This past year has been a lot to deal 

with and having constant access to 
news about the traumas of our realities 
has only worsened our mental health. 
Especially in the Black community, it 
seems like every time we recover from 
one thing and find some happiness, 
another disastrous headline or tragic 
event surfaces to bring us back down. 
The Black community has lost many of 
our brothers and sisters since January 
2020. Kobe Bryant, George Floyd, 
Breonna Taylor, Chadwick Boseman, 
John Lewis, Ahmaud Arbery, Cicely 
Tyson, Hank Aaron, Natalie Deselle-
Reid and Naya Rivera are only a few of 
the angels we have recently gained. 

We’re facing these heartbreaking 

losses while the pandemic keeps us 
isolated from the distractions and 
loved ones we go to for comfort. We’ve 
constantly hoped and searched for 
a light that will guide us out of this 
lonely darkness, only to be thrown 
in deeper. One way I have tried 
to bring myself out of the empty 
darkness is by absorbing Black joy 
through different artistic mediums. 
I’ve listened to a lot of music by 

my favorite Black artists and read 
inspirational books by Black authors, 
but I have spent most of my time 
watching countless movies and films 
I’ve loved my whole life that showcase 
Black voices in a positive light. 

Nostalgia has pushed these classic 

reruns back into my life, including 
“Cinderella” with Whitney Houston 
and Brandy, “Black Panther”, “Jump 
In!” and many other films that 
brought me joy when I was younger 
and when the world seemed so much 
brighter. Revisiting these old sources 
of happiness have been great ways 
to take my mind off the turmoil 
this country is undergoing. While I 
enjoyed these trips down memory 
lane, I couldn’t help but notice how 
many of my favorite films don’t 
illustrate Black people in the positive 
way that I remember. 

Disney was a staple in my 

childhood. Its filmography was a 
big source of my happiness. These 
movies and shows made me feel 
like I could achieve anything in my 
wildest dreams. A notable film that 
I was excited to rewatch was “The 
Princess and the Frog.” I loved this 
movie as a kid because Tiana, the 
only Black Disney princess, was the 
only princess I was able to see myself 

in. The music, the characters, the 
plot, everything about the movie 
made me so happy as a kid. Watching 
it again brought me some joy, but why 
is the only Black Disney princess a 
frog for the majority of her film? I 
didn’t notice this when I was eight. 
I was just happy to finally have 
that representation. It caused me 
to wonder why that representation 
has to come at such a dehumanizing 
cost? Why do displays of Black joy 
always come with a price? Disney is 
supposed to be a place where dreams 
come true. My dream is to live in a 
society free of racists and racism, but 

I guess that is one dream Disney isn’t 
willing to grant.

Now that I am older, I am able to 

catch the subtle hints of racism in 
dialogue, like in “Total Drama Island”. 
I’m over Black characters dying first 
in horror films like in “Scream 2”. I 
am sick of the role of the Black best 
friend being implemented in shows 
and films just so they can be awarded 
their diversity points, like in “Clueless”. 
I can’t help but wonder if Tiana would 
still be my favorite princess if I was 
given more options, ones that aren’t 
as demeaning. I’m either asking 
why there are no Black people in 

a film or TV show, or, if I’m lucky 
enough to get that representation, I 
find myself asking why the plots are 
so saturated with racism? 

I love the displays of Black culture 

in “The Princess and the Frog,” but I 
am no longer willing to accept the 
underlying consequences as a price 
for this exposure. It’s 2021, and 
Black stories about our happiness 
without having to overcome some 
kind of racial tragedy have been 
long overdue. That being said, not all 
displays of Black culture have been 
negative; movies and shows like 
“Little”, “Soul”, “The Wiz”, “The 

Fresh Prince of Bel-Air”, “Black is 
King”, “That’s So Raven”, “Coming 
to America”, “Bad Boys” and so 
many more are great examples of 
this display of unapologetic Black 
culture. Movies that encourage you 
to find your purpose, love who you 
are and rise above the standard 
are uplifting messages that the 
Black community and our Black 
children should be able to access. 
These positive messages within 
Black representation have given me 
that hope I have been looking for 
amongst the darkness. I can’t wait to 
see what comes next.

