Archive for November, 2008

A lot of people (including myself at one point) muttered about how Obama’s ideas are not that great. That he’s fairly conservative. That he’s not going to lead the revolution. But, I think to focus on Obama the person is short sighted. It’s really important to distinguish between Obama the man and Obama the symbol in accounting for what has people so hyped up. It’s true. He’s a moderate who would fit in nicely in Canada’s Conservative Party. His politics suck in a lot of ways. Of course, some people agree with his politics, but I don’t think that’s what has so many people excited.

What’s stunning about him is that if someone had told the slaves stolen from Africa that one day someone who looked like them could be the President of the land, they would have been floored. As I heard someone say on my mom’s show yesterday, “This isn’t just for us. This is for our ancestors who fought and died so that we could have the right to vote.” Obama’s election is stunning proof of our strength to survive and to thrive despite the most incredibly debasing history.

I have to admit that I’ve been frustrated with people (many of them white) on the left who have failed to have perspective on what this means. It means that kids who look like me are now less likely to grow up the way I did, thinking that I could do a lot of things, but some things were still just for white people. It means I can say to my kids, “You can be anything you want, even President,” and believe it.

This isn’t a mere change; this is a phase transition. A lot of the Black folks who came before me had some messed up politics. But I can’t knock them too hard because they paved the path for me. That’s who Obama is going to be for generations of Black youth (amongst others) to come. They are going to be empowered by the image, no matter what his stance on Pakistan or Guantanamo. And in countless cases, their lives are going to be saved by that image.

I heard a woman from Harlem on MSNBC who, when asked how she felt, said “I feel proud and strong and tall.” And I thought, goddamn, they are finally asking Black folks how they think and feel! And they will do it more now! And I thought, she doesn’t sound white. She sounds like Black poetry. She sounds like the Harlem of yesterday and the Harlem of tomorrow. And the words she speaks, they are for Black America, the Caribbean, Africa. Her words are the sound of people waking up and saying, “Yes we can!” And individuals saying, “Yes I will!” The collective consciousness of a people saying, “Yes we matter!”

An America lead by President Obama is an America with a waking Black community. Waking to itself again. Waking renewed. Waking ready to fight for justice. The amazing thing is that white folks who haven’t will learn to walk with us. I believe that. They’re going to get educated because they’re already becoming educated. They don’t have a choice about it anymore. They don’t have a choice but to see an Black man being intelligent and conscientious. They can’t keep him out of their community because he is their community.

It took 350 years of injustice, but Black folks are making it and will make it. That doesn’t mean we, or our leaders, are immune to the kind of bullshit that is twisted into the oppression of many, from First Nations peoples to Vietnamese sweatshop workers. As activists, we will have to keep on keepin on, just like so many generations before us.

And that’s where the power of Obama’s symbol comes in. He is proof that the struggle matters, that it works, that we’re not wasting our time, and that we should persist and INSIST on change. The US is a racist country. But now, I believe, it won’t always be so because the work that I do, that you do, that we do, matters. And it will change the world. I’m in it for the long hall because I don’t just hope: I believe.

Whatever problems many of us have with Obama, I think this story does put things in perspective. Borrowed from the Austin American-Statesman:

Daughter of slave votes for Obama
109-year-old Bastrop woman casts her vote by mail.

By Joshunda Sanders
AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Monday, October 27, 2008

Amanda Jones, 109, the daughter of a man born into slavery, has lived a life long enough to touch three centuries. And after voting consistently as a Democrat for 70 years, she has voted early for the country’s first black presidential nominee.

The middle child of 13, Jones, who is African American, is part of a family that has lived in Bastrop County for five generations. The family has remained a fixture in Cedar Creek and other parts of the county, even when its members had to eat at segregated barbecue dives and walk through the back door while white customers walked through the front, said Amanda Jones’ 68-year-old daughter, Joyce Jones.

For at least a decade, Amanda Jones worked as a maid for $20 a month, Joyce Jones said. She was a housewife for 72 years and helped her now-deceased husband, C.L. Jones, manage a store.

Amanda Jones, a delicate, thin woman wearing golden-rimmed glasses, giggled as the family discussed this year’s presidential election. She is too weak to go the polls, so two of her 10 children — Eloise Baker, 75, and Joyce Jones — helped her fill out a mail-in ballot for Barack Obama, Baker said. “I feel good about voting for him,” Amanda Jones said.

Jones’ father herded sheep as a slave until he was 12, according to the family, and once he was freed, he was a farmer who raised cows, hogs and turkeys on land he owned. Her mother was born right after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, Joyce Jones said. The family owned more than 100 acres of land in Cedar Creek at one point, she said.

Amanda Jones’ father urged her to exercise her right to vote, despite discriminatory practices at the polls and poll taxes meant to keep black and poor people from voting. Those practices were outlawed for federal elections with the 24th Amendment in 1964, but not for state and local races in Texas until 1966.

Amanda Jones says she cast her first presidential vote for Franklin Roosevelt, but she doesn’t recall which of his four terms that was. When she did vote, she paid a poll tax, her daughters said. That she is able, for the first time, to vote for a black presidential nominee for free fills her with joy, Jones said.

One of Amanda Jones’ 33 grandchildren, Brenda Baker, 44, said the family is moved by the election’s significance to the matriarch.

“It’s awesome to me that we have such a pillar of our family still with us,” Baker said. “It’s awesome to see what she’s done, and all her hard work, and to see that she may be able to see the results of all that hard work” if Obama is elected, she said.

Jones lives in a small gray house with white trim just off Texas 21. These days, a curious white kitten and a sleepy old black dog guard the house. Inside are photographs and relics of a long, full life, including a letter from then-Gov. George Bush in 1998 commemorating her 100th birthday. A black-and-white picture of her in a long flapper-style dress was taken between 1912 and 1918 — no one can remember the exact year, Baker said with a chuckle.

Jones is part of a small percentage of active voters above the age of 100 in the state — and the country.

Sister Cecilia Gaudette, a 106-year-old nun born in New Hampshire but living in Rome, made recent national headlines as the nation’s oldest voter. But if Texas records are any indication, that’s hard to validate.

Secretary of State spokeswoman Ashley Burton said Texas can’t confirm whether Jones is the state’s oldest active voter because there is too much voter information to sort through. At the county level, there are other challenges. An election official in Hays County said its records are not searchable by age, and Bastrop County elections administrator Nora Cano said that some counties automatically list voters who were born before the turn of the 20th century with birth dates of January 1900.

The oldest active voter in Travis County is 105, officials said, and in Williamson County the oldest is 106 — making Jones the oldest-known active voter in Central Texas.

Making it to see the election results on Nov. 5 is important, but Jones is resting up for another milestone: her 110th birthday in December. “God has been good to me,” she said.

joshundasanders@statesman.com;445-3630

A. Lewis Hamilton is hot.

B. Even I am a bit shocked by the racism that he has experienced as the first Black driver to make it on the F1 circuit. I mean come on people. Haven’t you gotten decent at hiding it? Or something?!?! More here in the Guardian about the latest attempt to break his focus. Tomorrow, he will become the first Black F1 Champion. I hope so anyway.

C. Happy Fucking Halloween. I went out in Waterloo, Ontario tonight. Went to the local bar, the Jane Bond. Counted not one but two guys in Blackface. One of them was wearing a tank top and a pair of jeans. So like, he was Black for Halloween? I mean, let’s say he doesn’t get the Blackface historical bla bla. Who goes as another race for a costume?? Would he have dared to tape his eyes? And what was the point?

Maybe next year I will paint my skin white and go as an asshole.