Thoughts On the Day

Posted by Patrick in Discrimination, Election 2008, Racism

Barack Obama is now president of the United States.  Yesterday, which was Martin Luther King Day, people spent most of the day talking about whether King’s dream had truly been realized through Obama’s election to the presidency.

I am glad I am a child of the 1970s, and not the 1950s.  Racism in the 70s was a lot more subtle: I never grew up in a world of segregated schools or “white” entrances on one side of a room and “colored” entrances on the other.  Since I’m white, I obviously don’t really get what it’s like to be black, nor do I pretend to.

Still, I do know what it’s like to be a target of discrimination:  all of us have been treated differently for one reason or another, and we all learn how to either deal with it or pretend that it didn’t really happen.  That’s a tough thing to do.

But is Barack Obama’s inauguration a sign that King’s dream has been realized?

No.

We’re a lot closer than we’ve ever been, but we’re not there, yet.  King wanted people judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, and too many people who are arguing that an Obama Presidency means the dream is here are focused solely on the color of the new president’s skin.

If that’s the acid test used to answer the question, we’ve lost sight of something important.

I don’t mean to sound negative:  I voted for Obama, and I believe he is our best chance for a new hope, the kind that we desperately need.  He’s inheriting a royal mess from the Bush administration and faces an uphill battle.  But I think he brings to the office and to the country a spirit of enthusiasm that will inspire people to look for new ways to solve old problems.

As much as some of us hate change, change is sometimes exactly what we need.

Obama was my first choice fairly early on in the campaign.  I liked what he had to say.  I liked his attitude.  It didn’t “scare” me that he is biracial.  I couldn’t find a reason for his race to keep me from voting for him, nor did I really consciously look for one.

The fact that he is biracial or that he identifies himself as “African-American,” wasn’t an issue for me in selecting who I was going to vote for.  To act otherwise would, to me, have been like voting for one candidate because he or she had blue eyes.  I like blue eyes.  I wish I had blue eyes.  Blue-eyed people, I’ve read, tend to be more popular because more people find that to be an attractive trait, but that could be bogus propaganda written by some hopeful blue-eyed columnist.  Some people feel that people with blue eyes are more trusted.  I have hazel eyes:  my eyes couldn’t even make up their minds to just pick one color, so mine are a mix of green and brown.  If blue eyes are more trustworthy, a muddy mix of hazel must be indicative of someone who’s hiding a lot.

Maybe I should have looked for a candidate that I felt was hiding a lot, so I could relate to that person, so I could feel that I really understood where he or she was coming from.  Perhaps sharing an eye color with a candidate would have been a sign that that candidate and I shared a common perspective when it comes to how we see the world.  Maybe hazel eyes should have been the factor that put me over the edge when it came to selecting which candidate would get my vote.

How dumb would that have been?

Of course, there were never Jim Crow laws targeting people by eye color.  If there had been, maybe I’d have been the one walking in a back door.

My point, though, is that it should have been, from day one, about content, not race.  What brings us closer to King’s dream was the people who voted for Obama without worrying about what color he is.  There were plenty of whites who voted for Obama.  There were blacks who didn’t.

What fueled those decisions? Not all of the whites who voted for someone else or the blacks who voted for Obama did so just because of race, either.

But those who didn’t let race influence them one way or another were the ones who were living the kind of dream King talked about.  And that’s the kind of dream all of us should have been living all along.

I understand all of the talk about the dream, but I think the day that King’s hopes will truly be reality is the day that a black person will be elected president and no one notices their color at all.  No matter how much progress we’ve made today, I think that day is still a long way off.