A funny thing happened in this election cycle. As invested as I was in the outcome, when Obama was declared President-Elect, all of the emotions that I thought would come to the forefront didn’t. I mean everyone else was crying, everyone else was hugging, and while I was amongst them, it just didn’t seem to hit me that way.
I, initially, justified it in my mind that with this country’s history of assassination, I wasn’t going to jinx the chance of having the first minority POTUS with my jubilance. I was just going to have to remain calm until Inauguration Day and that’s when all of the emotion would surely come out.
Then inauguration day came. I rushed out at lunch to share the moment with my wife. We watched the inauguration with a close friend and we cheered at the appropriate moments, we stood for the Pledge of Allegiance and we hugged when the oath was complete. But I still felt strangely detached. My excuse at the time was that I had wished my kids were old enough to appreciate it. Or that I would have liked to have savored the moment with my Pops whose stories of rural Georgia in the 50’s and 60’s still drive him to the point that I doubt his (and my mom’s) zeal in campaigning for Obama was even matched by ‘Obama Girl.’ To some extent, both of those reasons for my lack of emotion about the moment were true, but damn I’d even brought tissues for the occasion and...Nothing!
But this video was the missing piece of the puzzle for me: (H/T Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic Magazine -- http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.c... )
Now, I’m no fan-boy. I don’t fawn over celebrities, and while I would love to have their paychecks, I don’t envy their inability to fail in private like the rest of us do. So why did I find myself fighting snot-bubbles at work over this, seemingly, innocuous piece of video?
The answer was this...On stage shaking hands with the new administration at the National Mall was Mary J. Blige, Queen Latifah, John Legend, Beyonce, et al., and for the first time in my life, I felt included.
Now, obviously I knew Barack Obama was "Black", but in reality, I listened to Mary J. Blige to sooth my adolescent heartaches and just knew that she was "All I Need(ed)" when I was nodding my head to her joint with Meth. I rocked with Latifah, when she was shouting "Ladies First" from the stage and holding every bit of her own as a solo artist and as part of the Flavor Unit with all-time greats like A Tribe Called Quest. John Legend is not just a soulful balladeer, but we even share an alma mater. Beyonce, in addition to having some of the baddest pipes in the game is married to Jay-Z, a fellow Bed-Stuy alumnus and self-proclaimed "Baddest dude in the game." With which I’m inclined to agree.
To be clear, these were not my role models because, I have been truly blessed with great parents, but I would be lying if their music and art didn’t take me in directions that allowed me to forge an identity for myself amongst the varying worlds in which I inhabited. They helped ease my razor burns and ingrown hairs from shaving by beard to conform to corporate policy. They helped me to settle myself before politely arguing that braids/locks/twists or any of the other African hairstyles were not indicators of intelligence, aptitude or effectiveness. They helped me laugh it off when white female colleagues (that I hadn’t met) would feign forgetting something at their desk to avoid getting in an elevator late at night with the young black guy. Their music was playing in my head when being forced to listen to, yet another, Led Zeppelin cover band during happy hour. They were the music playing in my earphones when a group of rednecks in South Carolina decided to yell "nigger" and gun their cars at me and some friends down the street.
But that’s not all, they were also the music playing when I met my wife and when I brought my kids home for the first time, and at my wedding and my brother’s wedding and at graduation parties, and during house parties during the summer, and in my headphones getting me ready for football games and track meets. To state it plainly artists like the ones on stage at the inauguration were my theme music through both the good and bad times in my life. And while I don’t know any of the artists personally, I feel like I know a part of their stories and some of their views about life through their music. Furthermore, like most music fans, my life experiences have inevitably become intertwined with their life’s work.
And now there they were, standing on the f**king National Mall in front of 1+ million people shaking hands with a President of the United States who embraces both who they were as people as well as the perception of who they were, faults and all. But even that wasn’t enough for me to lose it. Thinking of that I just smiled and thought to myself, "Ain’t that some s**t?" The specific moment when I lost it was a little later in that video when John Legend backs up a bit, raises his hand and, jokingly, says..."I have a dream."
In that precise moment, if you look closely, you can see the Washington Monument in the background, framed with the throngs of people in attendance. In what felt like a minute but must have been no longer than a couple of seconds, I lost it because I knew that this is what Dr. King must have seen, both literally and figuratively, when he gave his speech in 1963. Dr. King saw both the crowds in attendance on that day and foresaw the crowds in attendance on this day when the peculiarities of one’s birth would not be the insurmountable barrier to becoming a fully vested member of society that it had been.
And now, my generation, my group, my ni**az were a part of it. Our motley crew, whose music was going to be the downfall of civilization, whose culture amounted to nothing more than glorified thuggery, whose members were completely unappreciative of the sacrifices of the past and intent on squandering the future had created a movement that reached not only across the world but had been part of the machinery that had put a "Black Man" in the White House. How’s that for a big bag of irony and some fries? But even better than that, was the fact that the black man now in the White House took the time to say, ‘Thanks.’
I guess that what I was crying at was the beauty of it all. That maybe a bunch of people both like me and not at all like me, can now wake up and not have to make a choice between being themselves and striving to be better. Now in reality I know that that dream has not been fully realized and that there is much work to be done, but for at least a fleeting moment it felt like it was true.