Just Some Random Thoughts on Race

I've been reading a lot of material about race and racism in America here lately. A friend suggests that addressing white racism needs a more humane approach to guide white people into confronting their racism and dealing with it. I'm not feeling so generous.

I'm tired of waiting for white people to understand the obvious. I'm tired of reading nasty racists comments on a story about fashion. Almost any topic on the Internet can be used by those who want to spread racist hate to do so. I'm tired of having to coddle white racists and I'm at the point where I don't really give a damn if they go screaming into an insane asylum. I agree with an old friend, a white southerner, who says that white people need to talk to other white people about racism.

How long does it take for white people to recognize that they have participated in and benefited from a monstrous system? When I was a child growing up in a society of "no colored allowed" signs, I thought that we were going to move beyond that. I thought that Dr. King's dream was going to become a reality. But while legalized racism has been dismantled, societal norms and social conventions haven't caught up. Since Obama's elections, racism has become more public. A 17 year old unarmed black male is deemed suspicious by a neighborhood vigilante who follows him, shoots him and then successfully argues that it was self-defense. I can accept that the jury viewed the evidence as insufficient to convict. What pisses me off is all of the white people who assert that Zimmerman's stalking of Martin had nothing to do with race. Are they really so ignorant that they don't know that "looks suspicious" is code for walking while black in Zimmerman's world? There was no reasonable cause for Zimmerman to follow Martin, exactly what is suspicious about a kid walking through a neighborhood?

I just read a comment by a white male in NC who talked about how well his integrated neighborhood gets along. He extolled the image of all the neighbors being friends. I'd love to talk to the black people in his neighborhood and find out how many of them agree with him.

My experience has been that it is always up to the black people to conform to white society in order to be accepted by the more enlightened liberal whites. There is nothing that we can do to be accepted by the sheet wearing crew. Wearing the mask, that is cloaking our connections to black cultural norms, is psychologically harmful and emotionally draining. We've been doing it since the first Africans were carted to these shores in the belly of a ship. There was and is immense pressure from the white culture for black people to assimilate culturally if we wish to be reasonable successful in the larger society. I don't want a colorblind society. I want to be appreciated as a black southern woman. Race is a social construct but my black cultural identity is an essential part of who I am.

President Obama's recent words about the Zimmerman verdict were beautiful and heart felt but they've also been said over and over again and haven't really made much difference. White people are not only still clinging to racist generalizations but when all else fails, they accuse black people of "reverse racism" and with sincere indignation declare that it is black people, led by that irascible duo of Sharpton and Jackson who keep racism alive. 

I have no more patience with the persistence of racism and I certainly don't have the emotional energy to help white people learn how not to be racist. 

White people are not the victims but the perpetrators of a system of racial exclusion that has persisted long past the end of chattel slavery and imposed social and economic consequences on black people that have impeded our ability to successfully and fully compete in the economic infrastructure in this country leaving us disproportionately represented in the underclass and in the nation's prison system. I find this to be unacceptable and I think that it's long overdue for white people who know better to talk to those who don't, about racism in America.

Obama, Holder, and the Matter of Race

I don't have any problems with Rich Benjamin's article at salon.com, the one where Benjamin poses the question, does Attorney General Holder represent the President's "inner nigger"? I wonder if the folks expressing outrage and offense over the article read past that question. 

Benjamin's piece addresses the same topic as an old, eloquent poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar, We Wear the Mask. Benjamin isn't calling the President nor Holder a nigger; he is addressing the duality of consciousness written about by diverse voices from Carl Jung to W.E.B. DuBois.

Being black and participating in a white culture creates a sort of duality of nature for many black people. We must be careful not to be too black in our attitudes and behaviors because that frightens and disturbs white people. In Benjamin's words, "As such, what black person doesn’t understand duality and double consciousness, especially when s/he speaks to multiple publics and circulates in multiple contexts?" (salon.com)

Many otherwise rational people have taken issue with Benjamin's critique of Obama's speech. Bob Cesca offers a rambling and accusatory commentary on Benjamin's piece that essentially consista of repetition of variations of, "what the fuck?" (Bob Cesca, WTF is this?) Some liberals seem particularly bent out of shape because they perceive the article as accusing the President of being a coward, afraid or unwilling to speak out on race. This obtuse misconstruction of Benjamin's thesis reflects the general lack of familiarity with the body of work dealing with race theory and race consciousness. Most relevant is the concept of "double consciousness" as defined by W.E.B. DuBois.

