(ThyBlackMan.com) He must literally be perfect daily to be considered simply competent…
Despite passing health care reform, despite preventing this recession and subsequent financial crisis from sliding into a full-blown depression, despite then passing the most aggressive financial reform legislation in U.S. history, despite having the most aggressive Department of Justice when it comes to combating mortgage fraud, despite being the only U.S. President in to express his disapproval of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, despite overseeing the end of our nearly decade-long military occupation of Iraq, President Obama’s approval ratings continue to fall. Democrats, they say, are demoralized. He’s not the man they voted for. Republicans are suspicious, “Is he even an American?” they say.
While I am not a blind Obama loyalist and realize the man has made some mistakes, I nearly choked the other day when Dylan Ratigan actually had the nerve to compare Obama to former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. Palin is a mean-spirited narcissistic idiot who knows less about U.S. history than my seven-year-old son. The argument, despite his ratings-hungry bravado, is this: 
They are both big on style, flash and personality but both lack substance, and presumably since he uses Palin as the example, intelligence.
And this is not the only “progressive rant” against Obama airing recently. There has been a constant assault from the “left” media for months. He’s not tough enough. He’s too aloof. He’s surrounded by nonprogressives. His economic team is too establishment. He needs to push more aggressively for Don’t Ask Don’t Tell. He’s not listening to the unions. He’s turning his back on progressives. He sounds too much like Bush. His policies are too similar to Bush. He’s not a real progressive. He should fire Rahm Emanuel, Timothy Geithner, Larry Summers, Robert Gibbs, and just go ahead and insert any member of the administration who is not currently kissing progressive ass.And that’s just from the left.
The criticism from the right: He’s a Communist. He’s a Muslim. He’s a racist. Wait no, he is neither racist or communist but a follower of black liberation theology. He wants to take your guns. He wants to push through reparations. He doesn’t care about the civil rights of white people.
He wants to take your liberty. He wants to take over private industry. He wants to nationalize the banks. He wants to tax you to death. He wants to indoctrinate your children. Blah, blah, blah.
And then, there is the other criticism. He’s not listening to the Congressional Black Caucus. He hasn’t defined a Black Agenda. He’s not fulfilling his commitment to Latinos and pushing aggressively enough for comprehensive immigration reform. And then, when he does talk about reform, it’s not comprehensive enough because it doesn’t include a guest worker program, why? because he is apparently doing the biddings of the unions.
Got that? He’s a communist, a Muslim, who is no better than Bush as dumb as Sarah Palin and he apparently has no balls.
I know folks think that whenever someone criticizes Obama, someone else makes the charge of racism, as if his race somehow gives him cover. But the constant dissing of the President from the left, right and the middle, sounds a bit like the “Black Tax.”
“The black tax is the price blacks (and other minorities) pay in our daily lives because of racial stereotypes. Like a tax, racial discrimination is persistent, pervasive and seemingly inevitable — as in ‘Nothing in life is certain save death and taxes,'” wrote Jody Armour, a professor at USC School of Law.
It’s essentially the idea that blacks, women and other minorities when working in traditionally white and male environments must work twice as hard and be twice as smart to be perceived as merely competent.
Just like the first black student at an integrated school, whose classmates constantly stare at him from a distance, whose instructors constantly underestimate and look for the slightest mistake as justification for their own stereotypes about his people, everything the President does is carefully observed, critiqued, dissected and then reiterated, from the perspective of whomever is doing the dissecting, and recylced into the world as some assessment of who he is, what his secret intentions are, what his ulterior motive is.
This man has undergone more uninvited pop psychoanalysis, administered by clearly unlicensed therapists — from Glenn Beck to Jane Hamsher of the “progressive” Firedoglake.com — than any public figure. And that’s including the once drunkard but then born again George W. Bush and the womanizing Bill Clinton.
Even when the media admits that the criticism is sometimes irrational — the whole “Why do Americans continue to think he’s a Muslim narrative” or “Why do Americans refuse to believe he is an American” narrative — they then back it up with some analysis making that bigotry and fear his fault as well. Thus, the he is to exotic. He is too aloof. He did not join a church immediately when he moved to Washington D.C. He has a funny name. He spoke out in support of the constitutional right of Muslims to build a Mosque in New York City.
It is not enough that Obama works hard and tries to do the right thing daily.
He must literally be perfect daily to be considered simply competent. And that my friends is the ultimate black tax.
Written By Devona Walker