There exists an overwhelming 

amount of cognitive dissonance 
when it comes time to address the 
awful actualities of former President 
Barack Obama’s legacy, but if we want 
to ensure that the era of Trumpism is 
truly gone for good, it must be done, 
lest we are doomed to repeat the 
mistakes of the past. As the first Black 
president of the United States, Obama 
was, and still is for many, a symbol of 
progress and hope. For people my age, 
he was the first president many of us 
have memories of — and juxtaposed 
with the recent administration, it’s 
easy to feel a sense of nostalgia for the 
bygone era of his presidency. But this 
nostalgia for Obama is just that –– 
nostalgia –– and it ignores the reality 
of the fact that his administration was 
right-wing, white-supremacist and 
imperialist in nature.

To start, one of the most overlooked 

ways the first Black president harmed 
his own people was abroad in Africa. 
Through the United States Africa 
Command, which originated in 2008 
under President George W. Bush, 
Obama oversaw its advancement and 
expansion as he worked effortlessly 
to continue neo-colonialism by 
extending U.S. influence throughout 
Africa via military dominance. 

Domestically, Obama arguably 

made it his mission to harm Black 
Americans. 
His 
administration 

contributed 
more 
heavily 
to 

the militarization of the police 
than any president, leading to an 
overwhelming increase of police 
brutality in Black America. This 
directly resulted in the emergence of 
the Black Lives Matter movement, 
which, as you may recall, started 
during the Obama administration for 
this reason. Ultimately, the Obama 
administration responded to this 
movement and subsequent protests 
by sending troops and tanks to 

Ferguson, calling Baltimore rioters 
“thugs” and working to increase 
surveillance of prominent Black 
activists — sound familiar?

Looking toward immigration, 

Obama’s 
immigration 
policy 

resulted in fostering the growth 
of 
Immigration 
and 
Customs 

Enforcement. Starting in 2008, 
his administration cultivated the 
Alien Transfer and Exit Program 
which 
deliberately 
sought 
to 

create complications for migrants 
seeking to cross the border, by 
separating them from their families 
and shipping them off to mystery 
locations without any identification 
or means to contact their loved 
ones. 
As 
his 
admisinistration 

continued on, it participated in 
the deportation and removal of 
nearly 2.7 million undocumented 
immigrants. Additionally, it caused 
tens of thousands of undocumented 
parents to be stripped of contact 
with their own children, most 
likely forever; some “disappeared” 
only to be found in countries 
they weren’t even from, where 
they were most likely trafficked, 
sexually abused or killed. On top 
of this, in 2014, the administration 
constructed 
border 
detention 

facilities with the sole purpose of 
placing 
undocumented 
parents’ 

children in cages. The growth in 
detainment of immigrants occuring 
during the Obama era proved 
especially lucrative for firms like 
Corrections Corporation of America 
and GEO Group, two companies that 
contributed hundreds of thousands 
to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential 
campaign. 

From 
his 
military 
coup 

in 
Honduras, 
displacing 
the 

democratically-elected 
leftist 

government of Manuel Zelaya and 
putting a far-right narco-dictatorship 
in its place, to his parliamentary 
coup in Brazil, which gave rise to the 
fascist Bolsonaro regime, to his soft 
coup in Paraguay, to his managing 

of Project Gunrunner, which led 
to armed drug cartels in Mexico 
with thousands of weapons, to the 
sanctions he imposed on Venezuela 
after declaring it an “extraordinary 
threat to the national security of the 
United States,” the great instability 
regarding immigration is not only the 
fault of the Obama administration, 
but Obama as well. If you’re appalled 
at the violence that took place at the 
U.S. Capitol last month, imagine how 
the citizens of these countries felt 
when forces of U.S. imperialism came 
to wreck havoc and unleash chaos in 
their home countries, all in service of 
capital and Western hegemony. 

