Nicky Loomis looks at the attempts to “unmask” Barack Obama and calls on journalists to stop perpetuating the prejudices:
In last Sunday’s New York Times, op/ed writer Nicholas Kristof said the accusations that Barack Obama is a Muslim aren’t so much religious slander as they are an attempt to “Otherize” the Democratic candidate.
Writing from “a sense of personal responsibility,” Kristof pointed his finger at journalists who serve as enablers of this subtly racist strategy.
Kristof aptly points out that in trying to prove that Obama is a Muslim, “Muslim” itself becomes a negative. “As it that in itself were wrong,” he says.
In a Pew Research Center survey released last week, 13 percent of registered voters said Obama is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March. What’s more, the study found that only half of Americans polled know for certain that Obama is a Christian.
The religious mudslinging becomes a political tool to disguise underlying racism towards the candidate—a tactic that Kristof calls an attempt to “de-Americanize” Obama.
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