Five Days Before Obama
[I wrote this piece the day before the big GOTV weekend, Halloween 2008]
On a walk I was taking around Gold Lake, outside the tiny mountain hamlet of Ward, Colorado, it came to me. I was naked under a robe, padding along in flipflops with my arms crossed behind my back, feeling a bit like Socrates. Near the opposite boundary of the property I carefully stepped down behind a release gate, a tiered construction of light-colored cement, the utility of which my city self could only guess at, and across to the other side. Imagine, I thought: a class picture of the past Presidents of the United States. Imagine one of those fraternity roster photos, with each member’s head a postage stamp. Think: Washington, Adams, Grant, Roosevelt, and then Carter, Clinton, Bush. Now Obama. White guys, gray haired and white, middle-aged. Now Obama. I envisioned looking at this line-up, going on down the line from the inception of the country to the present. All basically the same despite perhaps a few scant differences. The same, essentially, in age and mien and quality. In my mind, I was just going along each picture, saying white guy, white guy, white guy, Obama. 43 white guys, but here comes #44.
And there he is: a young face, a handsome face, the hair short and a little graying, the expression proud and statesmanlike. In other words, very like many of the other pictures except one, stark contrast: the darker hue of skin. In a country that has always promised safe haven to any person from anywhere, come one, come all, your tired and your poor, we have never even come close to anything but white men in our highest office. No women, no Chinese, no Jews, and certainly no black people. When, please note, our society was largely built on the backs of immigrants, of slave labor and indentured servitude, of women, and all the rest. Certainly, we’ve had Presidents with Italian blood, with Irish blood, other bloods. How could we not? We were all of us once immigrants to this continent. Yet it was strange in 1960 to have elected a Catholic, and now, with a mere five days left, we may in fact see the apotheosis of the civil and equal rights movements: a dark skinned President. Strange? It’s downright revolutionary.
I thought to myself, there at Gold Lake, with the outlines of the distant Rocky mountains rising and falling like a graph of the current economy, among the tranquil water and stone embankments, together among the pines: this is something that must happen. It has to happen, because what kind of country can we ever be if we don’t truly represent all our people? How can we champion, in our vaunted constitution, ‘all men are created equal,’ yet add, sotto voce, that if you’re non-white, and non-male, you most likely will never be able to seek the highest office in our land. That incredible symbol we hold out like a carrot on a stick to all pursuers: the President of the United States. We Americans consider ourselves the dreamers, believe big and believe strong and, by virtue of that equality of belief, you, yes you, can do anything you like, can become anyone or anything you want to be. We tell our children this.
Or do we? I had to wonder: how many disadvantaged or immigrant or “foreign” families in fact tell their children: you too could be President some day? Of course, there are restrictions to foreign-born people, see: Schwarzenegger, A. But we live in a society not simply of recent immigrants or of 1st generation peoples, but of 3rd and 4th and even 5th generation peoples. How can we continue to show this face to them, the face of Mt. Rushmore, the face of dead history, the vestiges of old Brits with powdered wigs?
We’ve sent our soldiers to foreign lands. Some of them came home with wives from those lands and here, in our land of freedom, they raised families together. These children are our American sons and daughters, too. Are we saying, hey you, Stanford grad, all-American kid, you show a bit too much of your mom’s Vietnamese heritage, therefore you cannot now, nor ever join the class picture? You will never be on the roll, the roster of photos of members of the club will never include you. No. We cannot now, nor ever again promote, implicitly or explicitly, the exclusivity of this club. In fact, any such notion shall now and forevermore be abolished. Whatever images that needed to be in place when the nation was born, ones that promoted a certain membership, a familiarity, an easily recognized nationalism or tribalism, however narrow, they are now forever changed. At least, they will be forever changed on Nov. 4th. They must be. The barrier must be broken, the ceiling, glass and otherwise, must be shattered.