On the other side of the 

globe, Obama was also actively 
destabilizing the Middle East, 
having 
dropped 
over 
26,000 

bombs on seven Muslim-majority 
countries in 2016 alone (a low 
estimate). 
His 
administration 

conducted 
airstrikes 
in 
Syria, 

Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, 
Somalia and Pakistan and led a 
drone-strike program in which 90% 
of the people killed were civilians, 
or non-enemy combatants. During 
his time as president, he initiated 
the civil war in Yemen and offered 
$1 billion in weapons sales to Saudi 
Arabia, resulting in one of the 
largest modern-day humanitarian 
catastrophes with over hundreds 
of thousands of casualties. Obama 
armed the Israeli apartheid regime 
with $38 billion in military aid and 
launched a war in Libya, using 
NATO to support rebel groups of 
Islamist extremists and resulting 
in the destablization of the Libyan 
government and an increase in slave 
markets. Yet, while the president 
who allegedly told a White House 
aide in 2011, “Turns out I’m really 
good at killing people. Didn’t know 
that was gonna be a strong suit 
of mine” continues to be seen as 
a beacon of good in the Western 
world, the Global South still suffers 
from the evils of his legacy. 

With the U.S. military being 

one of the largest polluters, bigger 
than 
140 
countries 
combined, 

producing more greenhouse gas 
emissions than any other institution 
on the planet, it’s clear the Obama 
administration was not the climate-
change conscious, science-believing 
administration it led the American 
public to believe it was. Furthermore, 
Obama worked diligently to increase 
domestic oil production to record 
levels and allowed police officers 
to attack Indigenous protestors at 
Standing Rock in order to build a 
corporate oil pipeline. 

As 
Paulo 
Freire 
wrote 
in 

Pedagogy 
of 
Freedom, 
“The 

capitalist system reaches, in its 
globalizing neoliberal crusade, the 
maximum efficacy of its intrinsically 
evil nature.” This was embodied in 
the Obama administration, and from 
a dialectical standpoint, because 
of its fundamentally contradictory 
nature, ushered in the era of 
Trumpism we just witnessed. 

Naturally, it’s very easy to read 

these accounts, hear these details, see 
these article links and brush them off 
as “things of the past.” It’s even easier 
to justify these atrocities by saying 
that “Trump did these things, too.” 
It’s even easier to trivialize them by 
pointing to the positive aspects of 
Obama’s presidency. What’s hard, 
is making a conscious decision to 
modify our behavior and attitude 
in order to overcome the cognitive 
dissonance we face when we hear 
the truth about someone we once 
admired. If we really want to say 
“no thanks” to Obama, we can start 
by remembering that these aren’t 
simply article links and facts. These 
are real events that happened to 
real people with real families whose 
lives (if they still have them) have 
been changed for the worse, forever, 
because 
of 
President 
Obama’s 

administration. And if you think 
that’s bad, wait till you find out who 
his vice president was.

Michigan in Color

Biblioamorapathy is a 

made-up word

Biblioamorapathy. 
Adjective, 

though in some especially sneaky 
cases, functions as a noun. Derived 
from 
the 
Latin 
roots 
“biblio,” 

meaning book, “amora,” meaning 
love and “pathy,” to feel. Defined as 
the special sort of giddy feeling one 
gets after checking out a particularly 
large stack of books from the local 
library, or happening across a dirt-
cheap box of yellowed, dog-eared, 
paperback novels at a yard sale –– the 
kind of yard sale held in a desperate 
attempt to exhume a home of all its 
oddities. It’s the painting of a poppy 
field in Marseille whose colors 
bleed so finely together under the 
fluorescence of display, yet seem so 
entirely out of place on the blank wall 
above the couch in the living room; 
spider web-fractured holiday-themed 
mugs gifted by friends who were 
now nothing more than strangers 
exchanging tight-lipped smiles. A 
feeling that comes from the beautiful 
realization that the book forced upon 
you by your world literature teacher, 
with indiscernible brown stains in its 
margins and blue arrows and circles 
around seemingly meaningless words 
left by students past, ultimately proved 
itself to be the kind of book you found 
yourself counting hours, minutes and 
seconds until the next encounter. 
Biblioamorapathy, in its entirety, is a 
feeling of pure elation –– one that has 
never been defined before in any kind 
of classical dictionary, thesaurus or 
new-age search engine that interprets 
popular slang for Generation X. 

