Randall Kennedy in Sunday's Washington Post
I am a black man born in 1954, the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Fleeing the abuses of Jim Crow, my parents moved from South Carolina to Washington, D.C., later that decade. Tales of racial oppression and racial resistance were staples of conversation in our household. My father often spoke of watching Thurgood Marshall argue the case ( Rice v. Elmore) that invalidated the rule permitting only whites to vote in South Carolina's Democratic primary. Memories of that story played a large part in producing the tears I shed on the evening Barack Obama won this year's primary in the Palmetto State.Related memories -- the most haunting being our visit to a D.C. funeral home to pay last respects to Medgar Evers, the courageous head of the Mississipppi branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who was murdered by a segregationist -- helped reduce me to tears, again, on the night the senator from Illinois accepted his party's nomination as its candidate for president.
Never before have my emotions been so exercised by a political campaign. For one thing, never before has a candidate so fully challenged the many inhibitions that have prevented people of all races, including African Americans, from seriously envisioning presidential power in the hands of someone other than a white American. With intelligence, verve and elegance, Obama has opened the public mind to the idea of a black president and made that idea broadly attractive.
I find it disturbing that this attraction to Obama is based (1) on his skin color - not exactly an "accomplishment" - and (2) simple nostalgia. It bothers me that Obama's candidacy hearkens backwards in time. This strikes me not as Change, but as resistance to Change; and it certainly doesn't evoke leadership into any future. Randall Kennedy can have any emotional response he wishes, but I have to point out that as a "Typical White" woman born in the 1950s, his words don't speak to me. But that's not the half of it.
Back now to Mr. Kennedy:
I anticipate that most black Americans will believe that an Obama defeat will have stemmed in substantial part from a prejudice that robbed 40 million Americans of the chance to become president on the day they were born black. They will of course understand that race wasn't the only significant variable -- that party affiliation, ideological proclivities, strategic choices and dumb luck also mattered. But deep in their bones, they will believe -- and probably rightly -- that race was a key element, that had the racial shoe been on the other foot -- had John McCain been black and Obama white -- the result would have been different.This conclusion will be accompanied by bitter disappointment, and in some quarters, stark rage.
Kennedy goes on to say that should his candidate lose the election he expects to "be stunned by feelings of dejection, anger and resentment," followed "soon thereafter" by "solace and encouragement in contemplating this unprecedented development."
I can't tell whether Kennedy sees a loss looming and so is trying to prepare the way for his fellows -by suggesting that they too find "solace and encouragement" in the sheer fact of Obama's nomination- or he is threatening white folks with "stark rage" in the Black Community should Obama lose.
The 1960s weren't just speeches and court cases. In 1965, there were large-scale race riots in this country, notably in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, where dozens were killed and thousands injured. In Watts alone, it took six days and tens of thousands of National Guardsmen to quell the rioting.
Is Kennedy cognizant of the fact that a lot of people don't feel in the least nostalgic about this? Or is that his point? I can't tell if we're being surreptitiously threatened, or not.
There's a lot of race-baiting going on in this election, so I would hope Mr. Kennedy and other Obama supporters in the Black Community would address this question... before November.
See also the Wall Street Journal: Black Voters Fret Over Obama
Black talk-show hosts and black-themed Web sites are being flooded with callers and bloggers reflecting a nervousness -- and anger -- over the campaign. Bev Smith, a nationally syndicated radio talk-show host, devoted her entire three-hour show Monday night to the question: "If Obama doesn't win, what will you think?""My audience is upset," she said in an interview. "Some people said they would be so angry it would be reminiscent of the [1960s] riots -- that is how despondent they would be."
In the meantime, too, some of us Republicans are wondering what's up with fellow-Republicans Colin Powell and Condi Rice.
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