The United States is facing a reckoning with racism and an Obama run for the White House is hastening that movement. America is ready for it. Racism is a dead horse. Although, like many diseases, it can not be fully eradicated we can inoculate ourselves and our children against it to limit those that are made sick by it. In that vein I have hope that during an Obama Presidency, possibly during a second term, Obama would offer an apology for slavery on behalf of the United States.
For all the hope and excitement Obama's candidacy is generating, some of his field workers, phone-bank volunteers and campaign surrogates are encountering a raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed -- and unreported -- this election season. Doors have been slammed in their faces. They've been called racially derogatory names (including the white volunteers). And they've endured malicious rants and ugly stereotyping from people who can't fathom that the senator from Illinois could become the first African American president.
The quotes are from an article by Kevin Meridain in yesterdays Washington Post. I know there's been a flood of words already offered up on this topic and I apologize if I am just beating a dead horse. My own personal view point (which is open to criticism) is that Obama's run for the Presidency by it's very nature embodies a spirit of oneness that pulls the veil off a side of America that troubles any well meaning human being. As he has demonstrated here in Philadelphia and elsewhere Senator Obama possess an uncanny ability to confront racial discord in a direct honest manner that people of all stripes respect.
The article goes on to point out:
Campaign field work can be an exercise in confronting the fears, anxieties and prejudices of voters. Veterans of the civil rights movement know what this feels like, as do those who have been involved in battles over busing, immigration or abortion. But through the Obama campaign, some young people are having their first experience joining a cause and meeting cruel reaction.
I was a young kid living in Woodbridge, Va nearly thirty years ago when I had my first confrontation that led me to obtain a bearing on my own identity. As background you have to understand this. My father grew up in a predominately African American community in Cleveland, OH. The problem for him was that he was very light skinned being that his mother had a relationship with a German guy described to me as a "friend of the family." He was a sort of white sheep growing up and so at age 18 joined the Marines to get out of Cleveland. Sometime around his nineteenth birthday he was being shipped from Japan to Vietnam but while he was in training in the States he met my mother who worked in the mess.
She was 18 and had grown up in Slidell, La outside New Orleans and later Norfolk, Va. Her father was a cook in the Navy. For my grandmother it was very important that none of her six daughters brought home any man that was too dark. They were striving to be upwardly mobile and at that time if you were brown stick around. My mom gave birth to me at Quantico Naval Hospital in Virginia. When my father came back from Vietnam my mother and I were living in Pensacola, Fl and we moved from there to Woodbridge. Thirty years ago Woodbridge was a very different place from what it is today. I don't even recognize it after all the growth. These are, as Obama succinctly puts it, the circumstances of my birth.
Now my parents carried their own racial/ethnic baggage and part of the mechanism for coping they used was to approach the world as if it were color blind. They attempted this while at the same time living in a neighborhood that was predominately white. The result was that I didn't have a concept of race even though I was darker than more than ninety percent of the kids at school and in my neighborhood. That was until I was either eight or nine. I took my bike to the nearby gas station to use the air pump. The tire was loose too so I approached three guys working under the hood of a car in the garage and asked to borrow a wrench to tighten it. There was silence as they stared over their shoulders at me. Then the oldest who couldn't have been more than twenty-five said, "Give the little nigger what he wants." Laughter from the younger two. I don't know what happened after that but I think I took the wrench and tightened the tire before walking away feeling a little sick.
These are reactions met by campaign volunteers. If you have never experienced this type of hatred it's difficult to understand. It also takes time and tact to address such difficulties.
"The first person I encountered was like, 'I'll never vote for a black person,' " recalled Ross, who is white and just turned 20. "People just weren't receptive."
Victoria Switzer, a retired social studies teacher, was on phone-bank duty one night during the Pennsylvania primary campaign. One night was all she could take: "It wasn't pretty." She made 60 calls to prospective voters in Susquehanna County, her home county, which is 98 percent white. The responses were dispiriting. One caller, Switzer remembers, said he couldn't possibly vote for Obama and concluded: "Hang that darky from a tree!"
"White people look out for white people, and black people look out for black people."
On Election Day in Kokomo, a group of black high school students were holding up Obama signs along U.S. 31, a major thoroughfare. As drivers cruised by, a number of them rolled down their windows and yelled out a common racial slur for African Americans, according to Obama campaign staffers.
The bigotry has gone beyond words. In Vincennes, the Obama campaign office was vandalized at 2 a.m. on the eve of the primary, according to police. A large plate-glass window was smashed, an American flag stolen. Other windows were spray-painted with references to Obama's controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and other political messages: "Hamas votes BHO" and "We don't cling to guns or religion. Goddamn Wright."
It's time to put a nail into this coffin. Racism is a dead horse an earth is flat way of thinking. Obama is the candidate with the the ability to help bring the United States of America to a place where we can lay this beast to rest. But like the Edwards endorsement today there is a perfect time and place to do it. A first term apology for slavery is too radical and too risky. But as I said in the beginning such an apology during the second term would be the shot in the arm future generations will need to bring about the full embodiment of our founding principles. It will be a hell of a speech if it ever happens. I hope it does.
Peace.