The past 7-10 days of non-stop media coverage, punditry, BLOGGING, and the like on the issue of RACE and who said what, and why, and when, and what do they really mean has convinced me that what America is in need of right now is the help of a communications expert. I suggest that someone like well respected communication expert and bestselling New York Times author & linguist Professor Dr. Deborah Tannen be summoned to teach a nationally televised mandatory course on open, effective “communication between the races.”
Clearly, some have received Senator Obama’s historic address on “Race” well, and others (e.g., blue collar workers & white middle class Americans), if talk radio and polling is any indication, have not. Tannen’s best selling book, “You Just Don’t Understand: Women & Men in Conversation” was a cultural phenomenon. The book spent four years on the NY Times best-seller list, including 8 months at number one. Tannen has helped men and women to better understand what we don’t understand about each others communication styles with humor, candor, and ground breaking research.
We as a nation need similar help in learning how people of different races and cultures interact and communicate as well. To ignore such differences in my opinion is more dangerous than helpful. The fact is that we experience life in America very differently as black and white citizens living in the same nation. if we can’t start at this truth, we are doomed to fail in our efforts to come together E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one).
While I am hopeful that the next generation of younger Americans will one day put all of this racial division, and pettiness behind us, we in this generation are simply not there yet. If you have been following the presidential campaign since the South Carolina Primary in February, you, like me have been disappointed in the trend in identity politics, and the racially insensitive dialogue that some of our nations best and brightest leaders have engaged in. And the culprit here is ironically not our political differences, but our inability to speak to each other across ethnic lines in a way that brings us closer, instead of driving us further apart.
Like most Americans I too have heard the 15 second clips of Pastor Jeremiah Wright’s spirited and at times off-color sermons. I find what he said offensive too, but unlike many white Americans, I was not shocked by the content of his words. Most African Americans (me included) who attend large urban congregations (as I do) have heard very similar rhetoric about the black experience in America coming from their respective pulpits.
What we need to understand as a nation of diverse people is that this is truly how most black preachers preach. It is also a generational norm for black preachers over the age of 45 to shout, jump, stomp, and revile the perceived enemies of the black community/family in America (e.g., Satan, drugs, infidelity, AIDS, homosexuality, the government, the vestiges of slavery, racism, unemployment and the like) from the pulpit. Be clear that much of this is theatrics at its best folks. When you get the flock worked up; they dance, clap, shout, and tithe more money into the collection baskets. Isn’t that the point?
The fact is this: Sunday morning is still the most segregated time in America. Think about it honestly, how many of us (educated or not, liberal or conservative, rich or poor) attend racially mixed congregations or synagogues each week? If we are honest we all tend to gravitate toward and socialize on an intimate, professional, and personal level with people who look like us, are of our same class, education, and values. That is why the black church for me and many others is a place of safety, and unvarnished truth. Just as I assume the Jewish Synagogue is for Jews, or the Mosque is for Muslims.
It is the same as going to the black beauty shop, barber shop, or to chapter meetings at my Black Greek letter organization. It is a place where I can unwind; let my guard down, and not have to wear my game face or dance the “black professional two-step” which is having to be white enough for whites to like me and not view me as a threat all while remaining black enough for blacks not to think I have sold out. In the black church I am at home and I can exhale and know that the lessons that will be preached will not only be spiritually uplifting but will also take into account the very complex realities of the everyday “double-life” I am forced to lead as a well-educated black professional woman in America.
I don’t go to these places to offend or shun white people, or applaud anti-white sentiments. Nor do I go to hear unholy aspersions cast on the nation that I love. Quite the contrary. Would it shock you to know that I have dated white men, and even fallen in love with one? I hope not. I go there to embrace my faith and my blackness in order to keep my sanity and keep my feet grounded. To be honest and I mean this respectfully: It is just not about white people. That thought never enters my mind. It is about a sense of community and understanding.