In DuBois' Souls of Black Folk (a summary), he describes double consciousness as follows:

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

It is this double consciousness that is the underlying theme of Benjamin's thoughtful post. Discussions of race are rare in this country; meaningful discussions of race are virtually nonexistent. When we do talk about race, there is a focus on agreeing that the narrative stay in safe territory so as not to offend anyone, especially white people who are sympathetic to issues of race and racism. President Obama said all of the right things. His words can only be construed as offensive by windbags like Beck and Limbaugh, and those who continue to enjoy dressing up in bed sheets and attending tea parties.

However, Rich Benjamin does not fail to recognize that Obama made the speech that he needed to make. The point of his post is not to bash Obama but to highlight the complexities of America's race problem. Benjamin fully recognizes that an angry back man is not a readily acceptable image for the President of all of America. In Benjamin's words:

Where Trayvon Martin is concerned, the president is also wise to sweep a racial discussion under the rug, because that discussion tarnishes his political capital. Politically, he seeks to run-up his party’s Latino support, by burnishing his reputation for historic inclusion and racial reconciliation. In discouraging too much diversity talk or racial gripe, the president’s image management promotes him as a racial icon with no racial agenda. His image management shrewdly polishes his racial identity even as it downplays it.

The disturbing reality is that even President Obama's measured and thoughtful words have left many white Americans up in arms and crying reverse racism. I've debated with friends since Obama's election in 2008 about the careful steps that Obama has had to make in navigating the minefield of race in America.

Benjamin's question shocks in his choice of language. I think that it is intentional and appropriate. Racism is the insidious scourge of the United States that has long survived the chains of chattel slavery; its continued presence should shock and disturb us. Benjamin suggests that Holder and the President are the flip side of the same coin, or as he puts it, Holder is the President's doppelganger, the voice that expresses the unpalatable truths that the President cannot. It was Holder who put a less than rosy spin on the state of race matters in a 2009 speech in which he accused Americans of “...retreating to our race protected cocoons, where much is comfortable and where progress is not really made.”

The divisiveness reflected in public reactions to the Zimmerman verdict belie that we have entered into the golden age of a post-racial society. Rich Benjamin never suggests that President Obama is weak or ineffective only that perhaps the President has to repress all that he would and could say and that Holder voices the deeper frustrations that the President may feel. It's an interesting theory and adds another layer to the matter of race and identity in this country.

Obama, FDR, and Me

Warning: I'm in a bad mood. I've been reading comments on a friend's blog (The Rant by Tom Degan) and I've finally reached my limit. I've tried to not let the debate over Obama's job performance among progressives get personal but I've finally accepted that for me, it is personal. President Obama represents everything that I hoped for when I was growing up a little black girl in the segregated South. I remember hearing the grownups talk about politics. They would ruefully shake their heads and discuss the lack of Negroes in positions of authority. No one even spoke of a black man being president; it was so out of reach. But I secretly thought about being president someday, ignoring that my gender as well as my race made that unlikely.

When I read Tom's blog post, "Time to Get Moving," I thought it was reasonably balanced. I didn't fully agree with his assessment of Obama or his review of FDR's presidency but his post didn't engender my foul mood. I concur that a great many Americans of voting age have a deficit of knowledge when it comes to the history of this country. However, I also think one of our failures is that we idealize historical figures and make them into icons that they never were. The problem is that no one in the immediate present can ever measure up to these past icons which never really existed, at least not as portrayed.

Which brings me to consideration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), the president that so many progressives have repeatedly compared Obama to and always find Obama lacking.  Roosevelt just told Congress what he would and would not do and shoved his New Deal through, Congress be damned. Only, that isn't factual; the real story is much more complex.

FDR  moved the country forward through a very difficult time. However, he didn't walk on water. No president ever has.

