Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job

November 5, 2008 in Reading Response

Thanks to an incident involving Country Time® Lemonade Mix — 40 Percent Less Sugar than Soda! — an appropriate amount of water and the keyboard of my laptop, entries in the near future will be sparsely worded, if posted at all. Today’s entry should be one of the more egregious examples of that.

The Onion covers a certain national election:

African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America.

In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation’s broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind.

The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it.

Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, “It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can’t catch a break.”

I blame the job market.

About these ads