President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama say they have been mistaken for valet and wait staff on their journey to the White House despite the progress America has seen in race relations.
The First Couple sat down for a candid conversation with People magazine on racism in American amid a fervid debate on the issue after a raft of white-on-black killings. "There's no black male my age, who's a professional, who hasn't come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn't hand them their car keys," the President told the magazine, confirming that he had experienced being taken for a valet.
The President was joined by the First Lady for an interview on, "How We Deal with Our Own Racist Experiences," that will hit the stands on Friday. On her part, Michelle Obama related that even as the First Lady, during a visit she took to a Target (Departmental) store, the only person who came up to her in the store was a woman who asked her to help take something off a shelf. "Because she didn't see me as the first lady, she saw me as someone who could help her. Those kinds of things happen in life. So it isn't anything new," she said.
The interview came amid chatter that the First Couple were insulated from — or had grown out of — the racial discrimination that black experience every day and that the President was cold to the suffering of African-Americans.
The First Lady contested that. "I think people forget that we've lived in the White House for six years," she said. "Before that, Barack Obama was a black man that lived on the South Side of Chicago, who had his share of troubles catching cabs."
She also recalled another incident when Obama was wearing a tuxedo at a black-tie dinner, and somebody asked him to get coffee.
There was have other eyewitness accounts of how Obama was subjected to prejudice even after he entered elite circles. A Wall Street Journal reporter once wrote about how she witnessed Obama get the rough end of the stereotype at a New York City book party hosted by Tina Brown in 2003.
The reporter had been chatting with Obama at the party and when they finished their conversation, another guest walked up to her and inquired after the man's identity, admitting that he had mistaken him for the wait staff.
The man, an established author, "sheepishly he told me he didn't know that Obama was a guest at the party, and had asked him to fetch him a drink. In less than six years, Obama has gone from being mistaken for a waiter among the New York media elite, to the president-elect," the journalist, Katie Rosman, had written.
However, the president said in the People interview that the small irritations or indignities that he and his wife experienced are nothing compared to what a previous generation experienced.
"It's one thing for me to be mistaken for a waiter at a gala. It's another thing for my son to be mistaken for a robber and to be handcuffed, or worse, if he happens to be walking down the street and is dressed the way teenagers dress," Obama said.
President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama say they have been mistaken for valet and wait staff on their journey to the White House.
The First Couple sat down for a candid conversation with People magazine on racism in American amid a fervid debate on the issue after a raft of white-on-black killings. "There's no black male my age, who's a professional, who hasn't come out of a restaurant and is waiting for their car and somebody didn't hand them their car keys," the President told the magazine, confirming that he had experienced being taken for a valet.
The President was joined by the First Lady for an interview on, "How We Deal with Our Own Racist Experiences," that will hit the stands on Friday. On her part, Michelle Obama related that even as the First Lady, during a visit she took to a Target (Departmental) store, the only person who came up to her in the store was a woman who asked her to help take something off a shelf. "Because she didn't see me as the first lady, she saw me as someone who could help her. Those kinds of things happen in life. So it isn't anything new," she said.
The interview came amid chatter that the First Couple were insulated from — or had grown out of — the racial discrimination that black experience every day and that the President was cold to the suffering of African-Americans.
The First Lady contested that. "I think people forget that we've lived in the White House for six years," she said. "Before that, Barack Obama was a black man that lived on the South Side of Chicago, who had his share of troubles catching cabs."
She also recalled another incident when Obama was wearing a tuxedo at a black-tie dinner, and somebody asked him to get coffee.
There was have other eyewitness accounts of how Obama was subjected to prejudice even after he entered elite circles. A Wall Street Journal reporter once wrote about how she witnessed Obama get the rough end of the stereotype at a New York City book party hosted by Tina Brown in 2003.
The reporter had been chatting with Obama at the party and when they finished their conversation, another guest walked up to her and inquired after the man's identity, admitting that he had mistaken him for the wait staff.
The man, an established author, "sheepishly he told me he didn't know that Obama was a guest at the party, and had asked him to fetch him a drink. In less than six years, Obama has gone from being mistaken for a waiter among the New York media elite, to the president-elect," the journalist, Katie Rosman, had written.
However, the president said in the People interview that the small irritations or indignities that he and his wife experienced are nothing compared to what a previous generation experienced.
"It's one thing for me to be mistaken for a waiter at a gala. It's another thing for my son to be mistaken for a robber and to be handcuffed, or worse, if he happens to be walking down the street and is dressed the way teenagers dress," Obama said.
The 2014 worst PR award goes to First Lady Rosmah Najib
First Lady Rosmah Najib Is all publicity, good publicity? That definitely seems to be what the big boys at Putra Jaya think. Because nothing else could explain their behaviour in in the last few weeks, which has been a case study on how not to do public relations.“You don’t have to be a ‘sting journalist’ to spy on somebody. Camera photographs and video are now ubiquitous.
Najib has closed himself up, till he sees all things thru’ narrow chinks of his cavern.” What face did one have before one’s parents were born? It’s like asking a sunflower what it was before it was a sunflower, or the wind before it was wind.Like the experiment quoted above, a true Master never asks to see something that isn’t already there.
Hit me baby one more time: How Najib won by losing ‘Person of the Year’It was hard not to like Najib and to be seduced by Rosmah the hope he held for the fake early childhood education programme, Malaysia , given her ambitions for shaking up the old order of oligopolies and cronyism. One of the strangest conditions afflicting humans goes by the unwieldy name of prosopagnosia, which is a disorder of perception where a person’s ability to recognise faces is severely impaired — including frequently the ability to recognise one’s own face. Interestingly, the syndrome is not related to memory dysfunction, impaired vision or a learning disability. Also, other aspects of vision such as making out objects remain intact.
