When members of Congress call the first black president of the United States a liar, send racist images of him in e-mails and depict him as a tar baby, the most recent slur, our natural reaction is to try to support him through all the vitriol.
But lately, some African Americans are starting to wonder out loud if blind support for the president is going against their own interests.
As the economic gap increases between white and black Americans, and the 16.2 percent unemployment rate among blacks is much higher than the national average, the number of Africans Americans who support Obama's policies has dipped from 77 percent to just over half, though overall support remains high.
That's why the difficult discussion that panel members had Thursday about the president and his policies at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, which drew thousands to Philadelphia this week, was right on time.
Black journalists, already underepresented in newsrooms and on the air, have seen their numbers dwindle as well.
Criticizing Obama
In Thursday's plenary session, "Black Out or Black In," author Sophia Nelson, former Republican National Convention chair Michael Steele, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, and Princeton University professor Cornel West went at it over Obama - albeit respectfully.
(The Rev. Al Sharpton, one of Obama's most strident supporters and an MSNBC analyst, was scheduled to appear but was a no-show. Seems Sharpton believes he was disrespected by NABJ's vocal criticism over the lack of black journalists getting prime-time hosting slots - but that's dirty laundry for another day.)
West has been one of Obama's most vocal critics. Chastising the president recently as "a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats," the professor didn't back down from his comments.