FDR had to deal with the southern Democrats, the Dixiecrats. They and a great deal of the country opposed anything that even vaguely resembled civil rights for black Americans. Roosevelt needed the southern votes to pass his legislation; so he compromised big time on civil rights issues. FDR failed to support proposed federal anti-lynching legislation. Lynching was a family sport that was ever growing in the South during FDR's administration but he refused to get behind efforts by blacks and white civil rights advocates efforts to pass federal anti-lynching legislation. FDR also refused to integrate the armed forces, leaving that to Truman to begin the integration of the armed forces in 1946. Blacks fought for this country but weren't allowed to train on the white military bases nor to interact with their white counterparts. When they came home, it was to return to the same segregation and Jim Crow laws that they faced prior to joining the military. FDR sold out black Americans in order to push through his New Deal.

It was also FDR's administration that interred Japanese Americans in camps during WWII. FDR made nine appointments to the Supreme Court and eight of those nine justices supported the administrations's decision to strip Japanese Americans of property and homes, and place them in confinement in Korematsu v. United States (1944).

Then there were the provisions of the New Deal, great intentions but not always realized.

The Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 authorized the Secretary of Agriculture to inflate prices by reducing farm acreage. This meant white farm owners (it was 1933 and blacks were sharecroppers, not farm owners) were paid to let their fields lie fallow, which often resulted in the eviction of sharecroppers and tenant farmers, a significant number of whom were African Americans. In addition, the Department of Agriculture, paid farmers to destroy crops and slaughter livestock while millions of Americans went hungry.

The cornerstone of the New Deal, the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), created the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The NIRA also authorized the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which organized cartels, fixed wages and prices, and, under section 7(a), established the practice of collective bargaining, whereby a union selected by a majority of employees exclusively represented all employees. Sounds like a good idea but many of these compulsory unions closed their doors to black workers. If you weren't a member of the union, you couldn't work in that particular industry. The NIRA was in effect from June 1933 until May 1935 when the Supreme Court found it to be unconstitutional.

My point is that when one starts talking about remembering history, it's important to remember all of it. My point is that every president has had his less than stellar moments because politics has always been about compromise. For every gain, you surrender something. It's a balancing act; you hope that what you get is worth what you give up.

I think that all of the expressed disappointment in Obama is unmerited and I'm particular tired of the dismissal of Obama as fearful of not being liked or being a coward. Have you ever been the first person of your race to enter into a position that has always been held by another race? I have and it is the most difficult step that a person can take. You have to deal with your own people expecting that their interests will take priority, those of the other race who feel that you don't deserve the position, and those of the other race who mythologized you into an archetype of nobility and are disappointed to find out that you are only human and don't walk on water. In the mean time, you actually have to carry out the duties of your job and remain civil and calm while not only you are being attacked, but in Obama's case, his wife is the object of ridicule, compared to various members of the simian family in right wing publications on a fairly regular basis.

The courage that it took for Obama to run for president is phenomenal in a country where assassination is not unheard of and it was less than 50 years ago when lynching of black men and women was public entertainment, documented in photographs of the crowds of men women and children in attendance. (According to the Tuskegee Institute, lynching occurred as late as 1968). When Billie sang about southern trees bearing strange fruit, she wasn't merely being metaphorical.

I'm tired of whites who supported Obama in 2008 acting as if they did him a favor and righteously declaring their indignant disappointment. Enjoy your right to be critical of anyone but don't expect me to like it and I'm exercising my right to say so. The man has worked within the confines of Republicans who have publicly declared that their goal is to ensure that he is not re-elected. That has been their stated goal since his inauguration. Instead of bitching about what he hasn't done or disagreeing with what he has, take a look at what he has accomplished in spite of having a rock equivalent to that of Sisyphus to continually push up the hill.

I cried when Obama won. I cried for the years when the signs over the water fountains said white and colored. I cried for the stores in which I couldn't sit and the lunch counters that my mother grabbed me away from lest someone take offense. I cried for the time my mother entered the wrong door at the clinic because my knee was bleeding profusely and she was confused, and she was met at the door by a white woman who told her to go to the colored entrance. I cried because of the job my mother quit because the KKK threaten to kill me and my brother and sister if she didn't. I cried for my father who went to Korea and had to ride in the back of the bus to go to boot camp. I cried because my mother died two months before Barack Obama became president and she never got to see President Obama. I'm proud of the President and what he has accomplished and I think that he has done a far better job than this country deserves.

