05 November 2008 
Change we can believe in
I was struck by how the journalists had decided that it was okay to mention the elephant in the room again: that we had just elected a Black President. It really hit home for me when CNN pundit David Gergen — the Last Responsible Conservative, who was a staffer in the White House under Nixon, Ford, Reagan, and Clinton — said something that penetrated the din around me.
... go up to the mountain ... seen the promised land ... I may not get there with you ...He was quoting, evidently from memory, Martin Luther King's last speech. I hadn't been sure whether I would actually weep last night, but that sure settled it.
As the President-Elect reminded us in his speech last night, there are people who voted in this election whose parents had been slaves. The girl in this picture, Ruby Bridges, was six years old in the moment in 1960 which it depicts.
She is fifty-four today.
Those men are there next to her because without them, ordinary Americans would have attacked her for being Black and trying to get a decent primary school education. She was born in a different country than the one that just elected Barack Obama President, and — in no small part because of her own efforts — she lived to see it emerge around her.
Not soon enough. Five decades was too long for her to wait. Five seconds would have been too long. But it happened, and considering how much has changed, it happened faster than anyone imagined it could.
I don't want to feed the chorus of White people crowing about how Obama's Presidency means that Racism In America Is Finally Over. Those folks need to pay better attention: there is still plenty of racist bigotry, inequity, and other injustice in our country.
But I take this moment as proof that though the arc of the moral universe is long, it really does bend toward justice ... and if we work hard enough, it doesn't have to be quite so long as we fear.
Labels: kulturkamph, politics, racism
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