{"id":96408,"date":"2013-07-22T11:08:53","date_gmt":"2013-07-22T05:38:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?p=96408"},"modified":"2013-07-25T19:59:45","modified_gmt":"2013-07-25T14:29:45","slug":"barack-obama-talks-about-the-13th-amendment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/barack-obama-talks-about-the-13th-amendment\/","title":{"rendered":"Barack Obama Talks About The 13th Amendment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>By\u00a0<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?s=Malinda+Seneviratne&amp;x=12&amp;y=7\">Malinda Seneviratne<\/a><\/span>\u00a0&#8211;<\/strong><\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_93503\" style=\"width: 160px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/index.php\/if-thuggery-is-to-be-arrested\/malinda-seneviratne-2\/\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-93503\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-93503\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-93503\" title=\"Malinda Seneviratne\" src=\"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/Malinda-Seneviratne-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/Malinda-Seneviratne-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/06\/Malinda-Seneviratne-50x50.jpg 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-93503\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Malinda Seneviratne<\/p><\/div>\n<p><strong>Meanwhile In A Parallel Universe Called Humility; Barack Obama Talks About The 13th Amendment<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>When Trayvon Martin (black) was shot dead by Mark Zimmerman (white) in February 2012, I said \u2018If I had a son, he\u2019d look like Trayvon\u2019.\u00a0 A few days ago, when Zimmerman was found innocent of any wrongdoing, I told the nation to engage in soul searching. I said that that the jury has spoken, meaning that we have to respect the decision. Then I said, \u2018Trayvon Martin could have been me 35 years ago\u2019.\u00a0 I have searched my soul, especially about race relations.\u00a0 Here\u2019s what I found.<\/p>\n<p>We talk big.\u00a0 We act small.\u00a0 We layer lie over truth and sprinkle glitter over it.\u00a0 Then we show the magnificent fiction to a world we believe is gullible. We praise Abraham Lincoln and do multiple versions of Martin Luther King\u2019s \u2018I have a dream\u2019 speech.\u00a0 We think we are so clever, so classless and so free but I often wonder whether we are peasants or whether we are slaves.<\/p>\n<p>Just this morning I read something from the other side of the world. \u00a0The Chair of an EU delegation to Sri Lanka, Jean Lambert, after enumerating the positives of reconstruction and democratization, opined that trust building among communities needs to be worked on.\u00a0 It took me back to 1865.\u00a0 That was when slavery was abolished, through the <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?s=13th+Amendment&amp;x=10&amp;y=1\">13<sup>th<\/sup> Amendment<\/a><\/span> to our constitution.\u00a0 When it was passed by Congress on January 13, a Trayvon Martin of that time might have smiled.\u00a0 He might have cheered and felt truly free when it was ratified on December 6 the same year.<\/p>\n<p>No one is smiling now.\u00a0 No one is cheering.\u00a0 Well, not the blacks anyway.\u00a0 I asked myself \u2018have we reconciled?\u2019\u00a0 I asked myself what moral authority do I have and do my officials in the State Department have to comment on Sri Lanka\u2019s post-conflict reconciliation process and progress therein.\u00a0 It is almost 150 years since the 13<sup>th<\/sup> Amendment was passed.\u00a0 The fact that I, a black man, is President might give the impression that our race relations are cheer-worthy.\u00a0 The truth is that Trayvon Martin\u2019s killing was not an outlier.\u00a0 There have been Trayvon Martin\u2019s before and there will be Trayvon Martins in the futher.\u00a0 Zimmermans too.\u00a0 So too double standards for whites and blacks.\u00a0 If there was an outlier, that\u2019s man, <span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.colombotelegraph.com\/?s=Barack+Obama&amp;x=13&amp;y=2\">Barack Obama<\/a><\/span>, and maybe this is because it was felt that I was white inside. Maybe I am.\u00a0 I know how to use words. That helps.<\/p>\n<p>I also wondered, in my soul searching exercise, whether we preach democracy, peace, tolerance, co-existence and talk about the values that make America great and bomb those countries which we believe are not as virtuous as us only to cover up.\u00a0 I remembered how we vilify our enemies or rather those who will not submit to us and asked myself if we do this because of a deep sense of national inadequacy.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s almost 150 years ladies and gentlemen.\u00a0 We thought we had fixed race-relations and related problems for good.\u00a0 The truth, I am compelled to acknowledge, is that we are not clever, we are not classless, we are not free of racism and we are as divided along lines of color as we were back then.<\/p>\n<p>I am, as I said, an outlier.\u00a0 I thought about it a lot.\u00a0 Soul-searched. We are not a nation. I mean we are not the nation we claim to be.\u00a0 We are a lie.\u00a0 I am a lie.\u00a0 And out-lying one another seems to be an integral part of our national ethos, if such a thing actually exists.<\/p>\n<p><em>*Malinda Seneviratne is the Chief Editor of \u2018The Nation\u2019\u00a0and his articles can be found at\u00a0www.malindawords.blogspot.com<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p> [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":93503,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,46,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-96408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-colombotelegraph","category-constitutional-reforms","category-editorial"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.3 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Barack Obama Talks About The 13th Amendment - 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