Though in order to truly define 

biblioamorapathy, or any other 
word for that matter, we must 
trace its origins, obtain a sound 
understanding of all its varying 
contexts and tenses, so that when 
we finally do put it into writing, in 

extensively detailed research papers, 
in beasts of literary works conceived 
in the most peculiar of ways –– 
perhaps while standing up, in the 
shower, writing in exclusively bright 
pink ink — we know in our hearts 
that we have done the word proper 
justice. I first became acquainted 
with biblioamorapathy the minute I 
learned to read; I found it intertwined 
within anecdotes on the backs of 
cereal boxes in seizure-inducing 
color palettes, no doubt an attempt 
to distract from the potential health 
implications that would soon arise 
from the sheer amount of saturated 
fats. I found it in “Fun with Dick and 
Jane,” in the boyish exploits of “Frog 
and Toad,” later in the home I created 
at Hogwarts alongside Harry Potter, 
and soon after in the gardens of the 
Brontë sisters and Dante’s journey 
through Inferno. 

Biblioamorapathy manifests itself 

in a multitude of ways –– the most 
common a telltale nagging itch that 
tickles the pit of your stomach and 
soon diffuses into your bloodstream, 
seeping into the folds of your grey 
matter, coating the endings of your 
nerves, so that in due time, every fiber 
of your body begins to vibrate with an 
unseen force of belligerent joy. The 
only remedy is immediate exposure 
to the half-finished book splayed 
on your bedroom floor, the novel 
with a department store coupon 
for a bookmark in the recesses of 
your bag vehemently demanding 
to be read. Biblioamorapathy is 
a learned sensation, devoid of 
any innate predisposition, born 
from the ability to love books and 
be loved by books. While often 
mistaken 
for 
heart 
problems, 

indigestion, or Langston Hughes-
esque weary blues, it’s important to 
understand that biblioamorapathy 
isn’t a complication but rather a gift 
endowed upon the lucky few of the 
world.

SARAH AKAABOUNE

MiC Columnist

No thanks, Obama

Where’s the Black 
joy in Hollywood

MARIA PATTON

MiC Columnist

What went wrong: Egypt’s political landscape and the impact of the youth

MARIAM ALSHOURBAGY

MiC Columnist

“Kefaya!” (Enough!) screamed the 

Egyptian youth as Hosni Mubarak 
planned his fifth six-year presidential 
term. “Kefaya!” they said to their 
parents and grandparents when told 
to sit back down and wait for time 
to mend their country. “Kefaya!” 
they yelled to the painfully familiar 
corruption 
and 
manipulation. 

“Kefaya!” became the motto of the 
Egyptian youth in a movement not 
only in opposition to the old regime 
but against an entire ideology 
ingrained in the minds of all Egyptian 
generations prior. 

Egypt’s youth, aged 30 and 

under, makes up 60% of the entire 
population. So on Jan. 25, 2011, when 
they stood together in Tahrir Square, 
they took the nation by surprise. They 
were the first in generations to stand 
united against oppression despite the 
insurmountable obstacle it presented: 
The Egyptian government comprises 
individuals 40 years of age and older 

with decades of experience in politics. 
So even as the revolutionaries gained 
more optimism and secured their 
first hearing with the government, 
who could they have sent to make 
negotiations? The fight came down 
to some naive 20-year-olds trying to 
negotiate with military strategists 
who had years of experience in 
feigned appeasement. 

There is a false dichotomy when 

it comes to analyzing the political 
and economic reasons behind the 
revolution. The Egyptian people spent 
30 years under Mubarak’s inefficient, 
irresponsible and corrupt regime. 
One cannot group the protestors’ 
grievances under either politics or the 
economy as the citizens endured low 
wages, collapsing health care and a 
failing education system to the point 
that other nations began to know 
Egyptians as apathetic and apolitical. 
The Egyptians needed a revolution 
to restore their dignity, stolen by 
Mubarak’s 30-year-long tyranny.