[Suggested reading for two differing contemporary historical perspectives on FDR and the New Deal: 
Powell, Jim. FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression. New York: Crown Forum (2003).
McMahon, Kevin J. Reconsidering Roosevelt on Race: How the Presidency Paved the Road to Brown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press (2003).
A review, "Bad Deal," of both books by Damien W. Root.]

The Harry Reid Affair: Identifying the Elephant

Despite Republican Party Chairman Michael Steele's insistence to the contrary, Senator Harry Reid should not resign because of his alleged racist comments in analyzing then candidate Barack Obama's chances of winning the presidential election. I don't believe that Sen. Reid needs to apologize and quite frankly, I'm a bit tired of hearing the man continually apologize for a nonexistent offense.

Reid simply expressed that Obama's chances of winning were better because he didn't scare white voters. Reid's supposedly racist offense: he privately told two journalists in 2008 that Obama was more electable because he's "light-skinned" and lacked a "Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

It's an ugliness that we don't like to talk about but skin color does matter in the minds of a lot of people and not just in the United States. Skin lightening products are large sellers in parts of Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East. In India and China, lighteners are a multi-million dollar industry. 

Historically, there have been tangible benefits to having lighter skin. In the U.S., lighter skinned slaves were more likely to be assigned as house slaves, a step above working in the fields all day. I won't digress as to the reason some of the slaves were significantly lighter than others. If you honestly don't know, follow this link.

In many cultures lighter skin is linked to class distinctions. Dark skin is a sign that one works outside; pale skin is an indication that one is of a higher class and not subject to manual labor. Think of the look of Queen Elizabeth I and other European nobility who achieved their pale complexions via lead based powders, some laced with arsenic and if all else failed, the application of leeches to leave one pale and beautiful. In Japan and China, rice powders were applied by the upper class to achieve whiteness. Men and women sought to achieve pale skin as a sign of their elevated class. In the United States, this obsession reached a peak with a fervent need on the part of European Americans to declare their superiority to African Americans and to ensure that children born to a slave mother of a white father were not in line to inherit any of the property of the landowner. Anti-miscegenation laws were still in effect in 16 states when the U.S. Supreme Court declared them unlawful in 1967.

Sen. Reid's comments merely sum up the history of race relations in this country in a few words. Strategically, Obama possessed qualities that made him more likely to become this country's first black president. Reid summed it up well--Obama didn't look too black and he was quite eloquent in his speech. Even the reference to Obama's lack of a Negro dialect except when he wanted to have one was dead on target. If Obama spoke like Snoop Dog he would have had a good chance of success as a rapper but not in becoming President of the United States.

A 1993 study on the effect of skin color on white voter preferences by political scientist Nayda Terkildsen yielded some interesting results. Terkildsen presented a random sample of adults with descriptions of one of three fictional candidates running for governor. The candidates were described in identical terms. The only difference was that one of three photographs were attached to the descriptions--a white male, a light complexion black male, or a dark complexion black male.The report found that there was a statistically significant impact in that black candidates were penalized by white voters based on the candidates's race, skin color, and individual levels of racial prejudice. Or in simple terms, white voters preferred white candidates, but if they had to choose between a dark skin black candidate and a light skin black candidate, they chose the lighter skin black man. (Want to check out your own attitudes towards race, gender, weight and other potential areas of bias? Check out the Harvard's research site, Implicit.)

American culture is schizophrenic when it comes to skin tones and other attributes of people of color. In the early part of the 20th century, pale was still the beauty standard, but somewhere about mid century, tan became the measure of good looks and health for whites. Of course, a lot of black folks had permanent tans, but there were those who could pass for white. I like to imagine that the fixation on tanning came about because of Annette Funicello and all those beach movies. Whatever the reason, in spite of the warnings about the sun and skin cancer connection, tanning salons abound and the beaches are lined with bodies sprawled under the sun. At the same time, quite a few white women are getting collagen injections to make their lips fuller, further mimicking attributes more generally seen in black women. 

It's absurd for Michael Steele and his fellow Republicans to attempt to tar Reid with the same brush as Trent Lott, who commended Senator Strom Thurmond's racist policies stating that if the rest of the country had also voted for Thurmond the country would have been better for it. Thurmond supported segregation and was an advocate against the mingling of the races. Lott's remarks and Reid's comments do not arise from the same place. Reid's remarks were in the context of explaining why he was enthusiastic that Obama had a good shot at winning the 2008 presidential election.

