“For every hundred of us who survived the terrible journey across the Atlantic . . .four hundred of us perished. During three hundred years—the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries—more than 100,000, 000 of us were torn from our African homes.”
–Richard Wright, 12 million black voices, 1941
I had the privilege on election night 2008 of being LIVE on AIR on BET News as one of a panel of political pundits and writers who were analyzing the results of the historic 2008 campaign as they rolled in state by state. I was truly a witness to living history in the making. Around 10:00PM it became apparent that Senator Obama was going to be elected President of the United States when the states of Ohio & Pennsylvania voted for the democratic standard bearer.
However, what struck me the most profoundly that evening was an interview that one BET Correspondent, who was reporting from Atlanta’s Spellman College, had with the Rev. Joseph Lowery (founder of the SCLC). He was very emotional (as were we all) and she asked him did he think he would ever live to see a black man being elected President.
He responded very softly and said simply:
“Yes, we thought it would come to this, but not this soon. I think God was in the plan. There are too many things that converged in his favor for it to have been accidental or even coincidental. Today America was reborn.”
As I reflect on the historic and profound change of November 5, 2008 I agree with Rev. Lowery’s comments most of all. Barack Hussein Obama is a name we as African Americans in particular should all be proud to say out loud, because his name has meaning rooted in providence and scripture, and in thousands of years of African culture and civilization.
It was somewhat of a disappointment to me on election night beyond all of the coverage, tears, and joyful celebrations being broadcast worldwide, that no one mentioned that our new President is not really a “black American” as we have come to embrace our evolution from “colored” to “Negroes” to “Afro” Americans, to “blacks”. He is in fact something broader than that.
His father Barack Hussein Obama, Sr. was a full blooded Kenyan; an African from the east coast of the largest continent in the world. His Mother Anne Dunham was a white woman of European roots from Kansas. Unlike me, and millions of other black Americans who bear a “slave name”—like Johnson, Smith, Wilson, or Jones; Senator Obama’s name is pure African. The Senator’s own wife, the former Michelle Robinson (now Mrs. Obama) is also a direct descendant of slaves.
President-elect Barack Obama is the genuine article as they say. He is more than mulatto or bi-racial he is the very embodiment of how this great nation began in 1619 on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia. He is one half African and one half European-Caucasian.
He embodies the worst of our past—a nation that captured millions of Africans against their will and stored them away in the hull of slave ships, brutalized them, and held them illiterate for hundreds of years before truly granting them the full rights of citizenship in this country. And he embodies the very best of our future—a black boy born of a broken home, who was raised by his white grandparents, was educated at the best schools our nation has to offer, and who made no excuses for his life. He truly pulled himself up by the bootstraps with the love and support of his family. He married above himself (as all smart men do) and he had the courage to pursue his ambitions and dreams for a better America. He never let the naysayers in—he never doubted that America could and would vote for change.
But my point is deeper than that: For me, President elect Obama’s election to the Presidency is the providence of God in action. In the book of Daniel chapter 4, the scriptures tell us that God chooses who rules in the kingdoms of men, whether princes or Kings, good or bad, He decides and gives men dominion.
It is poetic justice—a form of providence as the founding father John Adams would call it. Perhaps, it is the ultimate right to a wrong done so long ago when America started with its great “birth defect” (e.g., slavery) as Secretary Rice so poignantly coined the phrase last spring in an interview with the Washington Times.
Senator Obama has been labeled “messianic”: he has been called “The One”. Of course we know none of this is true. He is just a man. A man with a funny name. A man so unlikely to be President. A man who many tried to disparage and label as an “Arab”, “Muslim”, “A socialist”, “A terrorist pal”, and on and on.
My Nana used to say you can’t judge a book by its cover. You also can’t judge a man by his name. Barack Hussein Obama, the son of a Kenyan and an American. You can’t tell me God’s hand was not in this outcome last November. Because it clearly was.
How profound and how appropriate that our nation’s first commander in chief of color would be an African. How amazing and right that Americans, white and black alike elected him so resoundingly and placed the hopes of our present day America and future generations of Americans in his hands.