If I go by the whinging coming from the Republican side of the political aisle, if the electorate does what it is now predicted by every major poll to do today (elect Senator Barack Obama, a Black man, as President of the United States aka "Leader of the Free World"), it will be the end of America as we know it. Probably the end of the world as we know it.
I think they are right.
I will start with my usual disclaimers. I have donated to, canvassed for, and have been for 48 hours now phoning to the point where my hand is cramped up on behalf of, Barack Obama for President. I am scheduled to do so for hours today. In addition to donating time to the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights mobilization of attorneys throughout this country to protect the franchise. In addition to donating a couple of hours time to try and use my tiny voice as a religious person of color to beat back Proposition 8, one of the most hateful ideas I've seen in my voting life.
I have done all these things despite many misgivings that I have about Barack Obama, both in terms of some of his specific political positions and his campaign strategy developed and managed by whites, which I felt systematically pandered and exploited white unconscious racist sensibilities about what an acceptable Black man is supposed to be (which thus reinforces racism) at the expense of allowing racist and white supremacist myths about Black people generally held by huge swaths of the Right and the Left of all colors to continue largely unchallenged. So take that for what it's worth.
Despite this, I am one who believes strongly, as the editor of Black Commentator believes, that
I believe that it is completely legitimate to hold reservations, including significant reservations, regarding an Obama presidency while at the same time recognizing that it is essential for us to vote for him.
IMO it is impossible for any Black person who deeply loves our people and believes in them fundamentally despite our country's white supremacist narrative of who we are collectively not to be on the verge of keeling over right now. On the verge of being disembodied, almost, about to have our souls rise up out of these mere feet of clay that are our earthly bodies. Walking arould almost high, deprived of oxygen at the historic possibility -- no, the historic likelihood of today. As Eugene Robinson said so simply this morning, "African Americans' love of country is deep, intense and abiding, but necessarily complicated."
And it is our love of country as much as love of our people, and the man who is our brother, who when he gives interviews in quiet places calls us brother and sister, that is driving Black people to the polls today in what is expected to be the largest numbers -- with the most lopsided partisan vote -- in United States history.
Because we have come to put our trust in earnest in the political process again for the first time in 40 years, as Black voters in a country whose wealth we largely built for free. To take a chance that our vote really will matter, this time.
But even if it doesn't matter at the end of the day, it matters at the most foundational level of our collective unconsciousness, I believe, in ways that are too hard to explain when all you have is words to explain them. And that's all I have, other than my tears, which I shed this morning when I got to our little city hall and saw folks spilling in the parking lot. Waiting. Holding our breath, it seemed, collectively.
As a great writer once said in another context, waiting to exhale.
You have to have spent time with Black folks emotionally overwhelmed this past few weeks, in our hair shops and barbershops and places of worship and grocery stores and you name it to have any true sense of the magnitude of the feelings that so many Black Americans have today, to understand the collectivity of our experience today even though we have as many political opinions (40 million or so) as we have people who Identify. Why are we doing this? Why are we giving, depending on whose polls you believe, 93-97% of our votes to a single candidate - something which has NEVER been done in Black electoral history?
As uncomfortable as it may make some; no matter how much the official campaign rhetoric runs away from this narrative, frightened because in our country the idea of mass action by Blacks is indeed frightening at a level we don't even think consciously about, and nobody would want to spook the opposition into getting out to vote at the last minute like they did in that silly movie with Chris Rock, it cannot be avoided -- and should not be avoided that this is the reason:
Because Barack Obama is Black and qualified, Black and liberal, Black and can be elected the first Black president in the United States.
