I did not vote for Barack Obama and if he were running again on the same platform, I could not vote for him again. I’m glad to see that circumstance has knocked askance the ride of his team from their ideological high horse. I’m disappointed that he will doubtless use executive orders to undo what precious few restrictions on abortion in America, but glad that he’s demonstrated some pragmatic common sense about the reality of our current economic situation. And, I’m hoping that he will prove Rush Limbaugh wrong on many things just for the sake of doing so.
But…
Today is a day in our history that I’m not sure any white American can fully grasp. Many think or even say, “Well, I know it’s significant, but…”
Harry T. Moore. Titusville, FL. Christmas Night, 1951
Mack Charles Parker. Poplarville, MS. 1959.
Clarence Triggs. Bogalusa, LA. 1966.
Cynthia Wesley. Birmingham, AL. 1963.
James Chaney. Philadelphia, MS. 1964.
Or maybe the more well known, Emmitt Till, who was murdered for the unpardonable sin of whistling (supposedly) at a white woman. Or Medgar Evers, assassinated by the cowardly Byron De La Beckwith, for the crime of registering African Americans to exercise their constitutional right to vote. This list represents a few of the more than 40 people, white and black, who were murdered for their role in attempting to bring equality to those who had been proclaimed equal a hundred years before.
Few, if any, white Americans understand the depth of despair experienced by those of our friends who strove for dignity during the abominable Jim Crow era of the south. I’m not talking about Ludacris, L’il Bow Wow or Don King. I’m talking about the African American male who said to himself, “I AM a man,” while those around him reviled him as a nigger or a brute. About men who had to stand by as white men could get away with murder in the same county where they themselves could be jailed or beaten for the most minor infraction. For women who had to endure all manner of harassment, including rape, just to satisfy the demonic carnality of the true beasts. For families who had to get food from the back of a restaurant instead of sitting inside it or drink from a water fountain that said “colored.”
If you are white and paid attention through election night, perhaps you read or heard Whoopi Goldberg say, “I feel like I can unpack my suitcase now,” and thought it was just liberal hyperbole. For many people it was not.
I do not fully understand it; I wish I could. Every president until now has been white, so their world experiences were close to mine. It was almost an expectation that we were going to have a white man as president for all times. Martin Luther King was prescient in saying that he believed a black man would become president as soon as 25 years, but definitely within forty, which is either this year or close to it.
So I congratulate soon to be president Barack Obama for the standard he now bears and hope that he is able to accomplish great things.
