Blog Focus: The Obama Effigy In Jimmy Carter's Hometown
Blog Focus is Technorati's daily roundup of the top stories as told by the bloggers of the world. Each day five posts, no matter how popular or nascent, will be selected by editors to portray a general unscientific reaction to discussion points around the 'Net.
What does it mean with the likeness of a black man is hung by one's neck with a rope in the South? Whether it's 2010 or 1810, it roughly has the same racial annotation. That's a lynch, Charlie Brown.
The double halfcaf twist in this isolated incident was the sign draped behind the President Obama effigy: "PLAINS, GEORGIA, HOME OF JIMMY CARTER, OUR 39TH PRESIDENT." Sounds like a purely political statement, no?
But the Secret Service have said they are looking into the incident.
• Posted | National Post — Let's start the political carnival off right. Mary Vallis goes with hey, it happened to Bush too: "This is certainly not the first time an effigy to a U.S. president has been found — much the opposite. It comes with the territory, black, white, or any other kind of president. George Bush has been burned more than once, and sometimes on Canadian soil."
• WyBlog — You won't see Chris Wysocki defending the offender's action, except to the death his/her right to do it: "The Secret Service is wasting their time. This won't be the last time that some nut hangs Barry in effigy. It's political commentary, protected by the First Amendment, even if it is in poor taste."
• Womanist Musings — Renee sees a stark difference between this effigy and others: "Even if there were dolls hung of former White presidents, the threat would mean drastically different things because lynching has never been used as a mechanism of terror within White communities."
• @sontaikle — "I can't believe people sometimes. You can dislike the president, but this is just...wrong."
• Gather — Ah, but is he really black in the racial sense that we know it? Jefferson Locke takes a page out of the meta book: "However, his black heritage isn't tied in with the black experience in America as his father was Kenyan. Thus, perceptions of Obama are skewed by an American history regarding race (with slavery being the American original sin) that he doesn't actually share. This highlights the extent to which race is a social construct."
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