Candace
Talmadge
Read Candace's bio and previous columns
February 4, 2008
Is Barack Obama Willing
to Lance the Boil of Racism?
“Race doesn’t matter! Race doesn’t matter!” supporters of Democratic
presidential candidate Barack Obama reportedly chanted after his huge
victory in South Carolina, where he beat Hillary Clinton by 55 percent
to 27 percent of votes.
Obama is on a roll, raising $32 million in campaign cash last month,
racking up endorsements from Democratic elder statesman Ted Kennedy and
other Kennedy politicians. Caroline Kennedy, the only survivor of
President John F. Kennedy’s immediate family, called the Illinois
contender “a president like my father” in a recent opinion piece in
The New York Times.
He
may well turn out to be a commander in chief a little bit too much like
JFK – a generational inspiration who is cut down in his prime.
Think it couldn’t happen – that we’re past all that as a country? I pray
earnestly that it never does, but there is far too much lingering racial
bigotry and hatred to be certain.
For starters, Obama does not appear to have much support among Latinos.
In heavily Latino California, he was trailing Hillary Clinton among
Latinos 39 percent to 27 percent, according to a mid-January Field Poll
of likely Democratic primary voters. (With the latest AP-Yahoo poll
showing a roughly even split among supporters of John Edwards, now out
of contention, the earlier Field Poll gap isn’t likely to change much.)
Then there is the ever-present minority of white supremacists, who have
guns – lots of them – fully locked and loaded. It’s not that much of
stretch to imagine one or more taking extreme umbrage at the notion of a
black president and using those weapons to do something about it.
Yet Obama does embody hope by being the first presidential candidate of
color who has a real shot at his party’s nomination. He also energizes
the young across racial boundaries to become involved in politics – and
that’s good news.
He
unfortunately also lets white folk off the hook, because we can vote for
him and thus absolve ourselves (and our race) without ever really
contemplating or acknowledging the role of whites in this nation’s
tragic and often sordid racial past. This land of the free and home of
the brave was founded on involuntary servitude and racial inequality.
Ultimately, there’s no going around that truth, even if too many whites
deny it or shrug it off as all in the past.
In
his speeches, Obama tends to gloss over centuries of pain, hardship and
struggle by talking about bringing people together for a brighter
future. His message: Let’s move forward, not look back.
How can we as a nation move forward when as a country we refuse to
acknowledge the truth about our racial history? For those familiar with
12-step programs, we have yet to make that searching and fearless
national moral inventory (Step #4) of our racial errors and omissions as
a country.
A
boil continues to rot and infect unless it is lanced. Lancing a boil is
never pleasant, but it can be done – and the relief is both immediate
and long-term. So how would we lance this boil of racism and racial
animosity?
Simply by acknowledging, in humility, that it happened and still does.
By admitting to the national wrongs of slavery, lynchings and other
racially motivated murders, Jim Crow laws of the past and current
attempts at voter suppression, and the lingering disparities between
whites and blacks in education, income, health and so many other
critical measures of the life we all long to live.
This isn’t about whites flagellating themselves or stewing in endless
guilt. It is simply being honest and forthright about our failures as a
nation to live up to our highest ideals of human equality – nothing more
and nothing less. Until we do this, we cannot truly move in any
direction, much less forward. We remain stuck in racial neutral.
The United States rightly (if belatedly) apologized as a nation to the
Japanese interned during World War II and paid each one the sum of
$20,000. We are long, long overdue for the same consideration to the
descendents of those who came to this country not by their own choice,
yet whose presence among us has enriched our entire culture beyond
measure or price.
© 2008
North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
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