Whether you have loved every word Barack Obama has uttered on the campaign trail or, like me, occasionally cringed with pain at yet another diss -- inadvertent or strategic -- of the beauty and strength, hard work, survival, resourcefulness, faith and LOVE that has largely been the character of the Black diaspora in America for hundreds of years both in bondage and without, unless you are simply too young to know what is happening (and I put that at somewhere around age 4 or 5 this year) it is very hard to not feel as this young brother writing on Black Commentator feels at this moment in our people's American history:
We’ve heard all about the expectation that next Tuesday will be the "Mother of all turnouts." There are caveats, of course, like rain, long lines, running out of ballots and the types of things that historically happen when low voter turnout communities suddenly show up. Voter suppression, as a strategy, is real. It is not incumbent on anybody else to make your voting experience convenient or pleasurable. You have to look at this like an escape from slavery, a hard, long walk that you cannot allow to fail. For those who escaped from slavery, failure wasn’t an option. For those who were fighting in the civil rights movement for their right to vote, turning back wasn’t an option. In the words of the old civil rights hymnal, "Can’t let nobody turn you around..." Not this day. Not this time. This is the day for which black America prayed over three hundred years, to become a full partner in the political process. Finally, America is willing to let one of us drive the car. Our votes will be the gas that fuels this car.
(Emphasis mine.)
And this car, at least if what I saw in my beloved East Palo Alto this morning when I arrived at the polls at 7:00 AM is any indication, will be hitting the road with a V8 engine and the pedal to the metal - due to the largest turnout in our little city's history since we incorporated this progressive, once Black now fully multicultural city 25 years ago.
Others, all across the America that all of us love or we wouldn't be fighting so hard to wrest it back from the clutches of those who have been trying to destroy everything good America stood for over the past 8 years, have reported the same. A mass of people, all standing for one cause.
But the experience, the atmosphere, in many Black neighborhoods today is likely to be far beyond just the fierce commitment and determination that those of all races who have worked so hard have felt as they committed to elect Barack Obama president today, or die trying. The mood is, and this is the only word my swirling emotions can come up with right now to describe it, likely to be hot buttered SOUL. I know that everyone I've talked to, the hard core lefties like me to the centrists to the conservative Black folks, are all on fire today. Burning up inside with the spirit, at the idea that maybe -- just maybe -- America will let us (us being represented in a single Black man) drive the car. Just this once.
That the idea itself is not scoffed at today is one way we know that are facing today the end of America as we know it. Even if nobody is talking very much, just smiling, and making sure that the elderly have chairs to sit on while they wait to vote, some of whom came from dawn prayer meetings today -- feeling you can never have too much insurance. Afraid to jinx it, I guess.
I think it's important to note that none of this is happening in Black communities today because any large number of Black folks needed to be "shown" that "we can be anything we want to be" through Barack Obama's candidacy. Frankly, as any Black person over a certain age can tell you, we've always known that we were a people capable of anything, but especially greatness in the face of adversity. It was never about us needing a role model, at least not for more than a few of us who are misguided and misled, having abandoned the collective vision that sustained us for hundreds of years in favor of an "I got mine get yours" mentality that has led to some utter foolishness in Black communities, frankly. The idea that Black people didn't know that we were just as capable of running the whole show as those who insisted on running it is one that began suffering in Black communities only recently, when a generation that didn't have to struggle because their parents and grandparents struggled for them, decided that race no longer mattered in America so much and that they could self-actualize their way "me, myself, and I" -- all while making sure that they never actually thought about their exceptionalism not being an exception at all, but the ongoing rule necessary to slow down permanent justice and equality.
So to me, the importance of Barack Obama was never about giving Black people a role model; we've had plenty even if the youth often refuses to acknowledge them today thinking they know better (some things never change, of course). Instead it was about the nation's majority being a role model for us. About it role modeling that we were good enough, to them, so that it would take a chance on one of Us. (You know the Us I'm talking about -- the Us that still can't get a cab to stop for us in Manhattan a lot of the time.) About the country and our party role modeling that it, collectively, had changed enough to hitch its wagon to one of the largely dismissed and collectively disrespected -- even by the party to whom we have been loyal with our votes for 40 years. To "We Who are Dark". Voluntarily, despite the political narrative in our own party that has claimed that the reason we have been out of power is precisely because the party had hitched its wagon to us in the 1960's.
