Lynching Barack Obama: How Whites Tried to String Up the President

LYNCHING BARACK OBAMA How Whites Tried to String Up the President Molefi Kete Asante Asante, the author of African Pyramids of Knowledge, argues that the infamous historical acts of lynching black men in the United States might be used to describe how many people of the white Right Wing have used various techniques to "string up" presidential objectives. Barack Obama as the first black President of the United States met immediate resistance from a white majority that voted for his opponent in 2008. This was repeated in 2012. Thus, both John McCain and Mitt Romney received a majority of white votes in the two elections yet Obama won the elections. Asante contends that whites felt that they had lost "their" country and the only way to act was to prevent Barack Obama from asserting himself as a black man. Asante shows in a compelling manner, by choosing many of the attacks on Obama found in the media, that the President was tied up, roped, and hung out to dry by the white Republican Right. Nevertheless, as Asante explains Barack Obama championed some of the most progressive actions ever addressed by a president. He was unwilling to be cowed by the aggression of the frightened, fickle, and fearful virtual mob that wanted to "take their country back" from the President who was not one of them. "Asante's work reveals a profoundly reflective intellectual engaged in a balanced and authoritative analysis of the serious assaults on the personal and administration of the first black President of the United States. His metaphor is apt and well-placed in the analysis." ---Ama Mazama, co-editor, Journal of Black Studies. Other books by Molefi Kete Asante available from Universal Write: The Dramatic Genius of Charles Fuller African Pyramids of Knowledge