We never know who is recording what we are saying. Every e-mail we send is ‘discoverable’ and we should be prepared to see anything we wrote splashed across a blog or a chatroom.”Cyber-terrorism is an ever-present danger in India, but our defences are very far from being robust. The risks are incalculable:This potential cornucopia will be jeopardised by the increasingly sophisticated and sinister modus operandi of cyber terrorists. . The National Informatics Centre, which oversees the government’s vast computer networks, is shockingly vulnerable a quarter-century after it was set up.Little wonder that half of our bureaucrats list Google or Yahoo email addresses and use them for the most confidential of correspondence. We are one giant sieve.treatment used by governments on grounds of national security.Condemn the shameless abuse of the Sedition Act 1948 and other oppressive laws silence the voice of dissidents and Prime Minister Dato Seri Najib Tun Razak’s political adversaries.
That the selfie is some kind of a clue to the times we live in is difficult to argue with. Its ubiquity is everywhere, if one may be allowed to mirror the superfluous abundance of the phenomenon in question. It seems to be an impulse that is difficult to fight, and multiplied with the popularity of smartphones and social media sites, the world becomes a receptacle for countless images of the self. It is in the eyes of many, a sign of the narcissism that pervades this age, as our love for the self spills over into the firm conviction that the world needs us on endless rotation, as we go through the excruciatingly trivial moments of our life.
This is both true and a little unfair. For at one level, the selfie is just an extension of an age-old desire- to somehow pin down the slippery nature of the self. It is a central paradox of our lives that we are unable to grasp our being as others grasp it. We see everything in the world through an intensely experienced entity that we know to be ourselves but we cannot simultaneously turn the gaze inwards in any satisfying way. The mirror produced the earliest selfies, but the mirror showed the self as a tremulous being, that was always dying to escape from itself, with every little movement indicative of subsequent flight. One could watch oneself completely still, but one could only see oneself seeing oneself in the mirror. The mirror owned the person looking into it; it froze the watcher into being a mirror image of itself.
Trying to shoot oneself in the mirror was a fruitless exercise for we wound up shooting ourselves in the face, so to speak. Obscured by the camera, the attempt mocked us for it was an existential dead-end, the erasure of the very face that we wanted captured; erased by our effort to capture it. The camera that we used to shoots ourselves, became the reason why we could not be shot. A satisfyingly neat irony, if one likes that sort of thing.
The selfie is an attempt to escape the confines of the mirror. It uses profusion as a way of grasping the self in motion as it navigates different roles and contexts. It still needs one hand to be used in the capture of the self, but it does allow us to be doing things we do without being locked up in the mirror. We might be tied to an arm’s length of ourselves, but the selfie captures for future consumption many versions of a quicksilver self. The selfie is a photograph without carrying with it the studied formality that accompanies the act of being photographed. Beginning with its name which suggests that the self is an endearing pet of some kind that one scratches the belly of while cooing adorable names to it in a made-up language, the selfie breaks down the apparent solidness attached to the idea of an individual into a gel-like intermediate state, one that avoids concrete definition and easy categorization. The self is imagined as a blur of different intentions, rather than as a settled mode of being.
It is also part of a need to get inside the self a little better, to unravel it in different ways. This takes many forms, including the rash of self-administered quizzes that we can take on social media sites. Which tyrant from history do you most closely resemble? What kind of salad vegetable are you? Myself watercress. We look for some understanding and then flaunt it to the world, seeking validation which is easy to get- some obliging person will ‘like’ this form in which we present ourselves.
Like the signature, the selfie is an affirmation of one’s existence from one’s own perspective. There is a phase in life when we scribble our signature everywhere; this in spite of the fact that as a carrier of identity, the signature is completely detached from any kind of reality. It does not evoke who we are, except through a scribbled form of a code called language. The selfie is at some basic level, a similar exercise in multiplying a sensation of the self.
Like the signature, the selfie is an affirmation of one’s existence from one’s own perspective. There is a phase in life when we scribble our signature everywhere; this in spite of the fact that as a carrier of identity, the signature is completely detached from any kind of reality. It does not evoke who we are, except through a scribbled form of a code called language. The selfie is at some basic level, a similar exercise in multiplying a sensation of the self.
But the selfie does much more for it is part of a much more significant shift beginning to take place. As the popularity of Instagram establishes, the selfie is the beginning of a more visual culture that is starting to take root. On Instagram, the individual does not merely become the subject of the camera; she becomes the camera. What gets presented is a non-textual account one’s life that follows a very different grammar of communication. The world of text is one of logic and sequence where meaning strives to universality while the narrative that is made up of a series of photographs comes with no prefabricated meaning and it is the viewer who puts it together in her head as she deems fit. The selfie, as the basic unit of a visual vocabulary, becomes the starting point of a fascinating journey in a new kind of narrative.
That does not mean that the selfie is not narcissistic but that it is much more. The human need to come to terms with the strangeness of one’s physical self even as we celebrate its familiarity has found a new mode of expression. The unbundling of the individual is in progress, and the need to understand the self much better and to circulate this newfound knowledge to the world in ever newer ways. The self is being imbued with much greater significance but it is also simultaneously in the process of being grasped in finer detail. The universe is no longer something that resides outside; even the individual is being imagined as one. The selfie looks out at the world but also wants to look in and find something that has so far eluded grasp.
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