"With Obama's presidency, racism and racial inequities won't disappear. Today, blacks earn less than two-thirds the income of whites; the black jobless rate was 11 percent last month, almost double that of whites, and seven in 10 black babies are born to a single mother."
"We celebrate the Founding Fathers as the most gifted collection of men ever assembled at one time. They were. They also excluded women and blacks from their declaration that ``all men are created equal.'' The great Thomas Jefferson thought blacks were biologically inferior."
Obama Victory Helps Bury America's Painful Past:
Commentary by Albert R. Hunt
Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) -- American politics will never be the same. The election of an African-American president doesn't erase the stain of race; it closes old chapters, though, and opens a new one.
My 21-year-old son, a college student born years after the civil-rights movement, grasped the magnitude. ``This is so important for young black kids who've been isolated,'' Benjamin said. ``It's really important for young white kids, too.''
Politicians and the press are focusing on the daunting challenges ahead and the formation of a new government, and Republicans are engaging in the usual recriminations about who lost the election.
Yet more important is the historically monumental election of a president whose father was a black man from Kenya and mother a white woman from Kansas.
Of all the victories in the presidential campaign, none were sweeter to Obama's camp than Virginia and North Carolina, pillars of the old Southern confederacy.
This was the first time Virginia voted for a Democrat for president since Lyndon Baines Johnson in 1964. While LBJ was winning approval for landmark civil rights legislation, enforcing for blacks the basic right to vote and allowing them to eat in restaurants and buy homes in good neighborhoods, he lamented that those gains would cost the Democrats his native South for generations.
He was right. When Johnson's White House counsel, Harry McPherson, voted in February's Maryland presidential primary, a black ballot clerk said to him, ``President Johnson would be proud today.'' He would have been especially proud on Nov. 4.
Echoes of Kennedy
On the eve of the election, I went to Manassas, Virginia, to see Obama's last rally. I remember as a young journalist hearing veteran political reporters talking about John F. Kennedy's famous rally in Waterbury, Connecticut, just before the 1960 election. Some 50,000 people in that working-class community turned out late on a cold night to give JFK a hero's welcome. The scene was immortalized in Teddy White's ``The Making of the President, 1960.''
Decades from now, Manassas will be remembered as well.
The event was a stone's throw from the 1861 Battle of Bull Run, the first major fight in the Civil War. More than 80,000 Virginians showed up in a wildly enthusiastic tribute to the young black candidate. Most of them must have gone to vote the next day. Obama carried Manassas with 55 percent of the vote.
We were standing next to a black gentleman, Wendell McAllister, moved by the moment. In 1961, he was a waiter at Kennedy's inaugural.
Confederate Flags
A week earlier, Obama was in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in the conservative Shenandoah Valley, where Confederate flags are still displayed in some convenience stores. He was the first presidential candidate to campaign there since Stephen Douglas in 1860; Abraham Lincoln wasn't on the ballot in slaveholding Virginia.
The crowd of 10,000 at the James Madison University gymnasium included local folks as well as students. An elderly black lady, with a cane, sat near the back and stared quietly, somberly. As Obama began to speak, tears streamed down her cheeks.
There's no way a white person could experience the full depth of these emotions.
Still, after a long night of reporting on Election Day, I drove home at 3 a.m. and heard hundreds of celebrators a few blocks away, across the street from the White House. I had vivid, surreal flashbacks, the types you see in movies.
`Colored' Only
One was back in the 1950s as a child spending the summer with my grandmother in Orange, Virginia. On a hot day, we were walking through the town square and I went to get a drink of water. My grandmother pulled me back. The fountain was marked ``colored.''
Years later as a political reporter, I'd hear often well- meaning politicians say of black colleagues that, of course, they couldn't run statewide and win over a white electorate. In 1990, former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt came within a whisker of defeating segregationist North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms. Six years later, Gantt was challenged in the Democratic senatorial primary because party leaders knew a black man couldn't win statewide. They were right.
Last Tuesday, Obama carried North Carolina.
Apart from partisan politics, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida are a different South, more like New Jersey or Connecticut in racial attitudes. Which Southern states will come next, South Carolina, Georgia, Texas?
Racism Lives On
With Obama's presidency, racism and racial inequities won't disappear. Today, blacks earn less than two-thirds the income of whites; the black jobless rate was 11 percent last month, almost double that of whites, and seven in 10 black babies are born to a single mother.
Under the best-case scenario, that will improve only on the margins over the next four years.
Nonetheless, the election of a black man facilitates discussions of these issues for people of all races.
During his presidential run, Obama was never the African- American candidate. He was the candidate who was African- American. He was sensitive to the history of race and politics in America; read his Philadelphia speech of last March. Yet he practiced the politics of hope and opportunity, not victimization
(Although both campaigns had their seamy moments this fall, Republican John McCain, to his credit and to the dismay of some in his party, refused to play the race card.)
American Exceptionalism
And the Obama presidency, whether it's successful or not, makes the American experience, and the sense of American exceptionalism, far richer.
We celebrate the Founding Fathers as the most gifted collection of men ever assembled at one time. They were. They also excluded women and blacks from their declaration that ``all men are created equal.'' The great Thomas Jefferson thought blacks were biologically inferior.
When Johnson carried Virginia 44 years ago, it was against state law for Obama's interracial parents to marry; in parts of the state, Obama wouldn't have been allowed to vote.
He carried Virginia last week by 202,000 votes. That could only have occurred in America.
(Albert R. Hunt is the executive editor for Washington at Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Albert R. Hunt in Washington at ahunt1@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: November 9, 2008 09:56 EST |
