Candace

Talmadge

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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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