Politics of Black in White: The Obama-rama

I looked at Obama, and what did I see?

I almost saw Derek Jeter, after he'd run full sprint and dived into the third row of seats for a game saving play. Coming up cool "as the other side of the pillow," walking calmly out of the game to the hospital. I look from his green eyes to the red blood on his pinstripes, to his tan skin and back to the red bleeding American Yankee into the white and the blue cotton under the hot lights on a summer night.

And he's still not black, and he's still not white, he's just Derek, and he's beautiful and he leads OUR team by example.

That's what I saw in Barak Obama, except he's black, because he says he's black. He's gotten the pitch in a dozen interviews this week, and he puts the definition ball in play the same way every time. He's black because that's where he could most comfortably fit in. Black, I heard (read?) him say because that is how police will see him in the vicinity of a crime.

But talking about his goat herding African and roustabout Kansan forebears before the assembled Democrats, he didn't sound like any 'black leader' I've ever heard. For all his rhetorical might, Jesse Jackson came to convention 20 years ago looking to crossover from 'black leader' to leader. Obama has begun his walk...rather his sprint.... from the other side of that river.

A thoughtful journalist friend saw Bobby Kennedy; her husband sat next to her and saw Malcolm X.

Many sayings aspire to wisdom about what the "white man" does or ought to fear most in the "black man." Let me add this one:

Look out for the black men and women who refuse to surrender an inch of their claim to everything in their making. To own their African and their Kansan, their Nashville and their Motown, their Harvard and the South Side of Chicago.
Because, like Derek Jeter, they're not coming in their own name, or the name of a disgruntled faction.

They're coming in the name of all and everything that's gone before. In the name of Ruth and Mantle, as well as Jackie Robinson. In the name of the brilliant bow-tied late Illinois senator Paul Simon and maybe even Everett Dirksen from the land of Lincoln. And DEFINITELY in the name of the late Harold Washington.

I looked at Obama, and that's what I saw. Division is futile.

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The best line: “We worship an awseome God in the blue states... and we don’t like federal agents poking in our libraries in the red states.”