There are those -- many media, many not -- who need emotionally to believe that today's election of Barack Obama will mean that this country's ongoing legacy of white privilege and racism is at an end. It is a narrative that has flowered and taken hold, as well-meaning folks on the Left, largely white, desperately try to "disprove" the existence of electoral racism, such as the Bradley Effect, even as they forget that we don't even need to talk about Bradley when the best polling our candidate is doing still indicates that only a minority of American whites will vote for Barack Obama today - just as it has been since the last presidential election held before the 1965 Civil Rights Act was passed. (As if the passage of that Act and the fact that the best qualified man running today for the job of President can't get the majority of the majority of voters in this country are somehow rationally not connected when they are in fact deeply intertwined.) It is a strong likelihood that, if you go by the polls, "If [today's] election were confined to white America. . .Barack Obama would lose."
But a "strong likelihood" that Barack Obama would lose if not for the votes of Black and other non-white voters is not the same thing as an "absolute certainty". And in a country, which was built largely on the exploitation and dehumanization of Black slave labor; where we have never before nominated a Black man as a party's candidate for President; and where even now we will have a Senate without any Blacks in it if we elect Barack Obama today, the difference in those 2 ideas -- "strong likelihood" versus "absolute certainty" is a difference as wide as the Sahara. That even a respectable minority of whites -- far more than ever before -- have been willing to canvass, call, door knock and stand in line for hours to try and place a Black man in charge of this country's entire destiny -- and thus their destiny -- for at least the next four years is even more proof of the end of America as we know it.
There will be a lot of folks, no doubt, quoting from Dr. King's speech at the March for Jobs and Freedom about the content of character and little children sitting down together for a meal today, emotionally moved by the power of colorblind myth. As if the act of electing a Black man president is enough to do that in a world where we still see, each and every day, evidence of the white supremacist character, the sense of entitlement, of this country. I can't get moved by myth. I am, however, nonetheless moved when I think of Dr. King's words on August 28, 1963 (words I personally heard but were too young to remember, being just a baby when my parents took me to Washington that day), words that Barack Obama himself regularly borrowed each time he urged folks to consider the "fierce urgency of now":
In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable Rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.
It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. And there will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.
But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.
The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.
We cannot walk alone.
It is the idea embodied in those last few words of the excerpted words from Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech above -- that the freedom of whites in America is inextricably tied to ours as Blacks -- that a critical mass appears to have taken to heart today as we stand in interminable lines all throughout America's hoods, and farming towns and suburbs, patiently waiting to cast our votes for Barack Obama.
And that is the real reason why I believe that America as we know it will indeed end today. Because today, for the first time, I believe that for the first time a critical mass of the majority of the electorate, no matter what their reasons (and some are good reasons and others are not) feel that their freedom is inextricably tied to the success of the Black man running for President today. They see him as their best, greatest hope, not just for their locality, or county, or state, but for the entire nation.
We, us Black folks, are not walking alone today, with only a few exceptional folks at our side. We are walking with, if not a majority, a huge minority of whites by our side. Walking politically with one vision for the future, based on hope. For the first time in Black history.
No -- for the first time in American history. Since today is a history that all of us have made, together. No matter what the outcomes.
Never forget this: This is happening today in a country that was built on the assumption that all we were good for working ourselves to death for free for whites as their divine right, while being grateful for the privilege. In a country where today you still cannot be guaranteed that if you do everything right in this life that you will live a single day without someone's assumption of your inferiority merely because of your skin.
This was not possible in the America we all knew.
It is for that profound change in American politics that I am more than willing to sacrifice the idea of America as we know it. Sacrifice it for the possibility of a new America, as so many have always hoped it. Particularly those who are Black that do not have the same strategically political duty as Michelle Obama to pretend for political consumption that we have ever been as proud of our country before as we are today.
