FleaInNYCbanner.jpg

? Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown. | Main | Seething ?

November 05, 2008

A triumph for the mobility

No Angst Zone makes a rather obvious point that rather desperately needs making. This is not an historic day for black Americans; this is an historic day for transnational Americans. Though most of black America has yet to notice, it will.

President-elect Obama shares absolutely none of the heritage of racial repression that has darkened this country's history. A man who has formative ties to Kansas, Hawaii, Kenya, and Indonesia does not know what it is like to have a father who can remember being fire-hosed and attacked with dogs while marching for civil rights. A man who attended Harvard does not know what it is like to work a job while attending night classes to become the first college graduate in his family.

The day we elect a person who grew up in a small town in Mississippi (or Alabama, or Louisiana, or Georgia), who attended a small state college, and who can trace their lineage back to a sharecropper and, before that, a slave, THAT will be a historic day for America.

Posted by Ghost of a flea at November 5, 2008 05:57 PM

Comments

So I've said on more than one occasion, but appearances rule in the United States of Television.

Posted by: Andrea Harris [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 5, 2008 11:51 PM

OK, I made the mistake of reading the comments to that post, and now my head hurts. Note to self: read register-only comment threads only. What can I say, I have a low idiot threshold.

Posted by: Andrea Harris [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 5, 2008 11:56 PM

And yet, as the media treatment of Sarah Palin demonstrated eloquently, that slave descendant who went to a small State college will never be allowed the Presidency either. That mythical person will be subject to class-based ridicule, regardless of party I think.

Posted by: urthshu [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 6, 2008 09:47 AM

It's the crudest sort of racism: His skin is black, so he's one of us, all other facts be damned.

Posted by: Varenius [TypeKey Profile Page] at November 6, 2008 03:44 PM