It simply must not stand. The measure of a man is his character. The measure of a person. We pride ourselves on such statements, and then defy them in practice. During WWII, a Japanese American was believed to have some type of allegiance to Japan. But this notion was borne out to be specious; the world finally understood not to be simply about race, and allegiance to that shaky delineation, but about culture, about heart, about a brotherhood which might ease your human suffering. The human allegiance. For the beacon of freedom shines just as brightly to anyone wishing to be seen, understood, and taken for who they are not what they look like or where they’re from. American children of Japanese decent, for example, may in fact adhere to American “culture” more than white (however ambiguously defined) children ever will, based solely on the perspective, a closer connection, to what the opposite means, to not to have freedom, to live in tyranny.
Let’s be clear: the leaders and politicians of “different” heritage, and I’m thinking specifically of people with darker skin color, have almost always had to have a skin tone lighter than black to ascend to any level of stature. This is borne out again and again, in fact to such an alarming degree that often within the black community there is discrimination based on skin color. Indeed, Barack Obama’s candidacy would not be where it is if he didn’t have the racially mixed heritage he does, his Kansan roots, his white grandparents and white mother. It is almost as if his paternity is an anomaly, and in many ways it must be in order for so many in our country to accept, if not embrace, him fully. Conversely, though, his blood’s mixture is precisely the reason why he speaks for us all, that while his is more obvious than others’, we all have mixed blood of some sort, and that is why skin color or racial designation does not mean what it has come to mean to most people. The color of skin does not matter, since, in a larger sense, we are all of us immigrants to this world. Who knows what starlight and magic, what Creator, conspired to inspire our individual sparks initiated by our two parents. None of us. We arrive here on this planet we call Earth as we are: white, black, tall, female, healthy, curious, fill-in-the-blank. We cannot ever again in our glorious futures limit ourselves, our very thinking, by divisions based on skin color.
We must, and we will, rise above that history. Five days before Obama. Let this class picture change forever for the better, the best, and finally the brightest. Now the change in color means everything. Someday, it will mean much less.
On a walk I was taking around Gold Lake, outside the tiny mountain hamlet of Ward, Colorado, it came to me. I was naked under a robe, padding along in flipflops with my arms crossed behind my back, feeling a bit like Socrates. Near the opposite boundary of the property I carefully stepped down behind a release gate, a tiered construction of light-colored cement, the utility of which my city self could only guess at, and across to the other side. Imagine, I thought: a class picture of the past Presidents of the United States. Imagine one of those fraternity roster photos, with each member’s head a postage stamp. Think: Washington, Adams, Grant, Roosevelt, and then Carter, Clinton, Bush. Now Obama. White guys, gray haired and white, middle-aged. Now Obama. I envisioned looking at this line-up, going on down the line from the inception of the country to the present. All basically the same despite perhaps a few scant differences. The same, essentially, in age and mien and quality. In my mind, I was just going along each picture, saying white guy, white guy, white guy, Obama. 43 white guys, but here comes #44.
And there he is: a young face, a handsome face, the hair short and a little graying, the expression proud and statesmanlike. In other words, very like many of the other pictures except one, stark contrast: the darker hue of skin. In a country that has always promised safe haven to any person from anywhere, come one, come all, your tired and your poor, we have never even come close to anything but white men in our highest office. No women, no Chinese, no Jews, and certainly no black people. When, please note, our society was largely built on the backs of immigrants, of slave labor and indentured servitude, of women, and all the rest. Certainly, we’ve had Presidents with Italian blood, with Irish blood, other bloods. How could we not? We were all of us once immigrants to this continent. Yet it was strange in 1960 to have elected a Catholic, and now, with a mere five days left, we may in fact see the apotheosis of the civil and equal rights movements: a dark skinned President. Strange? It’s downright revolutionary.
