I started reading this speech to refute. I wanted to see the problems of Obama and I have some. I wanted to see where he missed the point. However, I see him. I understand. I’m cynical. I have to be proven things. I want to believe him. I want to believe that he won’t hurt us like every other politician has. I want to drink from the cup of Obama and be made full.
What is glaring about Obama is how he really does believe in America. I can’t. Strike that, I don’t. When he says, "Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution." I hear evil men that wanted more and more money. I see people pillaging an established community. I think about them fleeing for a profit. I understand it. My friends moved to Atlanta or Dallas or Houston for jobs. I see the similarities. I just cant see them as a people looking for hope. I can’t help it. My experience makes me hate this country that he loves. I don’t believe in it. I don’t see this rainbow coalition that he promises he is trying to create, making things better. I see them making things palatable. I don’t need the hemlock to taste like kool-aid. I want to drink kool-aid that isn’t hemlock. The way he continues to discuss and blare hope isn’t making me believe any more than I did before. I want to keep hope alive, but my reality says that it’s dying.
Obama has an "unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people." Well these are the same people that wanted attacks on "terrorists". These people want to ban "sagging" pants. These people are descended from the same people that gave Indians small pox and took their land. These people took Manhattan in a trade for beads and glass. These decent and generous people continue to deny Africa aid. They wage a war on poverty. They re-elect George Bush. When words and actions contradict, I follow actions.
Obama spoke of this. He said, "It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen – is that America can change."
See I have access so we have access.
Well, I’ve seen the changes. It’s a bunch of old dogs learning new tricks. Well let’s open up a pay day advance store in an area that doesn’t have banks. It has changed. It went from no way is my daughter going to school with negroes, to saying, Well the schools in the city are just terrible. I guess we will buy a house we can’t afford so that we can get Megan and Beckah in a good school.
When he says that nationalists like me, "simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality." Really!? We do. Well, it’s hard to explain the obvious any more than we have. I can’t buy that white folk are so stupid that they can’t understand "that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper."
They know this. It’s just that they don’t really believe that my dreams do not have to come at the expense of their dreams. Their profit takes precedent over my dreams. Their children are more important than mine. Their livelihood comes at the expense of mine. I really do believe that they believe that for them to be up I have to be down. The choices they make reflect this. They don’t appear to understand or accept the contribution of my people. They fail to discuss the role they have played in creating the situation some of my people face. They continue to discuss how they reap no benefits of being white.
They drink from cool glasses of everything that is white and fail to understand the problems produced by the condensation from their cups on my coffee table. I don’t believe they are completely unaware. Nobody makes this many mistakes on accident. A blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally.
I do have a "profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam." I can’t think that one suicide bomber killing 50 people at a discotheque warrants the annihilation of a town by helicopters or planes. Maybe radical Islam is to blame.
I don’t think it popped up one day. I think it was born out of the tyranny that is Christianity. Maybe it was born out of an ignorance that says that the million man march will fail because God isn’t in it. Maybe it comes from women being raped and children being killed. Maybe the golden rule doesn’t apply if I don’t think you’re of my Sheppard’s flock. Maybe I have to do unto others, before they do unto me. Maybe. Just maybe.
Maybe I don’t know what is right about America. Maybe I don’t say the pledge of allegiance because I can’t stomach the lies. I don’t stand for the national anthem because my ancestors harvested amber waves of grain and still have yet to taste the bread. I’m bitter. I’m hurt. I won’t forgive. I can’t forget.
I can’t see why people are screaming for solidarity now. Why not prior to 9-11? Why not prior to a recession? Why now do we have cries for "unity"? Why are we not supposed to be "racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change?"
Why are our problems "neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all," now? Crack was our problem. Your solution was just say no. Police Brutality was our problem, you turned a blind eye. We developed the Black Panthers. You marked that one wrong and created COINTEL-PRO. I don’t understand. History is full of contradictions. You screw me once shame on you. You screw me twice, I like it.
The black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former (current) gang-banger The kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America. This is me. I believe that we (all folk) need to work together to solve our problems. However, I feel the dominant culture wants us to come together for our benefit at their benefit. I have never heard white folk trying to rally around a black issue.
Inner city (read: Black) schools are failing all over the country but white folk want to unite around healthcare. Black folk been losing homes for years, now it’s a mortgage crisis. Sorry I just can’t jump on board this rainbow coalition. I don’t believe it. It is not real.
I agree when Obama says, "We do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow." However, I read that he thinks these things were unintended consequences. That people don’t really attach today with the past. Now I do believe that groups of people are stupid. However, few groups are this stupid. I cannot imagine that white folk really don’t see their head start.
Obama reinforces white nationalism with this point, "Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students." This is a surface truth but a real lie.
In 1935 Dubois cautioned black folk about integration. He said the education that black folk would receive would be less than what they received in segregated schools. See white folk showed us what happens with desegregation. Black Magic on ESPN shows what happens when the best go to the black schools.
However, these ideas of integration and diversity continue to reflect the opinion of the court in Plessey v. Ferguson. Justice Brown said, "The argument also assumes that social prejudices may be overcome by legislation, and that equal rights cannot be secured to the negro except by an enforced commingling of the two races. We cannot accept this proposition. If the two races are to meet upon terms of social equality, it must be the result of natural affinities, a mutual appreciation of each other’s merits and a voluntary consent of individuals."
The dissenting opinion even affirms white nationalism, Justice Harlan says, "The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty." However, it reflects the reality that black folk cannot will their way into acceptance by white folk.
All of this we are one talk forgets the history of the country. Better yet, it ignores it. It refuses to accept the fact that black folk live with the reality of this country and white folk live with the theory. I don’t see this rainbow coalition of hope that Obama represents. I’m leery. I’m cynical. I’m jaded. Well, I might just be too realistic?
p.s. "I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners"
my skin crawls when black folk say things like this…