3. Barack Obama: “He will have a transformative effect simply because he’s black.” “He will change race relations.”

I find this view very narrow. Barack Obama’s transformative effect is because he’s black - and it doesn’t matter. The whole of Mr. Obama’s movement is the idea that we are transcending categories…that is the change. To say that youth are enthused with this candidate because they want to eradicate the race problem – severely sells the youth short. By and large the youth have already moved on…pass the race problem. They are enthused with Barack because Barack is enthused, and in the words of my man Emerson:

“Every great and commanding moment in the annals of the world is the triumph of some enthusiasm.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson -Man the Reformer

IN RESPONSE:
# thomas Says:
October 30th, 2008 at 11:22 pm

brother nother from another mother,

I was just passing through, I happened to glance at your post, especially the last point. you wrote,

““He will have a transformative effect simply because he’s black.” I find this view very narrow. Barack Obama’s transformative effect is because he’s black - and it doesn’t matter. The whole of Mr. Obama’s movement is the idea that we are transcending categories…that is the change.”

I certainly share your general view that the transformation that Obama represents transcends the issue of race but nevertheless, brother O will have a transformative effect simply because he’s black. This sentiment comes from a young person (25 yrs) from my narrow perch in Fairburn, GA outside the perimeter of Atlanta.

With all due respect there is no issue as deeply painful for black folk and wounding for white folk (see Wendell Berry’s The Hidden Wound) as race. It more than simply a ‘problem’ that can simply be ‘passed’ by the young or any other people by a transcendence of categories.

Obama does transcend categories out of both expediency and idealism but I would imagine he is also well aware of the transformative effect he, as a black man, would have simply as the resident-n-chief in the White House.

The larger question for me in this issue of race in the national narrative as a southern white pastor in a largely black middle class suburban area is how does this race present an opportunity, if obama is elected, to not merely see it as a transcendence of categories on the way to just all getting along, but an opportunity to be truthful in our discourse about the brokenness in the narrative which must be acknowledged, confronted, and reconciled if the common good which looms radiantly on our horizon towards which we all yearn is to have any integrity at all. To do less than this would be to dawdle in illusion when the reality could be so much more beautiful.

IN RESPONSE TO THOMAS:

Ahh brother Thomas, I’m more than pleased to get your view from that sunny perch in GA. Yes you’ve set me straight to an extent. Obama will have a transformative effect on race. My reactionary reaction was a fear that the acknowledging this point could take away from the content of his credentials – in the same way that affirmative action is disparaged (even when the person was not a product of affirmative action).

The example I hold up is Jackie Robinson. He had a transformative effect on the game but would anyone say he wasn’t qualified? In fact, he was the best player on the field. And that’s what it took to finally break the color line…the best player by far. It could never have been an average black baseball player breaking that barrier. And it’s the same with brother O, he is sooo good that even the prejudiced in our society are forced to stand back…stand back in the way the white Civil War troops stood back as the 54th marched first into Fort Wagner.

You write: “but an opportunity to be truthful in our discourse about the brokenness in the narrative which must be acknowledged, confronted, and reconciled if the common good which looms radiantly on our horizon towards which we all yearn is to have any integrity at all.”

Thank you for the beautiful sentiment, Thomas. With every individual water cooler conversation struck up about brother O, we get closer to that elusive summit where your horizon of common good will stretch out and envelope us – even the most disillusioned of us.

“To do less than this would be to dawdle in illusion when the reality could be so much more beautiful.”
-thomas

“the unities of Truth and of Right are not broken by the disguise. There need never be any confusion in these. In a crowded life of many parts and performers, on a stage of nations, or in the obscurest hamlet in Maine or California, the same elements offer the same choices to each new comer, and, according to his election, he fixes his fortune in absolute Nature.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson from “Illusions.”
http://www.emersoncentral.com/illusions.htm