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Recently, a newspaper reporter asked me to comment on the attitudes of African Americans toward Sen. Barack Obama's presidential candidacy. I told him I would share my thoughts on the understanding that I had not personally polled all 30 million of us. No doubt, he thought me tedious. But I think it is important, especially lately to note the particularities of our experience. As I struggle to do that, with the clumsy tools that English provides, I can understand why poet Audre Lorde used to identify herself with a string of adjectives, "As a black, lesbian, American-born woman of Caribbean descent..." I feel the need to begin this message with all sorts of contextualizing adjectives, lest my meaning be misconstrued.
I've been feeling skittish ever since Michelle Obama was vilified for saying that the enthusiasm of this year's political campaign had made her "really proud" of her country for the first time in her adult life. Then there was the mumbling about photos of Barack Obama standing at attention during the Pledge of Allegiance, (never mind that there are similar photos of former Pres. GW Bush). There were the difficult conversations about race and gender on BlogHer and elsewhere that stirred so much emotion.
And now, Obama has finally denounced quotations from sermons preached by Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. over the last several years. Specifically, he was called upon to repudiate comments Dr. Wright made about the role of US policy in instigating the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as comments in which Wright likened the contrast between Obama's personal background and social location and Hillary Clinton's to that of Jesus and the Romans.
I watched the controversies and noted the return of a familar unease. As i told fellow BlogHer CE Erin Kotecki-Vest, I was afraid to blog my feelings about all of this -- this torrent of emotion, memories, struggles that lead me to such a different understanding of what Wright and Michelle Obama said.
And will you understand? Will you care? Will you see me in my similarities to and my differences from you? Can I trust you? Will you trust me? Can we do this work together?
Let me start here. I am 51 years old. Like Michelle Obama who is seven years younger, I have working class roots, and I was privileged to graduate from Princeton. Like Michelle Obama, I wrote of feeling alienated during my time there. When she talked about feeling really proud of her country for the first time, I heard nothing offensive. The pride she expressed reminded me of the tears that fell involuntarily when I watched Obama's Iowa victory speech, and the delicious shock of walking into a voting booth Feb. 5 and seeing before me the most diverse array of candidates I have ever seen: a black man, a white woman, a Hispanic man, and a white man with working class roots who talked about poverty and the need for racial healing.
What surprised me was when I read comments like these from John Podhoretz:
Forget matters like the victory in the Cold War; how about only things that have made liberals proud — all the accomplishments of inclusion? How about the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1991? Or Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s elevation to the Supreme Court? Or Carol Moseley Braun’s election to the Senate in 1998? How about the merely humanitarian, like this country’s startling generosity to the victims of the tsunami? I’m sure commenters can think of hundreds more landmarks of this sort. Didn’t she even get a twinge from, say, the Olympics?
Like a foreigner still trying to learn the language of the locals, I found myself wondering what this pride was that I was supposed to feel? Understand me, I used to raise money for Soviet Jews, and I hoped the fall of the Berlin wall would advance freedom for the people of the former CIS states and reduce the threat of nuclear war, but it never occurred to me that this should be some occasion for jingoistic pride. I thought of that and other accomplishments of that time as a testament to the efforts of diverse coalitions of people, not all of whom were American.
I watched the clip from Dr. Wright's sermon on the Sunday after 9/11 and I heard a call to conscience. The language intemperate, but it was a call to conscience none the less. I was reminded that as
