First a disclaimer. I am a woman of color and I am also an educator. I have followed this election very closely and what Obama experienced has been common to many experiences of people of color in all areas of employment.Many people of color already know this and I am just in the mood to rant and vent and get it out of my system.
One thing that I have known and noticed through my entire life is that people of color have a different standard of competence to bear when they have to prove themselves worthy. This remained true for me in all my life. In school, all the way until I completed my dissertation, I saw how the standard of evaluation and expectation was different for me than my white counterparts. I didn't complain. I don't believe in victimization. I figured that I am going to be smarter if people push me and challenge me more. I didn't care that I lost points for things that other people didn't. I didn't care that I had to take English competency test because I might not speak "real English" at home. I didn't care that I was told to hold my tongue when the teachers asked for inputs from students because apparently, I would intimidate the teachers. For the most part, I felt that whatever was going on, it was making me smarter, making me reflect on my position, allowing me to make sharper, stronger, thoughtful points when I was allowed to present my perspectives.
A group of my friends and I gather regularly to speak about the elections. One of my friends, Mary, is an African American woman in her early 60s (I am in my 30s but have friends of many ages)who remembers being hosed, being asked to take tests before being allowed to vote, and being thrown stones at for crossing the railroad tracks to go and get milk from the store. She continued to say to me during the primaries and till now that Obama is being told he doesn't know his place. He is supposed to be the good little house negro and he is not being one. People are getting mad at him because he doesn't have the same kind of resume or the appearance of those who came before him to run for the President of the U.S.
Months passed and I saw what the Clintons tried to do to Obama including Bill Clinton, who tried to make him the Black candidate, tried to ask if anyone has heard a one term senator ever becoming the President, as if it was Hillary's earned due and Obama should have stepped away. They tried to make him too black and started to run the angry black man narrative with the use of Reverend Wright. Obama came out and did something no one expected him to do. He gave an honest speech about how our racial identities and differences put us in different social realities in the U.S. He urged us to come together in our similarities than in our differences. He talked to us as if we were adults. He made himself vulnerable to show that he is not perfect and he doesn't expect us to be either. People tried to say that he threw his grandmother under the bus when he did nothing of that kind.
Obama was held to the highest of expectations during the primaries. Even when it was mathematically impossible to win for the Clintons, they continued on, hoping to find a loophole, hoping to add more votes, hoping to get more delegates, hoping to do anything to recover from their complacency of underestimating what Obama was capable of doing. I have always used this kind of underestimation to my advantage. If I have been underestimated at work, I have quietly performed higher than expected. I quietly recruited an army of supporters and cheerleaders who would be able to speak to my performance with honesty. Those who underestimated me, became surprised and often weaponless because they were not prepared.
Now at the end of the general election, after months of underestimation, after many attempts to make Obama the angry Black candidate, after deliberate attempts to darken his skin by various types of media organizations, after trying to portray Obama as terrorist, unpatriotic, America-hating, Islmaofascist, white hating, socialist, communist, they forgot one thing that Obama did successfully and better than any other candidate in the history of politics in the U.S. Fundraisng. His decision to raise funds through small donations was a brilliant one and even Karl Rove tried to whine and ask if Obama was going to buy his way to the White House. This is the same Rove who would literally do the same if not worse.
They made fun of Obama being a community organizer. Yet Obama used that mockery to his advantage and organized some more. We worked tirelessly to help him. The more they made fun of him, the more small donations I gave to Obama. The more phone calls I made. The more canvassing I did. And they didn't know how to attack him on the strongest aspect of his campaign - funds. They tried though to suggest he has illegal donations and he has to show all the records. However, that didn't go very far because Obama still had the money advantage.
The republicans, like Mike Murphy, last night said that because Obama had more money to advertise, and because when McCain went negative Obama counter attacked with more ads, Obama spent more money on negative advertising, and therefore he engaged in more negative attacks against McCain than McCain on Obama. Are you fucking kidding me? Anyone with an ounce of brain will know that 100% fund investment in negative advertising is the key argument here. Not the money amount because McCain cannot match Obama in his fundraising. But that standard didn't apply to Obama. Oh well, as Obama says, brush it off of your shoulders and move on.
Ben Stein was on Larry King the other day with Arianna Huffington. He said that McCain should have stayed more on message and highlighted his character. He could have won on character. What character would that be? Reversing McCain's character on Obama, would Ben Stein be as glorious about character then? What if Obama was a womanizer in his youth? What if Obama got a free ride through school, graduated at the bottom of his class, didn't bother to learn how to fly planes and got away with crashing 5 of them? What if Obama divorced his wife who stood by him through everything after she got disfigured and married some young rich hot thing? What if Obama got messed up with a scandal like Keating 5? What if noises were still being made of his alleged affair with another woman even right now? What would be so honorable about that character?
It makes me feel so proud that Obama understood that the expectation about his performance will always be higher than his counterpart and he rose to the occasion. He hardly ever complained like Hillary did or like McCain did how he is a victim of media, or how he is being asked to explain things that his counterparts are not. He understood the game and hit it out of the park. I cannot wait to see tomorrow and see how someone who worked to his advantage and brought so many people together in their strengths, in their similarities, in their common desires and hopes, become the President of the U.S. It is time.