Two recent encounters caused me to get up early this morning to write this. At the time I was puzzled and taken aback by the anger and resentment. At the time I didn’t know what to say to them and part of me wanted to hold them in my arms and tell them that it was going to be okay.
The first was an old friend, a black woman, like myself, who in a non-stop rant against Obama defended herself as being, "the only black person she knew who wasn’t for him."
"I don’t understand why," she said. "What’s he stand for? What’s he
done."
She didn’t like his health care plan, she didn’t like his economics, I pressed for specifics. The Clinton talking points came pouring out of her mouth, all that stuff about inexperience and youth, about disloyalty. Mostly I watched her work herself into a spitting, angry mess, defending her candidate like a barker in front of a retail store imploring people to come in.
I kept interjecting with, "What about Hillary’s health care fiasco, or sitting on the board of Walmart and her husband’s NAFTA bill?" My questions would stop her for a moment but she wasn’t having any of it. She was upset. She took Obama’s run as a personal affront to Hillary and to black people.
My head was hurting and I had to get to work. I pressed the elevator button wishing for it to come but she kept on, sensing she was winning the argument because I wasn’t responding anymore. There were others around and we all watched her as if she was a boiling pot about to explode.
Finally the elevator came and I got in. I couldn’t help myself. I was mad at her.
"Sweetie, there’s one thing I know for sure."
"What?" She said, taking a moment to breathe.
"Obama’s going to whup her butt."
And then as the doors closed, she called out something about the Patriots win. At first I thought she was talking about the revolutionary war and then I realized she was talking about football.
The second encounter was at my office with a Hispanic friend. She was a former Edwards supporter and like me is now voting for Obama but I'm not sure if it will stick.
"Your people are so fickle. They deserted the Clintons, the only
white people who worked for blacks. This is how you repay them?"
She was half joking but the other half was a serious.
Again I’m struck dumb by the comment. I was shocked that she could make such a strange sweeping statement. A Republican president freed the slaves. Does that mean I’m obligated to vote for Bush/McCain?" Finally I managed a response.
"Well if that’s the case, seeing what happened in Wisconsin, most
white folks abandoned her as well and look what she’s done for them."
My joke was lost on her.
We got into one of those race conversations, the kind I hate to get in to. The kind where race is interjected before every issue thereby making the topic invisible.
"Your people benefited from the Clinton’s. They did more for black
people than for any other race."
"Like what?" I asked her.
"They appointed more blacks than anyone."
"Who?’
"They employed a lot of black people. A lot of black people work for
them."
"Tell that to Lani Guinier, I said.
I left this conversation by going back to my desk, but both encounters stayed with me and I wished at the time I could have said this:
Obama speaks to everyone. Black people are proud of him. We are thrilled that he is running for president but we are not stupid. We don’t only see color. If that were the case, African Americans wouldn’t have voted for the Clinton or any other presidential candidate except Jesse Jackson, (who didn’t get all of the black vote by the way.) Black people have been voting mostly for white people since we first got the right to vote.
We like Obama’s message, his ideas that have been spoken before by men such as Lincoln, Roosevelt, Kennedy and King. We have an ear for such talk. As do all people of all races. Compassion, justice and hope are universal. And black people are proud and excited that the message is coming from one of us. White people should be too. He talks of his connection to that side of his family in his book, the Audacity of Hope.
All of us are sick of the panderers and the show boaters, the ones who use race to cloud the issues, the ones who use race as the only measure. Like himself, Obama’s speeches cross all lines of color. He is talking to everyone and we are all listening.
As for experience?
No, he wasn’t around during Bush/Clinton. He had no experience in voting for this war, or voting for the bankruptcy bill, or screwing up universal health care. He was teaching constitutional law, and working in his community and living out here in the real world. Not to mention his years serving in the Illinois and US senate. After twenty years of Bushes and Clintons, that’s better than good enough. That’s wonderful. A breath of fresh air which Washington desperately needs,
Melissa Harris-Lacewell, in her excellent article titled, The Clinton Fallacy, for Slate.com on Jan. 24, 2008 wrote:
A hopeful African-American electorate was at the core of Bill Clinton's successful bids for the presidency. In many ways, the scandal-marred, deeply partisan years of the Clinton administration proved disappointing in the face of such early optimism. Welfare reform, the growth of black imprisonment, and the public abandonment of progressive African-Americans like Lani Guinier are some of the most memorable racial disappointments of those years. Even through these disappointments, African-Americans were among Clinton's strongest supporters because many believed Clinton's era was an economic boon.
And for a nation that seemed for a long time to be soulless—putting up walls to keep people out, profiting from war, not raising the minimum wage, abandoning generations to poor education and the prison system, the thievery and greed on Wall Street and in the board rooms, I could go on— we need and want a change.
So yes, we are all abandoning Hillary. And McCain. We are coming together, towards a common purpose. We are seeing past the distractions and hearing, for the first time in a long time, not just a pretty speech, not just words. Obama is giving us our souls back. We’re fools if we don’t take it.