I thought to myself, there at Gold Lake, with the outlines of the distant Rocky mountains rising and falling like a graph of the current economy, among the tranquil water and stone embankments, together among the pines: this is something that must happen. It has to happen, because what kind of country can we ever be if we don’t truly represent all our people? How can we champion, in our vaunted constitution, ‘all men are created equal,’ yet add, sotto voce, that if you’re non-white, and non-male, you most likely will never be able to seek the highest office in our land. That incredible symbol we hold out like a carrot on a stick to all pursuers: the President of the United States. We Americans consider ourselves the dreamers, believe big and believe strong and, by virtue of that equality of belief, you, yes you, can do anything you like, can become anyone or anything you want to be. We tell our children this.
Or do we? I had to wonder: how many disadvantaged or immigrant or “foreign” families in fact tell their children: you too could be President some day? Of course, there are restrictions to foreign-born people, see: Schwarzenegger, A. But we live in a society not simply of recent immigrants or of 1st generation peoples, but of 3rd and 4th and even 5th generation peoples. How can we continue to show this face to them, the face of Mt. Rushmore, the face of dead history, the vestiges of old Brits with powdered wigs?
We’ve sent our soldiers to foreign lands. Some of them came home with wives from those lands and here, in our land of freedom, they raised families together. These children are our American sons and daughters, too. Are we saying, hey you, Stanford grad, all-American kid, you show a bit too much of your mom’s Vietnamese heritage, therefore you cannot now, nor ever join the class picture? You will never be on the roll, the roster of photos of members of the club will never include you. No. We cannot now, nor ever again promote, implicitly or explicitly, the exclusivity of this club. In fact, any such notion shall now and forevermore be abolished. Whatever images that needed to be in place when the nation was born, ones that promoted a certain membership, a familiarity, an easily recognized nationalism or tribalism, however narrow, they are now forever changed. At least, they will be forever changed on Nov. 4th. They must be. The barrier must be broken, the ceiling, glass and otherwise, must be shattered.
It simply must not stand. The measure of a man is his character. The measure of a person. We pride ourselves on such statements, and then defy them in practice. During WWII, a Japanese American was believed to have some type of allegiance to Japan. But this notion was borne out to be specious; the world finally understood not to be simply about race, and allegiance to that shaky delineation, but about culture, about heart, about a brotherhood which might ease your human suffering. The human allegiance. For the beacon of freedom shines just as brightly to anyone wishing to be seen, understood, and taken for who they are not what they look like or where they’re from. American children of Japanese decent, for example, may in fact adhere to American “culture” more than white (however ambiguously defined) children ever will, based solely on the perspective, a closer connection, to what the opposite means, to not to have freedom, to live in tyranny.
Let’s be clear: the leaders and politicians of “different” heritage, and I’m thinking specifically of people with darker skin color, have almost always had to have a skin tone lighter than black to ascend to any level of stature. This is borne out again and again, in fact to such an alarming degree that often within the black community there is discrimination based on skin color. Indeed, Barack Obama’s candidacy would not be where it is if he didn’t have the racially mixed heritage he does, his Kansan roots, his white grandparents and white mother. It is almost as if his paternity is an anomaly, and in many ways it must be in order for so many in our country to accept, if not embrace, him fully. Conversely, though, his blood’s mixture is precisely the reason why he speaks for us all, that while his is more obvious than others’, we all have mixed blood of some sort, and that is why skin color or racial designation does not mean what it has come to mean to most people. The color of skin does not matter, since, in a larger sense, we are all of us immigrants to this world. Who knows what starlight and magic, what Creator, conspired to inspire our individual sparks initiated by our two parents. None of us. We arrive here on this planet we call Earth as we are: white, black, tall, female, healthy, curious, fill-in-the-blank. We cannot ever again in our glorious futures limit ourselves, our very thinking, by divisions based on skin color.
We must, and we will, rise above that history. Five days before Obama. Let this class picture change forever for the better, the best, and finally the brightest. Now the change in color means everything. Someday, it will mean much less.
posted by jdawords at 3:39 PM
1 Comments:
Well said, sir! These things that mean so much now.. someday they will mean nothing. People will look back and wonder how humans lived in such an uncivilized world. But we will change it, baby-step by baby-step.
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