In this past Sunday’s “Week in Review”, the New York Times headline was "Where Whites Draw the Line." Before arms are broken from self-congratulatory “Mission Accomplished” backslapping about how far the country has come in nominating Barack Obama as the Democratic candidate for president, thereby certifying that the country has moved beyond race, there has to be an acknowledgement that present-day whites are heirs to a legacy of economic privilege that was based upon race and passed down through generations, providing exclusive financial opportunity for whites for over 400 years. That’s not “Too black,” that’s history.
That legacy is most clear when brought directly up against the other side of the coin as it is here in central Brooklyn, with the epicenter at a shelter for homeless men at the armory at Bedford and Atlantic Avenues. A lot has changed since I ran in a track meet there as a member of the Police Athletic League (PAL).
The city’s plan to make the armory the only intake center for the homeless male population of New York has focused attention on a group of men, overwhelmingly black, who possess the highest rate of virtually every sexual or social deviancy, emotional distress, drug addiction and disease. I do not doubt that there are good men among them, but as a group, other than sharing a yen for a smoke, they are the polar opposites of Barack Obama. With his Kenyan father and Kansas mother, intergenerational post-slave trauma was not a direct factor in Senator Obama’s life, as it has been in the lives of these men.
They are what’s left after generations of financial, emotional and social assaults, of paths taken or blocked based on race. It is not “too black” to make note of this and of society’s obligation to not only give them intensive and holistic services, but even more importantly, work on emptying the criminal justice system of its overwhelmingly African-American population. They are also evidence, as is the dropout rate, of a pipeline based on race that has to be shut down by social intervention and the taking of personal responsibility by those in the pipeline, and by those who have historically benefited from it.
We also hope it’s not “too black” or offensive to white sensibilities to note the lingering effects of generations of racial financial exclusivity now in display in the real estate market in Fort Greene/Clinton Hill, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights. It is all the talk of black residents, of how white people, young white folks who haven’t paid a life’s worth of dues, are seemingly the only ones who can afford to buy a house or rent an apartment.
This is again the result of generations of entitlement vs. non-entitlement, and while it may be “too black” to note it, solutions that fail to do so and take it into account, are doomed to fail.
This will be a fascinating race for president of the United States. The African-American vote is set. For the first time, many white Americans will be faced with a straightforward question: Do they vote their interests or their race? When the contest was Hillary Clinton vs. Barack Obama, it was easy for Race and gender to play important roles in the primaries, since essentially, all other facts were equal. But the presidency is going to be a different matter entirely.
Based on the record of the last eight years of a Republican administration, and with a record of voting 95 percent of the time with President Bush, the promise from John McCain of four more years must give Democratic racial or gender voters reason to pause.
And speaking of John McCain, could this possibly be the guy they’re putting on the court against Obama? If you caught McCain’s Tuesday night speech it was a painful experience to go through, particularly painful if you’re a McCain supporter.
It was more than just McCain being awkward. It was more than the forced delivery. It was the forced applause and the manufactured chants trying to sound like people who cared. He started with dishonesty, saying “Pundits and party elders have declared Barack Obama as my opponent,” and spiraled downward from there. And who on the McCain team was in charge of the staging of the speech? That person should be fired along with the lobbyists he’s had to let go. With the green “A leader We Can Believe In” backdrop, it looked like a throwback to the 1950s. It was sad and plastic. This was old style and poor old style at that. His catch line, “That’s not change we can believe in,” with such a forced smile and cued applause, that it was embarrassing to watch.
If this is the best McCain’s got, then Obama has to worry about becoming overconfident or appearing cocky toward a much-admired old soldier, who may yet have a trick up his sleeve.
What is this talk from McCain of a series of Town Hall meetings? He wants a string of one-to-one comparisons with Barack Obama. Either he is delusional or he has a plan. Either he has grossly underestimated Mr. Obama or he is planning to use that elder jujitsu they taught him in that five-year prisoner-of-war camp in Vietnam. Obama can still take him, but he should very carefully examine the mouth of this gift horse.
On that Tuesday night he clinched the nomination, Obama said “We owe our children and our country a better future. Let’s chart a new course for America.” Let’s see if America is ready to set sail and explore this new world of the future.
