obama in black and white
by Jabulani Leffall
Published: January 23, 2008
This is all about Barack Obama, the presidency and race in America but I need to take you back first.
In late 1999, I found myself in a ballroom at the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco. There I stood with a Cognac in one hand, making quasi-smart gestures with the other. I was talking to Richard “Dick” Parsons, who was then president and chief operating officer of Time Warner and is now CEO, the big cheese, and one of the few black people in that position at a Fortune 500 company then and now.
Me: As one of the few top executives in a large company, do you feel a special relationship or responsibility to the black community? I mean I had to ask, you know I’m just saying I…
Richard Parsons: No.
I nodded my head and kept drinking but that conversation has stuck with me going on a decade. I’ve been confounded by cognitive dissidence on the matter ever since. On one hand, I know that we aren’t a monolithic people and while I consider myself an example, in some ways, for a younger generation of American blacks, I’m not obligated to give them zip. That’s advice, money or a chicken sandwich. Back up from me, man! Conversely, I was disappointed by Parsons’ notion. It was like a distant uncle had turned his back on me, us.
But this is where we are now as blacks and where we have been since the days when house slaves differentiated themselves from field slaves. The difference today is that with nothing of substance to march for or protest against, with no unifying cause, with class fragmentation caused by rapid intellectual, professional and monetary advances, we’ve turned on and against each other.
Two examples of this dirty laundry airing can be found with recent idiotic and sad comments against Obama by BET founder Bob Johnson, who stumped for “Billary,” and the simpleton James David Manning, a pastor of a Harlem church. They said the “Negro” people have left the Clintons for “that half white-boy.” This is America, they’re entitled to their opinions and they owe Obama nothing, but they’re comments also burn the idealism right out of one’s chest like a nice aged Cognac.
This is why if Obama doesn’t get elected as the first black president it will be due in large part to black people not voting for him. One, because they don’t think he can win. Two, because of a slave-like love affair with the benevolent white power couple Bill and Hillary, the former whom otherwise intelligent scholars such as Toni Morrison have already knighted as “the first black president.” Three, because many black people who come from the streets via Watts, CA, Venice, CA, South Chicago, South Bronx, to name a few of my stomping grounds, see a Harvard-educated light skinned, well-spoken man not as progress but as a white man in sheep’s clothing.
And now conservative pundits are having a field day talking about black people pulling the “race card” but the funny thing is that it’s the card white people gave us. Most of us were in Africa chillin’ before the institution of slavery, the apartheid of Jim Crow, and the unfair economic and social stratification of blacks in this country helped create the self-hate, duplicity and intra-racism we’re seeing with this campaign.
Qualifications aside, this political race is about race, especially if Obama gets nominated. If an Obama nomination becomes a reality, you’ll see a lot more stories about race. There will be a lot of uncomfortable discussions inside and outside the public sphere about what is and isn’t black or what Obama does and does not owe to people of African descent in America. Even if he is nominated, can he win, given our legacy or racism, race trading, race baiting, horse racing, speed racing and political races predicated on fear of races other than yours?
So, sure, Hillary can unintentionally imply that without a white man, LBJ, signing civil rights legislation, that Martin Luther King would just have had a dream. That’s America and she probably really feels that way deep down like a lot of well-meaning liberals who want to guide blacks out of the “squalor” that is their life. Sure, Obama can pretend he’s just a man, an American proper, a raceless “uniter” but he knows he’s much more than that.
One day he, as president, may be confronted by an idealistic young black man who wants to be where he is, and he might just disappoint him in a definable-yet-indefinable way too. That’s the America we live in. Like it or not, there are no gray areas when it comes to a legacy of emphasis on racial identities and division. That’s the truth in black and white.
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