America is collectively standing at the mountaintop that Martin Luther King, Jr. talked about on the night before his murder 40 years ago. He told a room full of striking Memphis sanitation workers that God had "allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."
American voters could enter a metaphorical promised land should they elect Sen. Barack Obama as their president this November. They will also, in the process, break a political color line as clear and obvious as the one that Jackie Robinson broke in major league baseball in 1947. The powerful reality of this may not have completely sunk in to the 300 million people who currently reside in the United States, but it is there, somewhere in the back of their minds. You'd better believe that it is there.
We may have a black president. More precisely, given that Obama is of mixed race, we may have a person of color as our president in 2008. When my 6-year-old son asks me why it matters if Obama is black, I don't know how to answer him. "It just does," is the best I can do for now.
I won't bedevil him with tales of lynchings or disturb his dreams with photographs of police dogs and fire hoses loosed on black children or tell him about the poll taxes or slavery or any of the myriad things he will learn about in time.
For now, it is good enough just to say, "It just does."
And then hope like hell it happens.
The impending reality of a "black" president has had strange impacts already, leading me to suspect that Americans on all sides of the political spectrum don't quite know how to handle it.
Take Ralph Nader, running on fumes in his fifth try for the presidency. He recently took Obama to task for not doing enough about economic exploitation in the nation's "ghettos" (Nader's term).
This is a fair enough concern, of course, but then Nader said, "What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson?"
While I hope that race-baiting utterances like this don't completely destroy Nader's legacy as a consumer activist, he's on thin ice already and this only makes it thinner.
And then there's Grover Norquist, the right-wing ideologue advisor to Reagan, Bush I and Bush II. He told the Washington Times—a newspaper owned by convicted felon and self-proclaimed Messiah Sun Myung Moon—that "Obama is John Kerry with a tan."
This is code for the "n" word, but rich white men like Norquist are too sophisticated to come out and say it. So they talk in code at the country club and laugh over their highballs.
Karl Rove has gotten into the act, too, waxing witty with "Even if you never met (Obama), you know this guy. He's the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette, that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone."
Well, we know Rove, too. And coming from him, this is code for: 1) just how pathetically insecure Karl is personally; and 2) saying Obama is a wee bit uppity.
As John Ridley put it on Huffington Post, "We've heard the pejorative 'arrogant' before. When I say 'we' I mean those of us who are 'others' in America: people of color. Minorities. Women. We hear the word all the time from a select section of privileged white guys; the codifying they use when they fear the silver spoons are about to be snatched from their lily palaces."
Snatch away, Sen. Obama.