Perhaps Steele is trying to divert attention from his own foray into bigotry. Last week, Steele declared that the RNC platform was the best in 25 years,"Honest injun on that." To add further insult, Steele's apology was less than sincere; when host Chris Wallace pointed out that "honest injun" was perceived as a racial slur, Steele answered, "Well, if it is, I apologize for it.” Steele went on to state, “It’s not intended to be a racial slur. I wasn’t intending to say a racial slur at all.”

Evidently, Steele is a believer in the, "I didn't mean to offend" defense.

This tempest in a teapot over Harry Reid's off the cuff observations regarding the potential for success of Obama's campaign for president could have a beneficial aspect if it leads to honest dialogues about race and race relations in this country. However, I'm not holding my breath. Race is the perpetual elephant in the room that most of us pretend not to see.

In the Absence of Profundity...WTF

After such a long absence from these pages, I feel an obligation to say something profound. Hmm...well...um...sorry, nothing comes to mind. I've been working a lot of 10 to 12 hour days and that kind of work schedule sort of saps your profundity gene.

There have been so many things that have caught my attention during this month of blog-silence, things that have made me mutter WTF as if it were some ritual chant. Regrettably, most of them have faded from my memory, although there are a few standouts.

There is the young woman who went to school without her underwear on the day that pictures for the yearbook were being taken. Sitting on the front row of the bleachers for a shot with her fellow members of some club, she became upset when the yearbook was published, feeling that she had inadvertently flashed the camera. The young woman and her mother made much ado about the photograph, demanding that the school recall all of the yearbooks. The school declined to do so, insisting that the picture didn't reveal anything and much ado was being made about what was no more than an innocent shadow on the image. The mother and the daughter were all over the news, making certain that those of us who didn't have access to the yearbook knew all about the daughter's faulty memory. Why else would you put on a short skirt and neglect to add underwear, except you forgot?

Then there is the husband who decided to fulfill his sexual fantasy of watching his wife with another man, but neglected to include his wife in the planning of the event. Instead, he hired some guy to pretend to break into his home and pretend to rape his wife. Oh wait, if she wasn't in on the plan, maybe pretend isn't the right word. The wife called the police and her husband was placed in a non-pretend jail cell. I hope that the next stop will be divorce court.

These stories are just small potatoes in the WTF competition compared to the ongoing attack on Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. Among the nonsense spouted by conservative pundits has been comparing her membership in the National Council of La Raza to membership in the KKK. La Raza is a private, non-profit, and non-partisan organization focused on reducing poverty and discrimination, and improving opportunities, for Hispanic Americans. It's difficult to believe that any rational, thinking individual could equate an organization like La Raza with the KKK. Until La Raza starts burning crosses in the yards of non-Hispanic people, not allowing them to live in their neighborhoods, bombing their churches, and advocating for a complete denial of rights based on skin color, then it equals the Klan about as much as night equals day. Don't waste my time or yours sputtering about why do Hispanic people or other ethnic and/or racial minorities in this country need special organizations. It's really very simple. No, I'm not going to explain it to you. I've written about racial discrimination way too many times in this blog. If you don't get it by now, you're hopeless. Besides, I've reached a place in my beliefs where I no longer consider it my responsibility or the responsibility of any person of color to explain to the majority about racism, discrimination or prejudice. Work it out amongst yourselves. I'm in a tough love phase.

There are countless advocacy groups in this country that La Raza parallels: the League of Women Voters, the NAACP, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, AARP, The ARC of the United States, etc. I don't believe that the spouters of this garbage about Judge Sotomayor or La Raza believe it. They speak out of fear. This country is actually moving forward on matters of race, beginning to recognize that the bigotry of the past has no place in the 21st century. My message to Limbaugh and his dittoheads: get over it and find some real issues to focus on, like homelessness, poverty, genocide, famine, war....

