslim=Arab to many of the less-informed. If you hear that Obama’s father was born a Muslim, and was from Africa, you tend to assume “Arab” if you don’t know much about Africa, and most people don’t. So that’s likely the source.
Sure, but it’s the same conservative gab that’s been repeating the ‘Obama is an Arab‘ bit, too. At the link, Media Matters documents a few more instances.
Anyway, it seems more likely that what Limbaugh meant was what he actually said. Occcam’s Razor and all.
Although, by all means, have fun inventing new meanings for his words.
—Myca
Actually, though, your imagined meaning brings up an interesting point. Nobody questions whether or not I’m ‘legitimately’ white because I:
1) Don’t listen to country & western music
2) Grew up in a predominantly black town
3) Use slang
4) Dress primarily in t-shirt & basketball shorts
Why am I not subject to the same sorts of interrogation as to whether or not I’m actually, legitimately white that Obama faces as to whether he’s actually, legitimately black?
Because white people think it’s okay to dictate black people’s identities to them. They think it’s okay to set themselves up as the arbiters of minorities’ racial authenticity, and to grant ‘authentic’ status to those they deem worthy.
—Myca
My mom got an email forward to this effect months ago, and there’s a wackjob on YouTube who was promoting it then. Limbaugh is recycling some old conservative theories about Obama.
Robert’s reinterpretation seems to be based on the Alan Keyes argument from the 2004 IL Senate race, in which Keyes suddenly came out for reparations (thereby losing Republicans who aren’t single-issue pro-life) to bolster his claim to be not just the only real Christian, but also the only real African American in the race. Under this theory, b/c Obama isn’t descended from slaves, he isn’t really “black” in the Alice Walker-esque genetic-memories-of-oppression way.
Pity that no one told the cops who shot Amadou Diallo “don’t worry, he’s African, not really black.” Obama didn’t face the inherited legacy of racial oppression (e.g. the lack of accumulated wealth, education and stability that stems from slavery and Jim Crow), but he gets hit with the non-inherited aspects just as much as any other person perceived as black. He too is born suspect, casually described as a “thug,” and before he became famous probably had no less trouble than Alan Keyes in getting a cab.
I wouldn’t question that you were a “white American” for not partaking of certain elements of some white subcultures, just as nobody is mentioning Obama’s non-exposure to rap music in childhood.
But if your father were a Caucasian immigrant from South Africa, and at the age of two you moved away from him and lived in Saudi Arabia with your black mother and your adoptive Saudi father, and then a decade later you returned to the US and settled on the south side of Chicago among mostly black peers, before moving to the Tennessee backwoods at the age of 18, I might question whether you and I were “white Americans” in exactly the same sense. We didn’t have the same acculturation as children – even though you now know all of Johnny Cash’s songs – and our ethnic history isn’t the same. When people talk about inherited white guilt for slavery, you can legitimately point out “hey man, not me”. When I go to apply at Harvard and get a couple bonus points on the application because my grandfather went there, you’re out of luck because the University of Trans-Nataal where you DO have a legacy is 10,000 miles away. And so on.
That’s more or less analogous to the Obama life story. I don’t question whether he’s “black enough” or whatever bogus gatekeeping function you’re trying to ascribe; but I’m not a moron, either, and if someone says “hey, let’s have economic or social reparations for the descendants of African slaves”, I can say “well, ok, but this guy certainly doesn’t qualify; he isn’t one.” If we’re discussing the effects of the shattering of black families after Reconstruction, we can draw a mental line around him and say “this discussion does not apply within this zone; that’s not his history, that’s not his experience”.
And surely, there are commonalities based on the experience shared by people who have a common visual profile and are thus treated as group members by other people in society. Until a few years ago, Barack Obama had a hard time getting a cab. Applying for a job, nobody would know or care that his dad was Kenyan, he’d just look like another black man to them. No question of that in my mind.
That said, I’m not entitled because of my Special White Skin to say what his history means to him, but I’m permitted the intellectual freedom to note that his story and Thomas Sowell’s and Will Smith’s and Tupac Shakur’s stories, aren’t all the same story.
What I don’t get is, why does Rush even care?
I mean, he wouldn’t support Obama if Obama was white, or purple, or neon green. On the other side of the coin, more than 90% of black Americans are going to vote for Obama, and Rush’s quibbling is not likely to cause them to change their minds. Why is he even interested in defining Obama’s ethnicity? I don’t see anyone on the left poring over McCain’s Scots heritage – do you? What is making Rush Limbaugh want to discuss this? Who’s the intended audience, and what is he trying to tell them?
Guys, can you hear someone whistling?
nobody is mentioning Obama’s non-exposure to rap music in childhood.
He was born in 1961. Who in that age cohort was exposed to rap music in childhood? Most people don’t form a musical taste until adolescence, at which point he was back in the U.S., and they were getting black culture in Hawaii, too. In his memoir, he does talk about his fondness for basketball and Stevie Wonder, but that he felt weird about these likings because they were what white people expected of him. (Sort of like the Chappelle’s Show episode where he feels like he can’t order the fried chicken.)
fascinating question.
