Family upset at store for denying request, and angry Internet postings The Associated Press updated 12:16 a.m. CT, Wed., Dec. 17, 2008 EASTON, Pa. - The father of 3-year-old Adolf Hitler Campbell, denied a birthday cake with the child's full name on it by one New Jersey supermarket, is asking for a little tolerance. Heath Campbell and his wife, Deborah, are upset not only with the decision made by the Greenwich ShopRite, but with an outpouring of angry Internet postings in response to a local newspaper article over the weekend on their flare-up over frosting. "I think people need to take their heads out of the cloud they've been in and start focusing on the future and not on the past," Heath Campbell said Tuesday in an interview conducted in Easton, on the other side of the Delaware River from where the family lives in Hunterdon County, N.J. "There's a new president and he says it's time for a change; well, then it's time for a change," the 35-year-old continued. "They need to accept a name. A name's a name. The kid isn't going to grow up and do what (Hitler) did." Deborah Campbell, 25, said she phoned in her order last week to the ShopRite. When she told the bakery department she wanted her son's name spelled out, she was told to talk to a supervisor, who denied the request. Karen Meleta, a spokeswoman for ShopRite, said the Campbells had similar requests denied at the same store the last two years and said Heath Campbell previously had asked for a swastika to be included in the decoration. "We reserve the right not to print anything on the cake that we deem to be inappropriate," Meleta said. "We considered this inappropriate." The Campbells ultimately got their cake decorated at a Wal-Mart in Pennsylvania, Deborah Campbell said. About 12 people attended the birthday party on Sunday, including several children who were of mixed race, according to Heath Campbell. "If we're so racist, then why would I have them come into my home?" he asked. The Campbells' other two children also have unusual names: JoyceLynn Aryan Nation Campbell turns 2 in a few months and Honszlynn Hinler Jeannie Campbell will be 1 in April. Heath Campbell said he named his son after Adolf Hitler because he liked the name and because "no one else in the world would have that name." He sounded surprised by all the controversy the dispute had generated. Campbell said his ancestors are German and that he has lived his entire life in Hunterdon County. On Tuesday he wore a pair of black boots he said were worn by a German soldier during World War II. He said he was raised not to avoid people of other races but not to mix with them socially or romantically. But he said he would try to raise his children differently. "Say he grows up and hangs out with black people. That's fine, I don't really care," he said. "That's his choice." URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28269290/?gt1=43001

Many people insist that 'the first black president' is actually not black The Associated Press updated 10:10 a.m. CT, Sun., Dec. 14, 2008 WASHINGTON - A perplexing new chapter is unfolding in Barack Obama's racial saga: Many people insist that "the first black president" is actually not black. Debate over whether to call this son of a white Kansan and a black Kenyan biracial, African-American, mixed-race, half-and-half, multiracial — or, in Obama's own words, a "mutt" — has reached a crescendo since Obama's election shattered assumptions about race. Obama has said, "I identify as African-American — that's how I'm treated and that's how I'm viewed. I'm proud of it." In other words, the world gave Obama no choice but to be black, and he was happy to oblige. But the world has changed since the young Obama found his place in it. Intermarriage and the decline of racism are dissolving ancient definitions. The candidate Obama, in achieving what many thought impossible, was treated differently from previous black generations. And many white and mixed-race people now view President-elect Obama as something other than black. So what now for racial categories born of a time when those from far-off lands were property rather than people, or enemy instead of family? "They're falling apart," said Marty Favor, a Dartmouth professor of African and African-American studies and author of the book "Authentic Blackness." "In 1903, W.E.B. DuBois said the question of the 20th century is the question of the color line, which is a simplistic black-white thing," said Favor, who is biracial. "This is the moment in the 21st century when we're stepping across that." 'Obama is whatever people project onto him' Rebecca Walker, a 38-year-old writer with light brown skin who is of Russian, African, Irish, Scottish and Native American descent, said she used to identify herself as "human," which upset people of all backgrounds. So she went back to multiracial or biracial, "but only because there has yet to be a way of breaking through the need to racially identify and be identified by the culture at large." "Of course Obama is black. And he's not black, too," Walker said. "He's white, and he's not white, too. Obama is whatever people project onto him ... he's a lot of things, and neither of them necessarily exclude the other." But U.S. Rep. G. K. Butterfield, a black man who by all appearances is white, feels differently. Butterfield, 61, grew up in a prominent black family in Wilson, N.C. Both of his parents had white forebears, "and those genes came together to produce me." He grew up on the black side of town, led civil rights marches as a young man, and to this day goes out of his way to inform people that he is certainly not white. Butterfield has made his choice; he says let Obama do the same. "Obama has chosen the heritage he feels comfortable with," he said. "His physical appearance is black. I don't know how he could have chosen to be any other race. Let's just say he decided to be white — people would have laughed at him." "You are a product of your experience. I'm a U.S. congressman, and I feel some degree of discomfort when I'm in an all-white group. We don't have the same view of the world, our experiences have been different." 