The topic on Midmorning this King memorial/pre-first-African-American-presidential-inauguration day was The end of a struggle, or just a step in the journey? I don't doubt that most thinking people would agree on the answer to that question, and I was glad to hear both guests, Jack White and Michael Fauntroy, dismiss the concept of a post-racial America and both recognize and place a value on difference. But the English Master (or would that be Mistress? oh, yes), excuse me, the English Mistress in me took umbrage at their aggressive dismissal of the Obama supporter's much-quoted statement, "Obama doesn't come with the baggage of the civil-rights movement."
My problem comes from their failure to disect the metaphor the young man chose to use. He didn't say burden; he didn't say curse; more importantly he didn't imply that Obama was free of the lessons or the legacy: he said baggage. I know the Civil Rights movement is a sacred cow, but it was born out of, and cannot be separated from, bigotry, murder, beatings, and all-too-human cruelty, and that's a lot of baggage. I won't claim to know exactly what this supporter meant by this statement, and I can't find his blog to get more detail or explication, so I'll just deal with the words as I have them.
To me, being able to approach the campaign and the presidency without the baggage of the civil rights movement allows Obama to view the world with fresher, more welcoming eyes. I find it hard to believe that most black Southerners (and others) who lived through the conditions that necessitated the passage of the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act can see this country as colorblind or racially equal, or that the treatment they receive on a day to day basis is necessarily fair. I don't think I could. After the Rodney King riots in LA, I felt racial hatred being directed at me in a way I had never experienced before, and I saw the world in a different way after that. (This from a girl who was raised in a racially mixed inner-city neighborhood and spent 3 years in a high school that was predominantly black.) I don't see any benefit in my change of perspective, and it was years before I could tone down my presumptions to something close to my pre-riot levels. This was nothing compared to what blacks suffered in the South in this country, so I would imagine that most people that lived through that time approach race with a certain, understandable, prejudice. While it's probably accurate that they are often not treated the same as their lighter-skinned fellows, the treatment is, probably far more often than not, subtle, ignorant, unintentional, and totally legal. Thus it closes doors for the person who carries the baggage to assume they are being treated poorly, and that assumption can often, in fact, contribute to destructive, if still subtle, changes in the people they're dealing with. Negativity breeds negativity. I know this from my own experience, spending some time assuming that all black people hated me, after having been attacked on the street both directly and indirectly after the spring of 1992. It made me more frightened, more angry, and less open to the people I came in contact with. It hurt, in fact, no one but me, and didn't protect me at all from those who actually did hate me based solely on my oliveish skin.
If Barack Obama is free of the baggage of the Civil Rights movement then he is free of the assumptions, the negative, predetermined, kneejerk emotional reactions that get in the way of so many of us being receptive to the love and support that could be available to us. Hopefully, and by all appearances it seems to be true, he is free of the assumption I still, ashamedly, carry, that most white Southerners are racists. This comes from my dad, a Southerner, talking regularly about being beaten by white cops and banned from his father's funeral because he played an instrumental part in the march from Selma to Montgomery. The Civil Rights movement was a part of the everyday dialogue in my household, growing up. It is part of my baggage, even though I was born after the movement ended.
I know President-Elect Obama has experienced racism, and I know he's aware of that, but he doesn't seem to have let it effect, at least superficially, his feeling of entitlement. Normally I'm opposed people carrying that birthright, but for a black man in America, one who does not come from wealth and privilege, one who's worked his ass off, and one with a brain like Barack, I'm kinda okay with it. Better the assumption that you have the right to hop on any train, than be slowed down by the bitterness or fear that running alongside the track with baggage can often bring.
I love how you think. I love how you write.
Posted by: Steph | February 24, 2009 at 08:51 AM