Embracing Hope

The world of my youth was a world of separation. The railroad tracks separated our town into black and white. There were two libraries, the Wilson County Public Library and the Wilson County Negro Library. Everyone ate barbecue from Parker's but my mother had to go to the back door to pick up our order; only white people were allowed to enter the front door and sit in the dining room and eat. The train station had two waiting rooms, one for whites and one for coloreds. The one for whites was bigger, brighter, and cleaner. In facilities where there was no separate area for us, the signs read, "no colored allowed," or "white only." There were even two hospitals. I don't recall the name for the white hospital but the colored hospital was called Mercy. These are my memories of growing up as a colored child in Wilson, North Carolina.

I was born in 1955; I turned eighteen in March 1973. The public school system in Wilson ignored the court ordered integration that came from the Brown decision in 1954, and it was 1971 before the school system fully integrated. I was in tenth grade. My dad, who had been one of four black men who integrated the Wilson police force in the 1960s, worked a detail at the only high school in the city of Wilson, Fike Senior High. The KKK had set up camp across the street from the Fike to make their opposition to the presence of Negro students at the school perfectly clear. The police were there to maintain order. My dad says that when he first joined the police force, the black officers weren't allowed to drive patrol cars. He was on the force when Dr. King and then Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. I remember him wearing his riot gear as he went to work. I was thirteen.

Darden, which had been the black high school before integration in 1971, became a school for tenth grade only. All sophomores, Negro and white, attended Darden; all juniors and seniors attended Fike. Darden lost its status as a high school for participation in sports, choral competitions, drama competitions, and all other extracurricular activities. When I began my junior year at Fike, I signed up for chorus. The chorus teacher commented that she had noticed that the Negro students all had a lot of vibrato in their voices and asked us why we sang that way. At Darden, we had sung spirituals, jazz, and R&B as well as some classical pieces. At Fike, the spirituals, jazz, and R&B were not regarded as appropriate music for choral presentations. I dropped chorus and took art instead.

A new employee at my office is also from Wilson. She is my sister's age, two years younger than I am. She is white. She doesn't remember any of this. She says that her year at Darden was a lot of fun. She has asked me if my class ever has a reunion. I didn't have the energy to explain to her why there is no class to have a reunion. There are the black students who attended Darden when it was a high school and the white students who attended Fike. When we integrated, all it really meant was that we attended school in the same buildings.

We never became a class. When we got to Fike for our junior and senior, we were still separate, just in the same buildings. Fike was on the white side of town and the KKK felt that it was on its home turf. It was difficult to build bridges among the students when grown men in white robes and hoods were standing across the street shouting epithets at us every day. It was also common knowledge that some of the armed police officers who were supposed to protect us had white robes and hoods in their closets at home.

I had thought that I was done writing about race. Friends whose opinions I value, have cautioned me that I only upset myself when I write of these things. I had decided to move on to other matters and let it be. However, I've come to realize that although they are well meaning, they don't get it at all. Writing about my experiences, what I know to be true, doesn't upset me. What upsets me is that so many people want to pretend that these things never happened, that they are some distant echo of reality, that what I know to be true is insignificant. That's upsetting and something that I refuse to accept.

Why am I thinking of these things now, at this time? Because I am witnessing an amazing revolution, a revolution of heart and mind that I never believed that I would see in my lifetime. I am filled with a deep joy as I contemplate the very real possibility that a man, who has brown skin like mine, may well be the next president of this country, my country that for so long has rejected me and my people. I had long ago accepted that there were wounds to my soul that could not be fully healed, wounds made by bigotry and hate, by an unrelenting message that because of the color of my skin, of the skin of my people, we were inferior. Don't misunderstand, I never believed that we were inferior but it was far too daunting a task to have to constantly fight against the belief by the larger culture that we were, a belief bolstered by pseudo-scientific claptrap like The Bell Curve.

I've been working over time to refrain from admitting to anyone, least of all to myself that at least part of the reason that I support Barack Obama is because he looks like me. I'm done with that. I admire Hillary's strong female base who have not shied away from admitting that they rallied around her in part because she is a woman, and they identified with her accomplishments as a woman in a male dominated world.

