African Americans and "the Right Stuff"

In this season of election campaign tomfoolery, we see a lot of drivel. We can expect this. But, for the purpose of accenting a more enriching discussion of the issues before us, it does not hurt to undress some of the palaver that finds its way into the media. I recently read an editorial posted on the website of Investor’s Business Daily which was manifestly racist. It referred to Barack Obama’s black church, to relatives of his in Africa who had questionable associations, to phone calls and trips made by Obama’s pastor. The connections of all this “African nativism” to Obama himself were quite oblique and insubstantial, but the editorialist did not mean for the reader to notice that. The article stressed that blacks are loyal to Africa first; and because Obama is black, he cannot be trusted. To display the fault in this editorialist’s reasoning, one could in like manner blackball me because my graduate school reading included Marxist historians, or denounce me because I taught at a fundamentalist college in Michigan. (What did you just learn about the real me by mention of this information? Maybe I am a covert communist fundamentalist.) In fact the writer is so bent on guilt by associative speculation, I wouldn’t be surprised if he harbors thoughts of conspiracy on the part of Barack’s Kenyan father, marrying a white woman so as to foster a mulatto child who would grow up to more easily infiltrate white American government and insinuate foreign African causes into the highest levels. Let me lift the topic up for some fresh airing in a less despoiling manner. I assert that black people are as genuinely “American” as I, a white man, am. I assume that any black person born and raised in the United States is as American as any fat person, or anyone shorter than George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and myself. If Barack Obama is a threat to America, it is not because of anything in his inherited background, nor is he a clone of those whom he encounters, whatever their color or opinions on nationally debated issues. Abraham Lincoln married into a southern family of rebel soldiers and Confederate supporters; Dick Cheney sired a lesbian child; John Kennedy was raised a Catholic; Barack Obama’s black father was a Muslim--do you follow the logic? If African-Americans as naturally born citizens should happen, in time, to become 55% of the United States population, it would not, by that fact, alter the political structure, the constitutional principles, or the heritage of democracy in our country. Democracy is government by the people; American citizens are its people. Whoever its people are, we are enriched. Whoever its people are, the life and spirit and shared experiences are affirmed and voiced by the structure of democracy. Democracy as a political ideal has no preconceived cultural, ethnic, or creedal doctrines to enshrine. We may honor and emulate our luminous predecessors, but to enshrine and encase them is to cut off the potential of the democratic way. Our democracy is a dynamic that calls forth the best from those who are uplifted by the freedom to vie for attention, to hone the truths they discover, and to lead the inattentive and ungrateful to a better way. To argue monotonously that tradition sanctions only the incumbents, the present generation, the current brokers of influence, is to prostitute the very idea of democracy. (Such notables as James Madison and Alexis deTocqueville have recognized the hazard of “tyranny of the majority.”) Democracy is a clamorous experiment, but it is not threatened by those who are not like “us.” A democracy that yields to fear, racism, slapdash pronouncements and narcissistic ethnocentrism as a means to retain power is a scam on what our founding fathers (in their best moments, and on their best behavior) had in mind.