'One-drop' rule The entire issue balances precariously on the "one-drop" rule, which sprang from the slaveowner habit of dropping by the slave quarters and producing brown babies. One drop of black blood meant that person, and his or her descendants, could never be a full citizen. Today, the spectrum of skin tones among African-Americans — even those with two black parents — is evidence of widespread white ancestry. Also, since blacks were often light enough to pass for white, unknown numbers of white Americans today have blacks hidden in their family trees. One book, "Black People and their Place in World History," by Dr. Leroy Vaughn, even claims that five past presidents — Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge — had black ancestors, which would make Obama the sixth of his kind. Mix in a few centuries' worth of Central, South and Native Americans, plus Asians, and untold millions of today's U.S. citizens need a DNA test to decipher their true colors. The melting pot is working. Yet the world has never been confronted with such powerful evidence as Obama. So as soon as he was elected, the seeds of confusion began putting down roots. "Let's not forget that he is not only the first African-American president, but the first biracial candidate. He was raised by a single white mother," a Fox News commentator said seven minutes after Obama was declared the winner. "We do not have our first black president," the author Christopher Hitchens said on the BBC program "Newsnight." "He is not black. He is as black as he is white." A Doonesbury comic strip that ran the day after the election showed several soldiers celebrating. "He's half-white, you know," says a white soldier. "You must be so proud," responds another. Pride is the center of racial identity, and some white people seem insulted by a perception that Obama is rejecting his white mother (even though her family was a centerpiece of his campaign image-making) or baffled by the notion that someone would choose to be black instead of half-white. "He can't be African-American. With race, white claims 50 percent of him and black 50 percent of him. Half a loaf is better than no loaf at all," Ron Wilson of Plantation, Fla., wrote in a letter to the Sun-Sentinel newspaper. Attempts to whiten Obama leave a bitter taste for many African-Americans, who feel that at their moment of triumph, the rules are being changed to steal what once was deemed worthless — blackness itself. "For some people it's honestly confusion," said Favor, the Dartmouth professor. "For others it's a ploy to sort of reclaim the presidency for whiteness, as though Obama's blackness is somehow mitigated by being biracial." Then there are the questions remaining from Obama's entry into national politics, when some blacks were leery of this Hawaiian-born newcomer who did not share their history. Linda Bob, a black schoolteacher from Eustis, Fla., said that calling Obama black when he was raised in a white family and none of his ancestors experienced slavery could cause some to ignore or forget the history of racial injustice. "It just seems unfair to totally label him African-American without acknowledging that he was born to a white mother," she said. "It makes you feel like he doesn't have a class, a group." There is at least one group eagerly waiting for Obama to embrace them. "To me, as to increasing numbers of mixed-race people, Barack Obama is not our first black president. He is our first biracial, bicultural president ... a bridge between races, a living symbol of tolerance, a signal that strict racial categories must go," Marie Arana wrote in the Washington Post. He's a bridge between eras as well. The multiracial category "wasn't there when I was growing up," said John McWhorter, a 43-year-old fellow at the Manhattan Institute's Center for Race and Ethnicity, who is black. "In the '70s and the '80s, if somebody had one white parent and one black parent, the idea was they were black and had better get used to it and develop this black identity. That's now changing." 'Transitional period' Latinos, whom the census identifies as an ethnic group and not a race, were not counted separately by the government until the 1970s. After the 1990 census, many people complained that the four racial categories — white, black, Asian, and American Indian/Alaska native — did not fit them. The government then allowed people to check more than one box. (It also added a fifth category, for Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders.) Six million people, or 2 percent of the population, now say they belong to more than one race, according to the most recent census figures. Another 19 million people, or 6 percent of the population, identify themselves as "some other race" than the five available choices. The White House Office of Management and Budget, which oversees the census, specifically decided not to add a "multiracial" category, deeming it not a race in and of itself. "We are in a transitional period" regarding these labels, McWhorter said. "I think that in only 20 years, the notion that there are white people and there are black people and anyone in between has some explaining to do and an identity to come up with, that will all seem very old-fashioned." The debate over Obama's identity is just the latest step in a journey he unflinchingly chronicled in his memoir, "Dreams from My Father." As a teenager, grappling with the social separation of his white classmates, "I had no idea who my own self was," Obama wrote. No single definition In