"It's Obama!"

We played this guessing game my co-teacher gave me as a warm up for an open class. The students would get five hints and had to guess the right person.

First person:
"I am American"
Everyone begins shouting at the top of their lungs, "Obama!, Teacher Obama!"
They were right.
The rest of the questions were a little tougher but this one stood out to me for a lot of reasons.

It made me realize that Obama (who doesn't even have a first name in this country) is the face of one of the most powerful countries in the world. At the same time, and this is the sad part, all black people are type cast as Obama. Al Rocker, Samuel Jackson, Michael Jordan, Bill Cosby, and even Lebron James are all Obama in the eyes of my students and the rest of their generation so my colleagues say.

This is stereotyping at its finest. Koreans and probably other nations too that aren't obsessed with the NFL or NBA can't name another successful person of African descent. There were always jokes that every Asian guy was Jackie Chan and every white guy was either Tom Hanks or Hans Gruber, now when this joke becomes a reality the world loses a little bit of its dignity.

Since February is a write-off month at school for reasons that I'll explain in February, I feel obligated to honour black history month and talk about a different accomplished man or woman of African descent in order to broaden the horizons of my students. Even if I talk about this for 5 minutes it'll be worth it.

Even though some jokes are deeply seeded in racism I can't resist sharing this one:
On student whose family name is Oh told me his first child will have the given name Ba-Ma so that his child's name will be Oh Ba-Ma. No pressure for that kid to change the world.