Cynthia Young
Dear President-Elect Barack Obama,
Despite the fact that I am your presumed demographic – bi-racial, ivy-league educated, politically left of center – I face the prospect of your presidency with more than a little trepidation. Oh, don’t get me wrong -- I’m ecstatic about your victory. As a bi-racial woman only a decade your junior, I can’t help but see your meteoric rise to power as halting validation of the black-white union that made my life possible. As the mother of a 5-month old black boy, I relish the shifts that will come with my son’s growing up in a world where a black president of the United States is a reality and not an aspiration. Yes, your historic election signals the beginning of a new era in race relations, and “all it took,” to quote The Onion “was severe economic downturn, a bloody and unjust war, terrorist attacks on lower Manhattan, nearly 2,000 deaths in New Orleans, and more than three centuries of frequently violent racial turmoil." Still, seeing your caramel face alongside those of Presidents Carter, Clinton, and Bush I and II packed a visual punch I won’t soon forget.
However, there is room for concern. As a scholar of the 1960s, I am troubled by the way that you simultaneously acknowledged and distanced yourself from that era, one that made your presidency possible, if not exactly probable. And this is about far more than the lukewarm, sometimes downright hostile, response you received from old guard Civil Rights leaders Andrew Young, Jesse Jackson, and John Lewis. (Though post-racial rhetoric aside, it had to sting when Lewis and Young endorsed Hilary Clinton.) No, what I am referring to here is the way in which your campaign repeatedly positioned you as the antidote to the partisanship and divisive politics that supposedly originated in the 1960s. The Right’s failed attempt to harpoon you with former Weatherman William Ayers was simply one version of a more widespread discourse linking you and the 1960s. Case in point: The day after the election Greg Sargent on Josh Marshall’s liberal website “Talking Points Memo” said, “Obama’s victory represents a potential death knell…for the 1960s cultural politics that defined and dominated our political landscape for the last four decades of the 20th Century,” and he didn’t mean that as a bad thing.
For many, your presidency signals both the symbolic fulfillment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision and the desire to bypass the very real conflicts – the street protests and lunch counter sit-ins, the murders, beatings and unjust imprisonments – that fueled that vision and made your presidency possible. Without the willingness to confront power in stark, frequently dangerous, ways buses and schools, swimming pools and other public accommodations might well still be legally segregated. Blaming 1960s cultural politics for dividing this country is really just a way of blaming 1960s activists for making visible to whites the oppression and genocide fueling this country’s 233-year history. It’s a way of imagining that change can somehow come without the messy business of finger-pointing and side-choosing, accusers and those who stand accused, victimizers and those whom they victimize. It’s the empty rhetoric that says “yes we can” without also enumerating the implied “no we cannot,” as in we cannot discriminate against gays and lesbians, we cannot abandon our public schools, we cannot tolerate health care for some, we cannot remain in Iraq.
Admittedly, your bi-racial, bi-cultural history predisposes you toward a delicate balancing act. Like you, I have family members separated by racial divides so deep and wide that they cannot be bridged. Like you, I feel a deep and abiding love for my white mother who has taught me much about racial inequality, even as her view of race and racism is belied by my own experiences. I too “learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning,” as you write in Dreams from My Father. Unlike you, however, I was “never convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.” There is a dance we bi-racial people do, a series of masks we wear, showing empathy and understanding for people when they do and say racist, outrageous things, even when we are the implicit, if not explicit, target. It’s a necessary skill when one is shoehorned into the space between two worlds. It is also, however, a destructive habit, one that can hinder true and meaningful change, a habit that asks those who have suffered the most to bear the greatest burden for making necessary change.
As you navigate your presidency, I wonder about the wisdom and necessity for continuing this high wire act, what Dick Morris referred to during the Clinton years as “triangulation.” Sure, during the inauguration it is possible to include both Pastor Rick Warren and Bishop Gene Robinson. It is not, however, possible to advocate for laws that oppose gay marriage and ensure abortion rights while keeping both men and their constituencies inside the same big tent. At some point, the rubber will meet the road, and that’s a good thing. If you are now deploying Lincoln’s “team of rivals” strategy in forming your administration, surely you would not emulate his equivocation and delay when confronted with wide-scale cruelty and oppression, as Lincoln did on slavery. Just as George W. Bush took the last 8 years to forward his Conservative agenda, you should use your next 4 to champion those causes in which you believe. Be bold. Move decisively without seeking to placate your opponents. I realize this runs counter to the instincts of successful politicians, but it guarantees that you will secure a place in history for more than being the first black president. If we had wanted another four years of politics as usual, we wouldn’t have registered voters, lobbied our neighbors and driven people to the polls to secure your victory. Let your presidency display the same boldness shown by your parents and mine when they married despite anti-miscegenation laws. It seems to me that our shared history, and the “audacity of hope” demands nothing less.
Cythia Young
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