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Today is April 4, 2008 -- the 40th anniversary of MLK's assassination. Most of the news coverage has (fortunately) made some mention of this fact and CNN has been running a series on Black America. This is a good thing. Of course part of me feels like these occasions are exactly the most difficult times to understand the significance of history. It is at these times where the commemoration obscures the event itself.
What I mean is that the measure of King's impact is seen in our everydayness. Kind of like the preachers who exhort their congregations to practice their faith regularly and not just in church (i.e. "a way of life, not just a day of life") The world we live in is impossibly complex and our eyes are often the least accurate measure of what the reality actually is.
So while the news programs and official memorials marks one kind of progress, the most important is that invisible aggregate of human exchanges. The speed with which we accept each other based upon character, not color, the degree of tolerance we achieve and our willingness to move beyond mere toleration into human sympathy and understanding. How quickly do we resort to the old fault lines -- how bad does a black man have to piss you off before he becomes a nigger? How extraordinary does a white person have to be before we grant them provisional "individual" status and view them outside that great undifferentiated mass of racially privileged, clueless crackers?
We can run down the line and cite questions for everyone who has ever been excluded, ridiculed or exploited but I think you see my point.
I joked with a friend that if you took a poll on year ago and asked every single black person in America about the possibility of electing a black president, just about all of us would have said it was damn near impossible and the one family that disagreed lived on the South Side of Chicago.
Part of what I dig about Obama is that he reminds me of that old line from James Baldwin about it being necessary to believe in the impossible because each generation has achieved something that the previous one thought was beyond the realm of possibility.
I was supposed to be talking about my race for delegate to the 2008 democratic convention, but when i started typing that's not what came out. So be it. I'm cool with that if you are.
But just to do my due diligence: I am running for delegate from the 5th congressional district in Georgia (i.e. anyone who has John Lewis as rep.) If you live in Atlanta or nearby and think you can come out for the caucus (teamster's hall, five minutes from downtown) on April 19th at 9:30 a.m. holler at a brother.
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Clearly from an ideological perspective, it generally makes sense to align with the Democrats because of their more egalitarian policies and their willingness to use government to address social problems. McCain, on the other hand, must move to the right if he wants to be elected and re-elected and will be no friend of African Americans.
The Clintons are smart folk most of the time. Bill is somewhat of a loose cannon as can be seen with his Oval Office indiscretions and his shooting off the mouth during the campaign. Whether or not his intentions were racist only he knows but the media and thin-skinned black folks are quick to project evil intentions on both Bill and Hillary. From a policy standpoint, Bill Clinton was never as great a friend to black folk as he often gets credit for, but that is more our fault than his because we did not have a policy agenda nor a strategy to advance that agenda.
Bottomline is that Sen. Obama benefited more from the playing of the race card than Hillary Clinton. What support she had in the black community evaporated and and she lost many liberal whites like Caroline and Ted Kennedy as a result. Just tell me what blacks have to gain from voting for John McCain--to teach Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party a lesson? Go back and revisit what happened to the Congressional Black Caucus when they decided to work with Republicans.
Let's not be so thin skinned to the point that criticizing Barak Obama is synonymous with being racist. That is the same anti-semitic trap that Jesse Jackson and Minister Farrakhan got caught in.