My two young nieces like Senator Obama are bi-racial; their mother is a white woman. In my grandmother’s day she was called a mulatto due to her parents black and white heritages. So, we have made some progress at least in how we refer to people. Hopefully one day we will not need such labels and we can all just be Americans.
As The Washington Post article on March 18, 2008 titled, “A Candidate Who Mirrors Their Lives” reported black professionals of my generation (Gen Xers) who were raised watch the Cosby show and MTV embrace Senator Obama’s gains and trails as our own. I like many blacks spend time in the black community to recharge my emotional batteries after dealing with the daily slights, barbs, insults, racial nuisances, biases, and yes, racism that is reality for any black person that lives and works in America, regardless of your educational, professional, or socio-economic status.
I know this is hard for white Americans to grasp when they see the success of black people like Oprah, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Bill Cosby, Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Bob Johnson, and Barack & Michelle Obama. But, this group of very successful black Americans does not represent the experience of all black Americans. And if you were to candidly ask each one of these Americans, if they have felt the sting of race, bias, insult and injury despite their success all of them will tell you YES.
Likewise, I have listened for most of my life and for the past weeks in particular to my fellow white Americans and their feelings on race. They have attacked Pastor Wright’s comments as racist, radical, and anti-America. But to do so in my opinion is to not see the proverbial forest for the trees. Whites say that they are tired of separatist language like “black pride”; “the black family”, and “black unity”. Whites like Geraldine Ferraro say they are tired of being discriminated against for being white. They are tired of racial preference programs that give unqualified blacks a leg up over them and their children. They are tired of being subjected to diversity training, and multi-cultural programs at work and in our schools. They are just sick and tired of the whole race thing. As one white man commented on an Op-ed I wrote last week in Politico encouraging GOP nominee John McCain to reach out to black voters in this historic campaign year, “Is this all you people think about, race?”
Well, in an answer YES.
But the better question is why?
It is because our nation was founded on the division of the races. Our founding fathers chose to divide men by their color, after proclaiming that all men were created equal. Our Supreme Court ruled 7-2 in 1857 in the Dred Scott decision that no slave or descendant of a slave could be a U.S. citizen, or ever had been a U.S. citizen. As a non-citizen, the court stated, Scott had no rights and could not sue in a Federal Court and must remain a slave. Thereby leaving us as the descendants of slaves (e.g., black Americans), with a permanent question as to our intellect, our patriotism, and our right to be heirs in the American promise. This is what controversial leaders like Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright mean when they speak about “chickens coming home to roost” in America. Everything has a context.
The point is amplified best in the new HBO miniseries John Adams, based on David McCullough’s best-selling book. In one scene Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams are reviewing Jefferson’s initial draft of the “articles of Independence” in 1776. Adams and Franklin are awe struck by the eloquence and passion of Jefferson’s draft, yet it is one powerful sentence in part that captures the two statesmen’s attention: “[The Christian King of Great Britain] he has waged cruel war against human nature itself; violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them to slavery in another hemisphere. . .” Franklin pointedly says to Jefferson, “You lay slavery at the feet of the King, but make no mention of its fervent practice here in the colonies. Would you have the trade be outlawed but have servitude remain?” Jefferson (a slave owner) replies, “That was not my intent Sir, Slavery is an abomination that should not exist, but one that I have not yet figured out what to do with.” They all nod in agreement.
Unfortunately, understanding the politics of their day, Adams and Franklin concede that the issue that must take precedent before the Continental Congress must be one of independence from Britain, not the emancipation of the slaves. Upon the declaration’s final adoption, the Congress rejects Jefferson’s poetic references to slavery and in order to preserve their own liberty and economic commerce; these patriots, these men of good faith, and honor agree to continue holding their fellow man captive in brutal bondage and deprivation for another 110 years until 1863. This is the great stain on America that Senator Obama referenced in his speech on Tuesday.
This is how America started and no matter how far we have come (and we have come far); this is our “conflicted beginning” as a nation. This is our great scourge, our great shame, our great irony as a nation and it still clearly haunts us to this very day.