I think that some of it also comes from the fact that (as a majority in many senses of the word) you are not in a situation where you are laying claim to “whiteness,” at least not with people who really care one way or another. If you are in a situation where you are trying to claim a marginal benefit (or avoid a marginal harm) and your interests conflict, then people will certainly challenge your bona fides. If you try to claim too much social standing, for example, those with Mayflower pedigrees or those who are descended from nobility may indeed feel that you are not worthy. Or if you try to get “treated like a local” because you’re white, and you are not a local. Etc.
Obviously you can claim many of the intrinsic societally mandated benefits of whiteness without being challenged. That’s a result of racism, of course, and of the numbing of awareness of common behavior that accrues to the majority.ism.
Why is he even interested in defining Obama’s ethnicity?
To undermine the sense of historicity among anyone listening to him who might not like McCain all that much and might be tempted to vote for Obama as a sign of American racial progress. Much of white America feels guilty (even if they won’t admit it) about the history of blacks in this country, and voting for Obama is an easy way of lifting some of that burden. About Kenya we feel no guilt; if Obama is some Kenyan carpetbagger then voting for him holds no emotional resonance for those white people, if they think of him as different from “ordinary” black Americans.
Of course, today, given the opportunity to back up Robert’s (frankly silly) interpretation of his words, Limbaugh doubled down on his earlier claim, describing Barack Obama as of ‘Arab-African heritage’.
Rush Limbaugh is a liar. A deliberate and repeated liar. He doesn’t care what the truth is, he just cares about whether or not he can make up a lie that will hurt Barack Obama.
Just like John McCain.
Just like Sarah Palin.
—Myca
I’ll go with Robert on what Rush meant. My real suspicion is that he was intentially trying to make that point in a way that would reinforce the beliefs of those who think Obama is a Muslim, and he just crossed the line because he neither knows nor cares where that line is. But that’s just an unfounded suspicion, so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt. I still agree with Thene: who cares? Robert sugests, probably rightly, that it is because many white people want to define “victims of America’s treatment of blacks” entirely in genetic terms. But this is both stupid and, almost by definition, racist. Nobody alive today is a victim solely because they cary the genetic material of a former slave or a beneficiary of racism solely because they carry the genetic material of former slaveholders. Many white people in America were decended from people too poor to own slaves, or from European immigrants who came here after the civil war, and many themselves have slave ancestors whose childen passed as white. And many, probably most, blacks in America carry the genetic material of white slave owning rapists. They are victims or beneficiaries because they look like one group or the other. Obama looks black, has worked with and for the black community in Chicago, worshiped in a black church, and married a black woman. He is black. Only a racist would think the genetics matter.
He doesn’t care what the truth is, he just cares about whether or not he can make up a lie that will hurt Barack Obama.
This is probably the real truth about Rush. According to philosopher Harry Frankfurt, this is not technially lying, for a liar must care what the truth is and intend to make you believe the opposit. Instead, Rush is “bullshitting”. http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7929.html
I have to agree with Robert’s read on Obama. Doesn’t mean he isn’t “black”, but he isn’t steeped in the “African-American Experience” the way a Jesse Jackson or MLK was. Indeed, Malcolm X had a white mother (same as Obama), but Malcolm X’s experience as an African-American (and he was a Muslim, too, so the comparison is even stronger than Jackson or King) as qualitatively and quantitatively different from Obama’s.
Doesn’t mean whitey in Alabama or Georgia is going to vote for the Obama, but would have voted for Jackson, just means that in the “in touch with the African-American Experience” department, Limbaugh is right.
Lu, Oprah is based out of Chicago. She’s up there with the Governor, Mayor of Chicago and the Archbishop of Chicago as far as her comings and goings being covered. She’s a major local industry. I know someone who works for Harpo Studios, in fact. I’ve watched 2 of her shows, which was about all I could stand. Few people like to talk about the fact that when she started out she did her share of Jerry Springer-like shows, but she upped her game after a couple of years.
When Sen. Obama’s campaign first started to be considered, the local media here seriously put forward the question of whether or not he’d get black support based on the idea that he wasn’t “black enough” – that he had not been brought up in (for lack of a better phrase) what urban blacks see as the normal “black American” environment or experience. He lived in a highly multi-ethnic area, he went to good schools, he had a white parent, he attended and graduated from an elite college, he speaks standard American English, etc., etc. The general idea being asserted was that he had not experienced racial discrimination; at least not in the way that, for example, someone born in a black neighborhood in the middle of Chicago has.
Understand that it wasn’t just the MSM. It wasn’t just whites trying to define what being black is. The local black owned and/or oriented media were exploring this as well. I saw “man-on-the-street” interviews of blacks who said “No, he’s not really black.” I don’t know how much play that got nationally, but it got a lot around here for a while. Of course, it’s not an issue now. Except for whacknuts like Rush.
Ditto what mimi tu said at #7. That arrow ain’t pointing to Kenya.
