Our perceptions about black masculinity have been finely shaped by a market culture that makes it easier for us to go to sleep at night, because we can so effectively distinguish "the niggas" from the black men. Brand Obama, from a marketing perspective, is therefore sellable and important to this American discourse. Barack Obama is not the prototype of perceptions of modern-day Black masculinity foul-mouthed, highly sexualized, money grubbing, woman-hating and brash. He is the opposite of all that.
By contrast, Brand Obama is about placating mainstream America that it has nothing to fear from this particular Black man in much the way that it has a symbiotic dance with hip-hop's gangsta rappers and their obscenely choreographed anti-social, but immensely lucrative, pastimes. His political success was based on his ability to cast himself as a beacon of hope and present an alternative to the entitlement, privileged position of a tiny clique of white Americans.
Finally, Obama's masculinity (Black masculinity) is highlighted by the advent of Sarah Palin in the new American political discourse. Her growing support is in part to her sharp departure from the Obama Brand. It's the "pure, virtuous white girl" against the raunchy, over sexed black male. Palin's support and continued relevancy are the byproducts of a nuanced re-packaging of the trafficked anxieties and old supremacist notions of the lily white woman and the obsession of black men to defile this alter of purity.
The Palin-Obama sequence resurrected the United States' not so long racial history and forces Obama to ignore her taunting, vapid, wide-eyed nonsense and vile utterings calculated to stir up the Republican faithful masquerading as Tea Party activists. He knows that in opposition to the pure, unsullied white woman myth he'll lose; so in response to her imbecilic ravings Obama is particularly muted. He is cognizant of the fact that any rebuttal risks a reinvigoration of bestial black masculinity, sexual desire, and presumed physical endowment and the rape of white feminine purity, if not virginity.
The new American discourse is also a review and re-examination of the presidency in this new century and millennium. American presidents are the closest beings that we have to royalty. Thus, the historical view of the American president is the guardian of the nation and he is usually white, male, Christian, with good looks, perceived virility and in accordance with white America's standards of cultural norms of beauty, breeding and class. To a large extent Obama has turned these notions on its head.
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