In an interveiw with People magazine, Obama has shared some of the devastating racism he has experienced in his life. I got my hands on an advance look at the article, and here are some of the examples of racism he has observed in his life first hand.
- None of the local butchers sell ground Shi Tzu or his favorite guilty pleasure corn-weiner-dogs.
- While he was campaigning, a citizen once asked him who his favorite rap artist was.
- For his own safety, the Secret Service would make him sit in the back of the bus while they threw his former friends and associates under it.
- Angela Merkel asked him if he new of a good Ethiopian restaurant in DC.
- His new Wii U didn’t have a default mulatto skin tone built in for his Mii.
- Harvard admitted him.
- In his Junior High School presentation of Freaks the Musical, the part of the albino was given to that weird, white kid with the pink eyes instead of him.
- He was denied admission to Cheyney University because he didn’t meet their purity requirements.
- Joe Biden keeps confusing him with the help.
- At a Hollywood fundraiser, he was once mistaken for Jay Pharoah. The real Jay Pharoah was moonlighting as the valet.
- It’s okay for Nancy Reagan to consult an astrologist, but if Michelle reads goat entrials just once……
- The only way to make his black coffee tolerable is to add white powder and white liquid to it.
- It was unacceptable to fill out his Scantron test sheets using black ink.
- Robert Byrd never invited him to any of his rallies.
- When given a choice at school lunch, kids preferntially choose the chocolate milk.
- He was always picked last for basketball, certainly due to his white ancestry.
- He often heard his girlfriend make hushed remarks to her friends such as, “Well, THAT stereotype is certainly a myth.”
- His SAT vocabulary prep book included the word ‘niggardly’, misspelled ‘def’ and had incorrect definitions for ‘stupid’ and ‘bad.’
- While growing up in Hawaii, he was constantly hassled by the man for smoking doobies while black.
- Natural dark chocolate just wasn’t good enough. Europeans had to invent a white variety.
- His grandmother took him to see Song of the South. He didn’t like it, and he didn’t inhale, though he was seen humming Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah for days.
- He was required to read Huck Finn in High School English.
- Sickle cell anemia.

I would argue that his being mistaken for a valet has more to do with his skillset than his skin color. Even Bill Clinton mistook him for a barrista once.
People are always asking me for advice on building enterprise-class I.T. environments. It’s not because of my skin color.
And people are never asking me for fashion advice, and it has nothing to do with my sexuality.
Pingback: The Racism That Reaches Even The Obamas | Tai-Chi Policy
I was surprised to find out that having a fellow shopper ask for assistance in getting something from a high shelf constituted bigotry. As a 6 foot 2 inch man, I’m used to such requests, which have always been polite and respectful. I never realized I was a victim of bigotry. This must be one of those “micro-aggressions” we’ve been hearing about lately (an “aggression” so small, it takes a microscope to see it).