RonF-
I have noticed that famous black Americans inverably get criticized by the black community for one of two sins:
1. Acting too black, and basically becoming minstrils for white entertainment, and
2. Acting too white, and trying to sell out the black community to fit in with white society.
Now, I understand that in some situations, these are both legitimate complaints, but these complaints inevitably pit the black community against itself, and put successful blacks in a no-win situation. It is horrible that the black community does this to itself, but it is an inevitible result of the white racism and the devaluation of black culture. It is wrong when blacks do this to themselves, but it is inexcusible when whites join in, and hypocritical for the whites doing it to say it is okay for them because blacks do it to themselves.
Too much Vicodin is bad for your thinking-processes, it’s a proven fact.
He is “black” in the American racial sense (the stupid “one drop rule”) but his intrinsic connection to the mainstream African-American experience would seem to be somewhat tenuous.
Then why all the foofaraw about Rev. Wright? (Did someone forget to alert the media?)
Obama says in his own memoir that he first went to Wright’s church because most of the people with whom he worked while a community organizer in Chicago were church-going people who felt mistrust toward someone who didn’t have a church. I think the reason that he didn’t disown Wright until Wright had personally tried to destroy Obama’s campaign (by exploiting new-found notoriety to tell the media that Obama was just lying like a typical politician) is that Obama felt a lot of gratitude toward Wright for bringing him to Christianity and helping him understand the link between the importance of Christianity in the African American community and the struggles that community has endured. Wright is a very important part of Obama’s reconciliation of his disparate parts — the African father, the liberal white mother, the childhood in Indonesia, the teenage years in Hawaii, the emphasis on academia from his parents and grandparents — to understand himself and where he came from.
I look at some white voters’ joy at having Sarah Palin on the ticket, and I have to realize that it’s kind of like my appreciation for Obama. I don’t share his specific racial background (as I’m Asian rather than black/white), but it feels like such an immigrant story to me and I identify with that. It is an identification that has less to do with race than with those components of struggling to belong somewhere; of being the reason why your parents and grandparents work hard and the emotional burden of being expected to fulfill their dreams; of determining how much of your work will be to meet your material needs and desires and how much will be to help your less-fortunate brothers for whom you feel some kind of responsibility.
Palin serves that function for people who identify with a wholly different experience: of being not the outsider, but the person who grew up with one big set of hometown friends; of working hard in the family business while you raise a family; of having an unshakable certainty almost from birth of where you came from, what you believe and who is standing behind you.
Decnavda, I believe you’re right. To me the fallacy is the whole concept of “acting white” and “acting black”, as if a specific pattern of behavior links to a specific race. Get away from those stereotypes, which are quite destructive, and both 1 and 2 go away.
Egypt is not the only Arab country in Africa. Algeria, Tunisia, and Morocco are all predominantly Arab despite the presence of Berbers and other minorities. Could the original commentator please justify how Algeria or Tunisia are not Arab countries in “any way shape or form?” I am pretty sure I just covered the Algerian Revolution in my Politics of the Middle East Class because it is an Arab country.
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Rush Limbaugh is a liar? Rush Limbaugh is a racist?
Next you’ll be telling me that bears like to use wooded areas for lavatory purposes.
I know this is an old blog, but I was working my way thru Google Images when your map caught my eye. I kept on hoping it was joke even after reading your entire post.
Rush Limbaugh is an ignorant demagogue trying to connect Obama to his supposed Muslim faith and Kenyan Birth.
But you, you need to do serious research before you prattle off on how ignorant someone else is. First you misidentify Tanzania as Kenya, second your text excludes the Maghreb from the Arab world while your map correctly identifies it as part of it. I hope the rest of your blog portrays more intelligence than this entry!
Sure there are non-Arab minorities in basically all the (orange) North African countries but the majority population identifies themselves as Arabs.
Go to Wikipedia and type in the Arab League or Arab Nationalism for greater understanding.
“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”
I am not disagreeing with Obama’s place of origin nor how horrible and idiotic of a person Rush Limbaugh is, but saying Kenya is not part of the Arab world is incorrect.
Now this is not stating Kenya is an Arab state, but there are arabic kenyans who have been living on that land since the Arab World came to them hundreds of years ago. Ethnic Somalis are a large majority minority in Eastern Kenya who are there due to European border creation during the Berlin Conference. Arabic is one of the official languages of the state of Somalia and is one of the traditional languages of the Somali people second only to Somali.
Your map is a very VERY basic and watered down version of ethnicity of Africa which uses modern borders as ethnic borders which is counter productive since the two do not coincide (generally). So the sphere of arabia does extend to Kenya very easily and believably. Now lets say Rush was so ignorant that he relates Arab with Muslim and just goes with that, it is also very possible (more so possible) that he meant a Muslim from Kenya.
But all that said, he is an idiot and please get more precise maps before making a point.
Re: Now this is not stating Kenya is an Arab state, but there are arabic kenyans who have been living on that land since the Arab World came to them hundreds of years ago.
Probably more importantly, the Kenya/Tanzania coast has a strong Arabic cultural influence- Swahili has a lot of Arab loanwords, though it’s a Bantu language, and portions of the region were ruled by Arab kings up until the arrival of the British (in the case of Zanzibar, the Arab sultanate didn’t fall until the mid-1960s).