There are already a million emotions that I've felt since I awoke before dawn this morning. A million more that I will feel throughout the day, and a million more in the period that time will move in infinitesimal increments between when the polls close and our new President is announced. I am certain that I am not alone in that either -- if today's 1/2 hour on the 1/2 hour ability to update your emotional state on a tickertape is any indication.
But no matter what happens, tomorrow America will be different. Because of the return of Black engagement in the electoral process, where once again we are willing to vest our hope and faith in the ballot box despite disappointment. The ballot or the bullet, as it were. Because we had a chance to vote for someone who looks like us, the value of which is not our need to believe that we were capable of being President -- most of us who have pride in our people have always known that -- but the reality that those who we believed would never let it happen actualy were willing to stand with us, to set aside their own conscious and unconscious biases and let us drive the car. America as we have known it has always been a place where interracial coalition was both an anxiety fraught and risky business, where the connections were ephemeral and . Yet Malcolm once said, just a month before his death, that
I believe that there will ultimately be a clash between the oppressed and those who do the oppressing. I believe that there will be a clash between those who want freedom, justice, and equality for everyone and those who want to continue the system of exploitation. I believe that there will be that kind of clash, but I don’t think it will be based on the color of the skin.
It is funny that so many malign Malcolm when he himself called this day, a day where for what we believe to be the nation's survival we have coalesced with blurrier racial lines than ever before in history, a collective of the oppressed from the past 28 years of Reagan Republicanism, to say collectively that we want freedom, justice and equality for everyone. But as I've always said, Dr. King and Malcolm were a lot closer than folks like to believe.
Today, as the daughter of a mother and father who were each the grandchildren of slaves in Alabama and South Carolina, and as the mother of biracial Black children whose hearts are bursting with joy today as much as mine is, I can embrace those that need to believe in the reality of a utopian vision of racial equality that does not exist today and will not exist tomorrow as the reason as the result of them voting for Barack Obama. As I hope they embrace me, someone for whom the fight for Black equality and justice in America didn't begin with Barack Obama's campaign and won't end tomorrow. For me, I think of all those who did not live to see this day -- from my mother who participated in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, to my grandparents to their parents all but one of whom were born into slavery. I think of and salute the shoulders of giants who Barack Obama's candidacy stands, even as he too often distances himself from them as a campaign strategy. I cry that they could not have been here with us today. Even as they are with us today, because the ancestors have never left us, not really.
I need to stop now because my head is too full of things to say and none of them make much sense other than the occasional "Thank You God, for letting me and my father live to see this day" and the bars of Lift Every Voice and Sing that I keep hearing and which keep blurring the words I've been trying to type somewhat incoherently on this screen for an hour:
Lift every voice and sing
Till earth and heaven ring
Ring with the harmonies of liberty
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the glistening skies
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song, full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
Sing a song, full of the hope that the present has brought us
Facing the rising sun
Of a new day begun
Let us march on, till victory is won.
Someday, I hope that all of us, no matter our race or economic standing or social standing, can as a nation can sing this together, loudly, proudly with the same reverence as we sing America the Beautiful, my favorite patriotic song (perhaps because it exhorts us to "crown [our] good with brotherhood from sea to shining sea", an idea not inconsistent with any of those I've written here, if you think about it.)
Who knows? Maybe we can have choir rehearsal in time for Inauguration Day, 2009.
Let our votes today be the gas that drives the car.
(Finally, as my little contribution to inspiration and and as a hat tip to my husband's homeland (he is a proud Australian and not an American citizen and therefore not voting today), I can't help but note that if this election were being held Down Under today, Barack Obama would win every single state in a supermajority landslide:
The Australian Electoral Map
Not bad for a country whose "White Australia Policy" was the law of the land until 1971! So get out there today, wherever you are, and let's see if we can color in the map of our beloved country -- America -- to look as much like this 100% blue Aussie one as possible, OK?
Please?