Possibly the last Inauguration comments online, 1
I've been busy, so bite me.
I had just enough time yesterday to hear Obama's speech. Then I went into a long distance meeting involving, among others, a woman of colour in Washington. It was dicey whether she'd make it, because she decided that she had to go to the Mall before we did business. She is, by the way, under 40: so much for the premise that a black president isn't a novelty to people under 40.
It interested me to see and hear black entertainers and news types wrap themselves around the words "first black president," with a little frisson or perhaps coming to the edge of tears. It may be that the idea of a black president is no big deal to young American white people. I don't think that's true t'other way around.
It's been a big enough deal for me. When I was in my teens, our minister began to get heavily involved in the civil rights movement. He was a genuine Boston Brahmin, the sort of patrician who had three last names as his name. He was driven in the cause unusually hard, went south several times and came near to leaving his bones there on a couple of occasions. Watching yesterday, I wish he had lived to see this inauguration: not just because we now have a black president, but because real racial equality has just now ceased to be an airy abstraction, and become something I may yet live to see. It was the crowd, as much as the man they came to see, that interested me.
Years later, my minister finally revealed why he was so driven. In the course of some ordinary bit of genealogy, he had found that the family fortune came chiefly from the slave trade. Oh, I know it's quite the popular little diss to assume that all old money New Englanders made their pile from slave trading. It isn't true in most cases, but it was in this one. Whatever other's motivations were in joining the civil rights cause, his in part was to do just a little to even the score.
He'd rest easier knowing that it probably helped that he took his turn pledging his life, his fortune and his sacred honour to something worthwhile.
I had just enough time yesterday to hear Obama's speech. Then I went into a long distance meeting involving, among others, a woman of colour in Washington. It was dicey whether she'd make it, because she decided that she had to go to the Mall before we did business. She is, by the way, under 40: so much for the premise that a black president isn't a novelty to people under 40.
It interested me to see and hear black entertainers and news types wrap themselves around the words "first black president," with a little frisson or perhaps coming to the edge of tears. It may be that the idea of a black president is no big deal to young American white people. I don't think that's true t'other way around.
It's been a big enough deal for me. When I was in my teens, our minister began to get heavily involved in the civil rights movement. He was a genuine Boston Brahmin, the sort of patrician who had three last names as his name. He was driven in the cause unusually hard, went south several times and came near to leaving his bones there on a couple of occasions. Watching yesterday, I wish he had lived to see this inauguration: not just because we now have a black president, but because real racial equality has just now ceased to be an airy abstraction, and become something I may yet live to see. It was the crowd, as much as the man they came to see, that interested me.
Years later, my minister finally revealed why he was so driven. In the course of some ordinary bit of genealogy, he had found that the family fortune came chiefly from the slave trade. Oh, I know it's quite the popular little diss to assume that all old money New Englanders made their pile from slave trading. It isn't true in most cases, but it was in this one. Whatever other's motivations were in joining the civil rights cause, his in part was to do just a little to even the score.
He'd rest easier knowing that it probably helped that he took his turn pledging his life, his fortune and his sacred honour to something worthwhile.
posted by Uncle | 01:07
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