Obama is BUFF!

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!

Has there ever been a black president or prime minister in Europe or Canada? I don't think we are necessarily the ones who need baby steps.

Remember that several European countries have never had any significant populations of African ancestry! Should even very small minorities expect to have one of their own in the top position?

England, France, Holland have an extensive colonial past, but they are the exceptions, not the norm, among European countries. (Finland has a population of which 2.55 are foreign-born, if one excludes the neighbor countries of Russia, Estonia, and Sweden it drops to 1.4%.)

In Sweden, slavery was abolished in 1253 and before that slaves were of local nationality anyway. Our colonial history is next to nothing (Holding Delaware for a short time, and St Barthelemy for almost a century) and there was no immigration from there. Now, people born in sub-saharan African and living in Sweden number 52729 strong, in the age cohort eligble for voting, according to the Swedish Statistics board. Some people of sub-saharan African origin living in Sweden have actually been born in Sweden, but among those older than 30 they are quite few. Stats are as of 2007, but they have not changed all that much since then, and they can be assumed to be correct, give or take maybe a few dozen individuals. The total population of people in Sweden of voting age was at the same time 7251275.

Therefore, those inhabitants of Sweden which were born in sub-saharan Africa constitute about 0.73% of the voting-age population. (For comparison, Wikipedia lists Iowa as having a black population percentage of 2.5%, and the figure is 0.8% in South Dakota). So, for a person of african heritage to reach high positions in Sweden is about as much to be expected as a black governor in SD. Wonder who is the highest politicina in SD of African-American heritage? Any well-known blacks from SD at all? Non that pops into my mind at the moment.

Anyway, the current Swedish Prime Minister is 1/16th African-American. Our Minister of Integration and Gender Equality, Nyamko Sabuni, is born in Burundi to Congolese parents, and has no Swedish heritage whatsoever.

Compared to the USA, I note that Sweden has both an openly gay and an openly bisexual minister. How many baby steps will it take until any US. administration can match that?

During the last election, a story arose that Reinfeldt's paternal great-grandfather, John Reinfeldt, was the illegitimate son of Emma Dorotea Reinfeld, a maid from Eckau in present-day Latvia, and John Hood, an African American circus director from New York.[48] Emma Dorotea Reinfeld later married the Swede Anders Karlsson, but her son John kept his mother's surname.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyamko_Sabuni


Have a nice time!

Peter Gustafsson

[Fencergrl]

Compared to the USA, I note that Sweden has both an openly gay and an openly bisexual minister. How many baby steps will it take until any US. administration can match that?

Canada also has several openly gay members of Parliament. We also have members who are wheelchair bound, Chinese, East Indian and other visible minorities. Briefly we also have had a woman PM in addition to a number of party leaders who were women.

[Purple Fencer]

May I present our current Governor General?
http://www.gg.ca/menu_e.asp#

So he's the Vice Pres, then....hopefully he's more palatable than OURS has been for the last 8 years....

[Fencergrl]

So he's the Vice Pres, then....hopefully he's more palatable than OURS has been for the last 8 years....

Not a Vice President... she represents the Queen (who is our Head of State) in our Parliament and is appointed by the Queen (upon the PM's recommendation).

Recently she had to decide if Parliament should be given a cooling off period, or if the PM should be removed from office and an election should be held. This all came about when the opposition parties banded together and tried to force our leader to step down. She holds much, much more power than a Vice President and has to be knowledgeable in Parliamentary procedures as well as world politics. She is the commander and chief of our military.

Here's a link on our Parliament: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliament_of_Canada

[latenight]

May I present our current Governor General?
http://www.gg.ca/menu_e.asp#

Fair enough!

[Inquartata]

I have resigned my 35+ year membership with the Republican Party, turned my jacket inside out, and joined the resistance... er... um... I mean the Democrat Party.

Yeah...we'll see if you keep it up once the Democratic nominee is the usual sort of old rich patrician white guy again...

[jeff]

Not according to David Alan Grier of The Chocolate News. According to him, Obama barely passes the "brown paper bag test".

http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/c...ws/index.jhtml

Gee, I didn't know this thread had gotten past the subject line's sentiment.

Grier is funny and all (and there is a big class/cultural thing in black culture about just how dark someone is - including the paper bag test), but in the US the legal (esp in Jim Crow era) and overall societal behavior has been much closer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_drop_rule Now that there's a lot more multicultural families and people with mixed descent, I think the "you are either X or Y" mentality will have to go away. Maybe some day there won't be much of an issue about somebody's melanin level at all....

[Inquartata]

And as if there isn't enough racism coming at black people from whites, now they have to manufacture reasons for it internally? I guess it's true: If we were all the same color, we'd gin up prejudice on the basis of eye color, height or some other trivial difference...

Stupid humans.

[jeff]

You're quite right, Inq. It's sad but true, with the larger system of racism long replicated on a smaller scale.

[lindajdunn]

Yeah...we'll see if you keep it up once the Democratic nominee is the usual sort of old rich patrician white guy again...

I was hoping that Sila María Calderón might return to politics and run in 2012.

[Hauptman]

Stupid humans.

QFT.... although somewhat redundant ...

[dcmdale]

...there is a big class/cultural thing in black culture about just how dark someone is - including the paper bag test [...], but in the US the legal (esp in Jim Crow era) and overall societal behavior has been much closer to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_drop_rule Now that there's a lot more multicultural families and people with mixed descent, I think the "you are either X or Y" mentality will have to go away. Maybe some day there won't be much of an issue about somebody's melanin level at all....

I had noticed this, "Is Obama black enough?" discussion, as well as, "Well, he really isn't the first U.S. president who didn't pass the 'one-drop' test: there were several before (especially Harding)" diatribes in the African press before the holidays. (I routinely read several international sources including allafrica.com which collects from 130 English/French papers in Africa).

It seems a little strange to me that communities that should be happy that someone who the voters clearly saw as "black" could be elected to the presidency would be denegating that accomplishment. While I don't believe that race should be a factor either way in the election of a president, it is a significant milestone in American political development that Obama was elected. Yes, several previous presidents might have had some "non-white" blood (suspecting that most of the blood was actually red when viewed from the oxigenated side of the blood system), but they were all perceived as "white" by the electorate and research that suggested otherwise was dismissed as dirty politics. At the end of the day, he is black enough to establish that one can embrace and be proud of a non-white ancestry and not be excluded from the White House.

I can understand certain whites trying to diminish this, but I don't get this attitude among blacks.

[Inquartata]

Whites aren't the only ones who suffer from self-hatred, apparently.