Summary Of David Sedaris's Obama !?

Improved Essays
While Barack Obama is not the first African-American to run for president in the United States of America, he is the first black person ever to become president. The process of him becoming president was met with skepticism, especially from the European people. This is, and the time after the election is the topic American author and comedian, David Sedaris discusses in his nonfictional essay “Obama!!!” from 2013.
Sedaris starts his essay by talking about newspapers and how the village he lived in was too small to have its own paper. From this he smoothly carries on to the large amount of interviews he has been participating in during the year before the election of a new president in the US. During these interviews, he noticed that he would
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Obama would not win and people who thought so were stigmatized as ‘Poor Dreamers’. The sole reason why most European people thought that Obama would not win the election was because of the prejudice “Americans are racists.” The saying is extremely narrow-minded and Sedaris questions the validity of this saying. He cannot help but wonder how Europeans are able to such a conclusion and if they are even better themselves. David Sedaris wrote, “It always sounds false when white people talk about how gentle and colorblind they are. “One thing I’ve learned from my many Asian, Latino, and African American friends is that we’re all brothers under the skin.” Being ‘colorblind’, is not equal to being a non-racist person, but rather a person of power, which is a white person, who refuse to acknowledge the struggles and oppression POC (People of Color) have experienced because of people who belong to their race. It is white people refusing to consider the importance of the oppressive history of POC people, because said oppression was and are still caused by white people and acknowledging that you as a white person are a part of a systematic system that constantly oppresses people based on their skin color makes you uncomfortable. The reason it would make a white person uncomfortable is that they are suddenly no longer as progressive and as open-minded as they thought they were. White people have a habit of forgetting that racism is not, ‘I dislike black people’, but that racism is based on a system of

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