And you thought President Obama singing “Amazing Grace” at the Rev. Clementa Pinckney’s wake in Charleston was a bold statement of his identity as an African- American president.
It was nothing like the president’s “homecoming” to Africa.
It was already enough that Obama is the first sitting president to visit Kenya and Ethiopia.
Tells you what kind of parochial attitudes defined America’s world-view and its sense of leadership when not a single commander-in-chief ever bothered visiting those countries.
This week Obama put them all on the map in a positive way. And not in the typical “bad news” light in which we tend to see Africa, or in a one paragraph newspaper story under the heading “global brief.”
We also saw the president, as they say, “be comfortable in his own skin.”
When was the last time you saw the president damn the birthers and proudly say: “Obviously this is personal for me, the reason my name is Barack Hussein Obama.”
