A couple days ago I was at work putting together a couple items for our “star watch” celebrity column when a statement from Will Smith struck me: he said he’d told his daughter she could grow up to be president, but now he actually believes it.
Here’s a guy, Hollywood Movie Star and successful beyond most of our wildest dreams, revealing something I suspect a lot of black people are thinking today: America, finally, feels like our country now.
As a white guy I could never presume to know what it’s like to be black in the United States of America, but I suspect it’s been like this: everything we have, The Man can take away. The man dragged us here in chains and kept us there for 300 years. Fought a war that supposedly set us “free” but treated us like dirt for another 100 years. It’s their country, we just live in it.
Until today.
A single Ivy League-educated half-white paid-up member of the nation’s intellectual and financial elite will not fundamentally change America’s race equation. But Barack Obama’s inauguration will say one thing: we don’t have to be the way we’ve always been.
It’s probably dangerous to read too much into what’s happening today: to be the first black president of the United States, you have to be Barack Obama, a guy curiously unaffected by impossible odds against him. Think of what he was up against 18 months ago. Beyond being a member of a racial minority with foreign first and last names and a notorious dictator’s middle name, he had almost no track record in politics. He wasn’t from an established political family. He was a complete outsider.
A guy like him finding a way to become president forces us to widen our ideas about what is possible and impossible.
Obama had no chance, and yet here we are today. Cynicism seems pretty empty in the face of that.
Obama had no chance, but what chance did we have, especially with what we didn’t know was coming at us over the horizon. Obama had no chance — and here WE are today. I’m optimistic about the importance of this moment for US.
On this date…,
I was 18, 1968 and a freshman at SIU, attending my speech class. We were discussing ‘I Have A Dream’ speech, by MLK. I can not remember what I said, but it sparked a remark from a young black lady across the isle from me. “you can be born into this country and dream and have a chance of becoming president, a black man can’t”. I thought a minute and knew she was correct, but being the person I am, having had polio as a child. I replied, “I understand where you are coming from, but how is that any different than me, never ever having the chance of being a Major League baseball player, what I love. I can’t tell you what you can accomplish in life, but if I had listen to all the people who told me I couldn’t do something, I would have never done anything, and if you use the excuse for being black for not doing something, then you will not do it” Now 40 years later I voted for a black man because I never wanted a black person to be able to say to me; I can’t do something because I’m black.
Nicely put.
Reality check.
Being “black” and successful (because my parents drummed into our heads that we could be — even after starting out dirt-poor on a small farm), I can say without doubt, people probably do not succeed because they don’t work hard enough. We shall excuse those with incapacitating mental and physical challenges.
Barack Obama was not just “curiously unaffected by the odds against him!” He had George Soros and all of the others who worked hard, and will continue, to create the “perfect” president for the times. Let’s see how he does.
Not an accident. And, no, I’m not a conspiracy theorist; just a realist.
Sorry benwaw58, the ONLY reason to vote for anyone is because they are the BEST candidate for the job.
Peace.