Editorial Comment: DNA: Obama must stand up for African-Americans’ cause

passed a no-confidence vote on them. 
Since these are systems that we use and rely on everyday, when they face such criticism, especially from foreign nations, it is interesting to see how these nations’ own systems operate, and draw parallels.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the world has witnessed two killings which have been dealt with very differently, despite the fact that both parties would want to look at the Zimbabwean situation from a similar point of view.
On February 26, a 17-year old black boy was shot dead by a member of the neighbourhood watch committee in Florida in the United States.
The guard claimed that he shot the teenage boy in self-defence, although there are strong indications that the boy was not armed. The US media in particular has not taken the case very seriously, making us wonder whether they would have reported it differently if a black man had shot dead an un-armed white teenager.
There are a number of issues and lessons to be drawn from the case, racism being the major one.
The February 26 incident, occurring during the month when people in the US celebrate Black History Month has made the world question what it means to have a superpower electing its first black president, and the ordinary black person continuing to be an object of ridicule and racial profiling.
What makes the case also very interesting is that the perpetrator who was initially fingered as white, but is in fact a Hispanic has not been arrested, and the police are now intending to carry out investigations just because some people have voiced their concerns at the callous murder of an innocent civilian.
Why is the US police force protecting the perpetrator, and why is President Barack Obama silent on the issue?
Although he is national president, Africa in some cases would want him to realise that he is first of all a black man, who lives in a world that has tagged black men as criminals, drug addicts and, living on social welfare.
Indeed, President Obama represents and protects a variety of interests, but the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin is one of those interests.
Why should issues about people of colour be issues after people have protested? Why did the law not take its course then?
We also ask the same questions to the US Ambassador to Zimbabwe who is not only a black man, but also knows the racial challenges that African-Americans face in their own country.
No amount of glossing will remove those problems. President Obama in particular cannot afford to be colour-blind just because he wants to play the “Mr Nice Guy”.
From the days of slavery up to the time when the likes of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr stood up against a system that had oppressed black people for more that three hundred years, the whole notion in the civil rights movement was not to have people compromising themselves against the very issues they struggled for.
The objective was to see the African-American man and woman standing their ground, and on par with people of other races.
The Rodney King saga in the early nineties should have been one major lesson. However, when there is a system that makes it is easy to accuse black people of every misdemeanour, it becomes a problem.
There are too many cases to recount, just as the many black men in US prisons and some on drugs. We thus ask President Obama not to be so colour-blind, but instead to be his own brothers’ keepers, for he knows what it means to be black in the US.
The African-American community in less than two years lost two of their most talented artists — Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston.
One minute they lived in that bubble-land as millionaires, and the next minute they were either broke and/or depending on drugs which also killed them.
This should not have happened, especially after the US elected its first black president.
And, president Obama, when the celebrated Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr was treated as a common thief by a white police officer while trying to enter his own home, you were angry, but later just swept that racism under the carpet and pacified the aggrieved parties at a “beer summit” at the White House.
Trayvon Martin’s family and other black people the world over are keen to know how you will deal with this case, for, you have been quick to condemn and judge other people’s systems not knowing that there is as much muck in your own backyard.
We have to make the contrasts although it hurts us. When a gunman killed some Jewish children and their rabbi in France, French president Nicholas Sarkozy was quick to respond and was with them through and through. He even called for a minute of silence to remember the slain children. So too, the French police!
We ask president Obama why he seems to distance himself when ordinary black people in his country would want to see him taking action, the sort of action he takes when dealing with governments that are not in his favour.
The change that African-Americans want is that when one of their own is in a position of authority, he or she will stand up for their cause.