college in the 1970s, like millions of other dark-skinned Americans searching for self respect in a discriminatory nation, Obama found refuge in blackness. Classmates who sidestepped the label "black" in favor of "multiracial" chafed at Obama's newfound pride: "They avoided black people," he wrote. "It wasn't a matter of conscious choice, necessarily, just a matter of gravitational pull, the way integration always worked, a one-way street. The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around." Fast-forward 30 years, to the early stages of Obama's presidential campaign. Minorities are on track to outnumber whites, to redefine the dominant American culture. And the black political establishment, firmly rooted in the civil rights movement, questioned whether the outsider Obama was "black enough." Then came the primary and general elections, when white voters were essential for victory. "Now I'm too black," Obama joked in July before an audience of minority journalists. "There is this sense of going back and forth depending on the time of day in terms of making assessments about my candidacy." Today, it seems no single definition does justice to Obama — or to a nation where the revelation that Obama's eighth cousin is Dick Cheney, the white vice president from Wyoming, caused barely a ripple in the campaign. In his memoir, Obama says he was deeply affected by reading that Malcolm X, the black nationalist-turned-humanist, once wished his white blood could be expunged. "Traveling down the road to self-respect my own white blood would never recede into mere abstraction," Obama wrote. "I was left to wonder what else I would be severing if I left my mother and my grandparents at some uncharted border." URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/28216005/page/2/

I was excited and energized to blog today to tell everyone about an opera I saw last night. I love history, have read, and research the story and life of Margaret Garner. This story intrigues me years ago, I even read the inspired story Beloved that Toni Morrison wrote based on Margaret Garner. The story last night was full opera; the story was very intense in song. The voices deep, sympathetic, harmonizing, soulful, and at times upbeat transformed this ordinary story into an event. However, the happiness that I have been experiences for a month to see this Opera was drowned in sadness. My cousin called from Mississippi to tell me that groups of her friends were attack walking on the side of the road to a friend’s house. I been living in a major city for a while and it never occurred to me anything but I listened. She told why they were killed – I immediately thought gang violence. Then I thought mmm, maybe, maybe not. It’s still much rural and not more than 10k people. Then she told me the horror of the last weeks of people being attack before she sobbed and told me they were attacked and killed for wearing an Obama t-shirt. They were 14. What do I tell her, nothing I listened. I told her to be careful. There has been increasing violence in many small towns throughout this election and no one reports it. I doubt that we ever hear about this story and many like this. However, it dampened my spirits and made me wonder, how much farther do we need to progress. The story of Margaret Garner is one of hardship, fear, love, and death. This story is the most significant and controversial of all antebellum fugitive slave stories. Margaret Garner's family was the "property" of a Kentucky plantation owner. One winter night, Margaret and her family joined an escape party and crossed the frozen river to find freedom in Ohio. Their hiding place was soon discovered and surrounded by pursuers. Margaret declared she would kill herself and her children before she would return to slavery. As her husband was overpowered and dragged from the shelter, Margaret seized a knife from the table and killed her daughter. She then attempted to take the life of her other children and to kill herself, but she was captured and jailed before she could complete her desperate work. The trial resulted in a major legal debate about whether she should be charged with murder or "destruction of property." Margaret Garner was found guilty of "destruction of property" and was remanded back to slavery. The Garner trial addressed crucial issues in constitutional law and posed key questions at the core of the rift in the Union. To abolitionists, the case decisively illustrated the pathology of slavery. Debate concerning the constitutionality of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, demanding that citizens assent to and assist in the capture of fugitive Blacks, was integral to the case. Also relevant were the all-important states' rights issues, which in the Garner case pitted a charge of murder in Ohio, a "free" state, against a mere "destruction of property" suit in Kentucky. The latter issue was hotly contested at the time in the courts of public opinion, and both sides saw in their differences nothing short of the simmering roots of civil war. So, I am asking everyone: How Much Further Do We Really Need To Go? Do you think things will get better in the years to come? How do we mend these feelings of hate or do we? How can people still evoke so much hate and scare people to believe they are not worthy? This is a disclaimer: I know some will want to participate and ask what about the flip side of this and violence among others: all comments are welcome; however, I would like everyone to be respectful and to try and focus on this situation. Pitting one situation or occurrence against another does not make a situation better or help us work through problems; it only makes the question, situation, go around and around. I want answers or even possible solutions not events that are compared that does not help us move forward. Thank you