Living through history

“Where were you when you heard...” is the question of our time. Depending upon the generation you belong to, those moments may be different. For my parents, the seminal events are the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, JFK being shot, MLK being shot and killed in Memphis and men landing on the Moon. For my generation, it was the Challenger exploding, Reagan being shot, John Lennon being shot, the September 11 attacks and now, the election of the first non-white person as President of the United States. So much of the history we remember, those ‘where were you when’ moments, are negatives. Looking at the list above, all but two of them are really negative events. But those two! There are two things this nation has done in my lifetime that we, all of us, can be unrestrainedly proud of--landing on the Moon and electing a black man named Barack Obama to the highest office in the land. We have no reason to be ashamed of the Moon landing and even if you didn’t vote for Obama, one has to admit that this bursting through is an event that not only did many of us not imagine seeing in our lifetime but this event heralds a new day in race relations. I’m nowhere near naive enough to believe that this means that America is ‘post-racial’ or that we have somehow magically slain racism once and for all. This new day that has dawned is not THAT day. What has changed is that four-fold; how whites see black people, how black people see ourselves, how blacks are seen by foreigners and how America, as a whole, is seen by foreigners. The way whites will look at black people has forever changed. The President is a kind of temporary embodiment of the nation, in a similar psychological way that a king or queen was back when people really believed in the divine right of kings. That a majority white nation elected a black man to be that embodiment is a powerful statement about how far we have come. What’s even more amazing is that Obama won in the face of, perhaps, the most racially charged Presidential campaign since Strom Thurmond ran as a Dixiecrat back in 1948! How black people see ourselves will also undergo transformation. A generation (let’s hope) is going to grow up and in their formative years will have seen a black President. The “Leader of the Free World” or “The Most Powerful Man in the World” now looks a bit like me. Young black children will now know that along with black doctors, black lawyers, black astronauts there is one more job, that most prestigious of all American jobs, that they can aspire to. What’s more important is that Obama shows a path for negotiating the minefields of race. Most of the time, as far as I read him, he moves through the world as if his race were not going to be an issue. When it becomes an issue, as it inevitably will, he addresses it. He does not pretend that it is not an issue but neither does he make it the core of how he projects himself into the world. It is a method and balance that I understand and hope that I, myself, manage to achieve on a more-or-less consistent basis. He pays proper homage and respect to those who came before him, while not behaving as if nothing has changed. Things have changed. In 1967, the year of my birth, there was NO WAY a black man was going to be elected President. Certainly not a black man named Barack Hussein Obama. Nicholas Kristof, the New York Times columnist, writing on the Friday before the election related the following story: (requires free login) The other day I had a conversation with a Beijing friend and I mentioned that Barack Obama was leading in the presidential race: She: Obama? But he’s the black man, isn’t he? Me: Yes, exactly. She: But surely a black man couldn’t become president of the United States? Me: It looks as if he’ll be elected. She: But president? That’s such an important job! In America, I thought blacks were janitors and laborers. Me: No, blacks have all kinds of jobs. She: What do white people think about that, about getting a black president? Are they upset? Are they angry? Me: No, of course not! If Obama is elected, it’ll be because white people voted for him. [Long pause.] She: Really? Unbelievable! What an amazing country! While this story addresses my last point, vis a vis how the rest of the world sees America, I want to focus on how the rest of the world views blacks first. Notice that this woman’s view of black Americans is that we can be janitors and laborers but not the President. When Barack Obama goes forth on missions of State he will be the symbol of America to the rest of the world. It is sad but instructive to note that Americans, in exporting our cultural products like movies, TV, music, have exported racism as well. Lastly, this will change how people around the world view America. One of the things I couldn’t help notice as reaction poured in from around the world was that people all over the planet, people who had no direct, first-hand knowledge of the struggle of black people in this nation were weeping, crying and I realized that it was because, in their view, they got their America back. I know that we progressives/liberals can be blind to this from time-to-time but people around the world believe in America. They believe in what we say we stand for and they think that we mean it at least some of the time. The last eight years has been like having a great, goofy golden retriever go full-blown Cujo on the family but the dog is so big and strong no one can take it down. The election of Obama is a sign that whatever madness had gripped us as a nation, might have begun to dissipate. I hope so. I am not alone in that. I imagine that there are the better part of 6 billion people on the planet (notwithstanding the 40 - 50 million Americans who voted for McCain) who agree with me. One other thing about Obama’s surprise election. I had long thought that if I saw a black President in my lifetime, the first one would be a conservative Republican of the Colin Powell model. Instead we got a center-left former community organizer who is a Democrat. I am shocked and it really does put the lie to the conservative mantra that we are a center-right nation. We aren’t. The Deep South is center-right, the Midwest is center-right, but the coasts, with the exception of the four Southeastern states below the Mason-Dixon line are center-left. We are NOT a left-leaning nation, we are a confusing mix of the two. We push too far in one direction, perhaps, and self-correct back the other. We went far, far to the right. So far to the right that it looked like we were about to rendezvous with history. We ended up having a rendezvous with history but not the kind that some of us feared was coming.