What Barack Obama has done is astounding, in a culture that is in its infancy of letting go of the racial apartheid of a less than 50 years ago, the culture of my youth, a culture that I know not through history but because I lived it. I get misty eyed and I have a lump in my throat just thinking about it. Every time I hear Barack Obama speak, I feel a sense of pride and joy that is intoxicating, and I shed all of those scars born of bigotry and I feel newly born into a world of promise. Finally, I can say with no irony, no sense of fabrication, to a little black baby, "Someday, you may be president."

I make no apologies for my unabashed support of Barack Obama. I have no more tolerance for those who profess that he scares them, that they worry that he's going to sell out this country. That's total nonsense and you're too ignorant for words to even believe it. If I hear or read one more person assert that he's a Muslim and that he's going to help the terrorists destroy the United States, I'm going to scream. And so help me, if I read or hear one more white person say that he is a reverse racist, I'm going to forget that I believe in nonviolence and slap somebody up side the head. By the way, my head was wagging when I wrote that last line.

Barack Obama is a man of principle. He is a man of intelligence. He is the man to lead this country forward on this journey of healing and I'm proud to claim him as my candidate of choice.

As a seventeen year old, I dragged around my guitar in a battered case with peace signs all over it, and sang songs about peace and love, but I was filled with the despair of youth, that the world in which I lived would never "give peace a chance," nor ever find those "answers blowin' in the wind." I thought that the racial division that filled my world would outlast my lifetime. My heart cried for the ongoing list of martyrs--Emmett Till, Medgar Evers, Jonathan M. Daniels, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, King, JFK, Bobby....

The Civil Rights Memorial that stands in front of the Southern Law Poverty Center includes the names of many of the people who risked and lost their lives in the pursuit of justice. I visited the memorial in August 1993. I recall my visit very clearly, because it was on that trip that I decided to go to law school. The memorial is black granite. It bears the names of the martyrs on a large disc in front of a curved wall that bears a favorite line of Dr. King's, "Until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." A steady stream of water bubbles out of the disc and washes over its surface, and water cascades down the curved wall. When I visited the memorial back in 1993, I sat and stared at it for a long time and I cried, not so much for the dead, but for the living because I had no hope that we were going forward and I feared that their deaths had been in vain. I am allowing myself to believe that I was wrong. I am engaging in the audacity of hope, and it feels really good. Below is a poem that I wrote after viewing the civil rights memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.

Memorial in Montgomery
casting long shadows in the afternoon sun
the wall is smooth, black
warm to the touch

the water falls down like healing rain
slides, swirls
drains away
washes clean…

close by, rising from the earth
stands the remembrance of struggle
a litany of the martyred
finite circle of sorrow and joy

cross over the river Jordan
fall down, fall down
like the walls of Jericho
like the walls of Jericho

dark mirror of tears take me home
wash my heart in justice
bathe my soul in peace
fall down, fall down
like healing rain

In Order To Form A More Perfect Union

The elephant that has not only been in the room, but sitting on top of us, has finally been revealed and we are stronger for it. Senator Barack Obama, in his speech in response to the littering of the Internet with videos of his ex-pastor's sermons on race in America, talked openly about the progeny of a nation conceived in liberty and yet mired in the most heinous of institutions--slavery. Sen. Obama identified that progeny--racism, Jim Crow laws, discrimination, black anger, and white anger, and the world did not come to an end.

Finally, someone has just flat out said, "Let's talk about race." If we listen, and I mean really listen to what Sen. Obama has to say, we can move towards an understanding of America's race problem that is an essential step in healing the racial divide that weakens and undermines our nation.

I became a lawyer because I believed in the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution. When I re-read those documents, which I frequently do, I am still moved at the ideology expressed therein.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed...

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

I am not naive, and I do not believe that we, as a nation, have always lived up to these ideals, but what gives me sustenance is the ideals themselves, something worth striving for, worth working to achieve. In the words of Robert Browning, "Ah, if a man's reach does not exceed his grasp,then what's a heaven for?"

Obama's speech today joins my list of inspirational documents. I hope that it is the catalyst to begin conversations at the dinner table, around the water cooler, and in our places of worship about the the ways in which we relate to one another. I hope that we engage in dialogues in which we acknowledge our biases but also recognize our commonalities; I hope that we work together to discover a healing place, grounded in respect and love for all of humankind.

To read the full text of Sen. Obama's speech, please click here. If you would like to watch and listen to him deliver the speech, please see the video below.