Nonetheless, 
these 
protesters 

made the mistake of listening to the 
older generations, who told them to 

be “grateful that the President even 
mentioned, or reiterated, some of 
the demands” they made. So they 
washed the graffiti, swept the roads 
and left the square before securing 
any of their demands. Nevertheless, 
they were still optimistic –– after 
all, nothing had ever before grabbed 
the attention of the government or 
prompted the whole nation to stand 
together. Right after that, Mubarak 
stepped down and public officials 
speedily organized an election and 
several candidates were nominated 
on the platform of representation and 
democracy. However, did the National 
Association for Change, the Coalition 
of the Revolution’s Youth, independent 
trade unions, independent Islamists, 
the radical left, the March 9 
Professors, human rights groups, 
the Constitutional Referendum and 
the Muslim and Christian religious 
establishments who came together in 
support of the 2011 revolution all want 
the same thing? Yes and no.

United in wanting Mubarak out 

of office, but divided by political and 
religious ideologies, each group was 

left scrambling for points of cohesion. 
Meanwhile, the military, on the 
opposing side, proposed a single man, 
Ahmed Shafik, to run their campaign 
instead of splitting their votes over 
multiple runners, a strategy that came 
at a great cost for the revolutionaries 
as it once again deepened the divide 
between the people. And although 
the military did not successfully elect 
their candidate, this divide proved 
insurmountable –– no one candidate 
seemed able to pacify the country.

These mistakes have something 

in 
common: 
inexperience. 
The 

revolution of 2011 was an uprising by 
the youth and for the people, but the 
youth did not have a point of reference 
or the guidance of wiser minds –– even 
the oldest generation alive was born 
in the midst of this corruption. The 
younger generation was vulnerable 
to the manipulation of military 
officials and the older politicians that 
made up the regime. Nevertheless, 
this youth would grow up and prove 
they have an advantage. They saw 
the power they had when they stood 
behind a common purpose with a 

single voice and gained an increased 
understanding of what goes on behind 
closed doors in Cairo. As they look 
forward, being part of the revolution 
of Jan. 25 against Mubarak’s regime 
gives them the experience they need 
to engage in more successful political 
activism in the future.

Fast forward to 2021, and Egypt 

is still suffering under military 
leader Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. After 
the mishaps of the last political 
revolution, Egypt was in ruins, and 
the fastest way to reassemble the 
torn country was to elect strong 
leadership. But at what cost? The 
streets may be safer now, but prisons 
no 
longer 
distinguish 
between 

criminals and political activists 
who oppose al-Sisi’s regime. As the 
government 
supposedly 
invests 

billions of dollars on projects to 
restore 
the 
economy, 
Egypt’s 

infrastructure and public services 
are collapsing. Even as the faith in 
the democratic system was restored 
after the revolution –– since Egypt 
saw unprecedented voter turnout 
and multiple parties on the ballot for 

the first time in generations –– this 
hope only lasted for a year under 
former President Mohamed Morsi 
before Sisi’s military coup –– which 
amassed near-unanimous support 
and ended any hope of political 
representation. Sisi learned his 
lesson from the events of Jan. 25 and 
worked harder to stifle any attempts 
of revolution. Unfortunately for him, 
the youth took their own notes.

The next step is to wait. The youth 

must wait for an opening to return to 
the square after learning from their 
previous mistakes. The revolution of 
2011 was the first sign of the power of 
new ideologies and tolerance amongst 
younger generations, but they didn’t 
have the experience that only comes 
with time on their side. The last thing 
they should do is lose hope because, 
even if they can’t see it yet, they are 
now at an advantage. So they should 
remain optimistic and never forget 
how Kefaya, a single word, held so 
much power. This is the opportunity 
of a complete revamp of society, to 
make it better and to say Kefaya to 
oppression.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
10 - Wednesday, February 10, 2021 

Graphic by Alan Yang. Images courtesy of Gage Skidmore, Joan Hernandez, Mike D. Photography and gdcgraphics.

KARIS CLARK

MiC Columnist