“When did you stop beating your wife?” If you say “never,” that means you still are beating her. If you say, “last week“, that means you admit to beating her until last week. The Main Message broadcast loud and clear at the Obama Inauguration was that our Nation has been racist and the white majority has been “beating” African Americans until now. Now that an African American has reached the highest, most powerful position in our country, the common perception is that those terrible days are finally over. Repeatedly we heard yesterday, Martin Luther’s Dream has been realized. We are now on the mountain top, which is the same as saying we have not been on it until now. We have been struggling in the valley for ages. Putting Mr Obama’s Victory, achieved by the votes of many “Europeans” (Whites), in these terms is a backhanded way of also saying that our predominantly White Nation has been a racist until now. For White people to echo these terms is for them to agree with this judgment.
So while millions are celebrating the ascent of African Americans to the pinnacle of our Society, they are also tacitly agreeing we have a dark, evil strain in our History. When people sing our praises now as a great Country, home of the free, they do mean “now“, we are now a great Country. We have overcome and moved beyond our racism and prejudice. There were limits and barriers; but now there are no longer limits upon African Americans because they are African Americans. This amounts to saying we have not been a great Country until now. Oddly, no one actually put that into words at the Inauguration. (Mr Obama’s wife and their former, longtime Pastor previously said words to that very effect, but they were not received well, to put it mildly). But this view of America was shouted at the Inauguration by implication. No one declared that and confessed it publicly. No one apologized officially for the centuries of mistreatment of “Blacks” by “Whites”, but that was the tacit and implied admission by yesterday’s Event. (Mr Obama did say, just 60 years ago, his Kenyan Father probably would not have been allowed to eat in many American restaurants because of his skin color.)
There can be no question that the slavery of Africans is part of our history, as is the reality of years of segregation, discrimination and oppression involving the descendants of those slaves. We rightly must abhor all that and be glad that we are moving past that particular part of our collective history. It is sobering and necessary to acknowledge that much of the support of these evils came from sincere, Bible quoting Christians. It is also important to acknowledge that much of the drive to abolish them also came from Bible quoting Christians. (And that has to make you wonder and be very circumspect about quoting the Bible.)
To me the Day was simply the inauguration of a Liberal Democrat as President and all the negative things that I expect that will come from that. For me, “Race” had absolutely nothing to do with the Day. But obviously to millions of my fellow Americans, Race was what it was about more than anything else (Perhaps for the majority of the same people, the Day was also about the inauguration of a period that Leftist Progressives have been dreaming about for many years. So they were and are very happy for both reasons)
But I will grant the Day belongs to the elderly Black Americans among us who believe they are seeing the results of their labor and the vindication of their suffering from the Civil Rights Movement in the middle of the last century. If that is so, all the young, affluent, well educated, well dressed and well connected African Americans we saw yesterday should feel greatly indebted and grateful to their grandparents and to the White Americans who joined their cause years ago. The Day, from that perspective, was a tribute to all of them.
