Tuesday, July 23, 2013

The Time Obama Was Mistaken for a Waiter at a Tina Brown Book Party

I thought this note at The Atlantic harking back to a 2008 article by Katie Rosman in The Wall Street Journal -- and accompanied by the perfect picture (from Kevin Lemarque for Reuters) -- expressed the issue of frequent racial assumptions with clarity and brevity:
"In less than six years, Obama has gone from being mistaken for a waiter among the New York media elite, to the president-elect. What a country."
      ...
And yet even as that country elected and then reelected its first black president, the easy assumptions about who black men are have yet to vanish.
(Link from Miss Cellania; interior quote from Rosman's article.)

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