Inaugurating Hope and Pausing for Nightmares
January 22, 2009
As a human being, it is hard not to feel excited about the events of this week. As a black person, it is impossible not to feel giddy and light-headed with a thousand iconic images streaming out of Washington, DC. Beginning with an improbable journey on the steps of the Old Capitol in Springfield, Illinois in January 2007, Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a forbidden relationship between a pitch black man from the continental heart of darkness in Kenya and a lily white woman from the prairie heartland of America in Kansas, started an improbable journey that culminated this week in his inauguration as 
America’s president. These are moments that people would savor all over the world for a long time; the sort of moments where a 13-year old girl from Florida told CNN that she would tell her grand-children (not her children) what she felt when she came to DC for the Inauguration; the sort of moments that you remember for a lifetime what you were doing when Obama took the oath of office.
This is a moment that is hard to think about coherently, much less put down in words that make any sense. The hyperboles fly all around: the rock concert that took place on the Sunday before the inauguration was so star-studded it is impossible to head-line with any particular artist; super stars who ordinarily would be coaxed to go on paid concerts begged inaugural organizers to sing alongside Beyonce, Bono, Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Wonder. Two million people from all over the world braced frigid weather and massive security operations to witness the first African-American president take the oath of office on the bible that Abe Lincoln used. Conversations this week often start and end with, what would Martin Luther King say? What would Lincoln do? How would Franklin Delano Roosevelt respond? It is as if this black man is the ultimate embodiment of the hopes, deeds and dreams of George Washington, Lincoln, FDR, JFK and MLK rolled into one.
But if as a black person, the inauguration of Barrack Obama is a dream that you do not want to wake up from, there are continuing nightmares of the collective trans-Atlantic black experience that you cannot shake off. Admittedly, it may seem mean-spirited to speak of nightmares during a week that we are celebrating the triumph of hope over fear and bigotry. Even so, it is hard not to pause and consider what it was like for the four-year old daughter of Oscar Grant, the 22-year old black man who was shot in cold blood while lying face down by a white police officer in Oakland, California on January 1, 2009. It is a cold reminder that a black man may soon be the most powerful man in the world, but blacks are still at the rung of the political, social and economic ladder even in America. We may be hanging on to the words of one black man in the White House, but there are still too many anguished voices of black people all over America and the rest of the world.
And that world includes, first and foremost, Africa, where powerful Big Men lord it over the rest of the squalid populace. Nowhere else is this more evident than in Zimbabwe, where one of Africa’s nastier Big Men, Robert Mugabe has presided over the unraveling of what was once Africa’s bread basket and turning Zimbabwe into a vast wasteland and the continent’s most atrophied open sore. Zimbabwe’s best and brightest have fled the country, often to their bigger southern neighbor, South Africa. Instead of a little empathy however (the sort the Zimbabweans and other Africans gave anti-apartheid activists not long ago), what the desolate and fleeing Zimbabweans meet are gangs of out of control marauders who hack them to death in South Africa’s shanty towns. America may be burying the ghosts of the past, but in Africa proper, the devils are alive and wreaking havoc, from Congo to Darfur and just about any corner of the continent.
You have to salute the ingenuity of America to re-invent itself, and to once again, give the world exemplary hope, despite the original sin of slavery, Jim Crow and continuing vestiges of discriminatory practices. As Obama himself has continually said on the campaign trail, in no other country in the world is his story even possible. Certainly not in Japan, where there are virtually no paths to citizenship for minorities, despite a shrinking population increasingly relying on robots (makes you feel that the Japs would prefer robots to other humans). Certainly not in Latin America, where despite the much-talked about racial democracy in Brazil, there are 99 ways of describing a man’s color, and the blackest continue to languish in dreadful favelas. Certainly not in Europe where, despite the smugness of Europeans about social equality, minorities but especially blacks are treated as less than full human beings in Germany, France, Italy and just about every other European country. And most certainly not even in Africa where whole peoples are slaughtered just because they speak differently, look differently or worship differently; actually, during Kenya’s post-election violence between the Kikuyus and Luos early last year, the joke was that America would have a Luo president before Kenya does (Obama’s father was Luo).
So, yes let us celebrate Obama and our achievements this week. But when we get a bit sober next week, let us renew our commitment to the task of building our black communities from the cocaine-laced corridors of Brooklyn’s housing projects to the cholera-infested gutters of Bulawayo in Zimbabwe.
This article was written by our contributing editor Saint-James.
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If, as you say on your welcome page, that you take pride in Africa and want to change the negative global perception of the motherland, it would behoove you to admonish your contributing editor Saint-James to refrain from using such phrases as “heart of darkness” when referring to Africa, and “pitch black” when referring to Africans.
These are racist terms that have no place in 21st Century civil society. His or her use of those phrases reflect a lingering, almost slavish adherence to a colonial legacy that most Africans are trying hard to shake off. Another note: it’s ironic - and unfortunate, needless to say - that in criticizing Japan for their lack of minority inclusion and their increasing use of robots in place of humans, the writer uses a derogatory term “Japs,” to refer to the Japanese. That is a highly offensive term to Japanese people, and again, it has no place in present day civil society. If your contributing editor doesn’t know these things by now, he or she has no business criticizing Africa’s “Big Men.” Reading Ngugi’s “Decolonizing the Mind” would be a good start for this writer…
Thanks a lot, your comments have been posted and the writer may or may not respond. I think though that those phrases were used figuratively and not meant to be interpreted literally, he was just referring to what Africa and black people were called in the past, to explain why marriage between a black and a white woman might have been resented. Anyways, thanks a lot for visiting Black Herald and for your comments.