Strange Fruit

On my way back from visiting my sister this morning, I drove past a billboard alongside the highway bearing the following message:

Supported Obama? Embarrassed Yet?

And if it had just been those words, it would have been very similar to one I saw and blogged about previously (Respect). But there's more. This billboard also had a picture of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush smiling, as if to suggest that the billboard's patron was someone or some group who supported both Clinton and Bush but not Obama. I racked my brain trying to come up with a possibility, and the only thing I (or the three friends I talked to about it) could come up with was racists. Who else would support both Clinton and W. but not Obama? Maybe there's another explanation, but it makes me really sad to think that it just might be someone who believes any white man can do the job but a black man, by virtue of the color of his skin, is somehow embarrassing.

This is one of the most powerful songs ever written about racism -- in it, the Strange Fruit to which Billie Holiday refers are the lynched black people hanging in the trees. The song was written in the 30s, and in some respects, we've come a long way since then. But not as far as we need to come, since I can still apply her lyrics to that billboard and other examples of racism that still go on every day:

Here is a strange and bitter crop

I think it is safe to say that you'd have to be pretty bitter to pay for that billboard. We've gotten past the lynchings, can we get past the bitterness?