My Country 'Tis of Thee

I have a Bachelor's Degree in Race and Gender studies.  I've met with the Civil Rights Leaders that brought voting rights to millions of people in America, met with men and women who marched on Bloody Sunday and the following March to Selma and talked with the recently passed Johnnie Carr - the civil rights champion that she was.

I've studied the beginning of race - in America, in the 1700s.  To find a way to keep more worker for less money, legislatures along the East Coast began to separate poor whites from poor Africans.

I've written about the 3/5ths clause, one-drop rule AND the 1/4, 1/2, 1/16 blood quantum rules that most American Indians nations grapple with.

I've lived in the projects - both when the projects were almost solely Black and when they became almost solely first-generation Latino.  My grandfather was Chickasaw Indian, my grandmother was White.  After their divorce, my grandfather married a Vietnamese woman.  There are bi/multiracial children dotted throughout my family.

I know race.

So when I walk down the streets of SouthSide Chicago - I recognize that the police are less likely to harass me than the Black man I just passed.  When I walk into Trinity UCC, as a white-skinned looking mixed queer boy, I am seen with God's love and a bit of trepidation until people understand that I'm not there solely to stare and watch their worship voyeuristically.

When I talk to some white folks about race - they tell me (from a friend of a friend, in NC):

• it's white bashing because he's implying that the circumstance of black people in america is due to the white people
• seriously there is no slavery now. there is no segregration now. there is no lynchings now
• geez man, if you want to make this presidential about race, obama might as well just give up now because he will lose. the appeal to me about obama is that his ability to move beyond his being black and talking about real issues and his straight talk
• lets look forward, and not backward! lets quit whining about the past, for crying out loud...there's nothing we can do about it no matter how much we talk about it...what's done is done.

Now, let me be clear - some White folks get it.  Some understand that the issues facing current Black youth aren't just the cause of the past 5 years.  History impacts us generations down the road.  Current White adults treat Black adults based on (1) their direct experience, (2) how their parents (communities, churches, schools) taught them as kids (which was impacted by how THEIR parents taught them and so on and (3) how the rest of the country and world treats Black folk.

There are adults voting now that couldn't vote when they were first eligible.  Think about when you were first eligible to vote - when you were 18 or 21.  Were you eligible to go to the board of elections to register? Did they ask you to translate the constitution into Latin or fully explicate the First Amendment (Disenfranchisement after the Civil War)?  Even worse - the people issuing these tests and halting registrations couldn't do it themselves.

That was just the effects of the 1900-1960s.  Then the issues of the 1960s-today - race riots, shootings of unarmed black men, Louis Farrakhan, James Byrd, Jena 6.  We have never fully dealt with these issues and more often than not, White America likes to pretend they don't exist because they're difficult to deal with. And who can blame them?

In my work on anti-racism, many times people express anger at how much racism (and sexism, etc) they see after a consciousness-raising.  After they first start seeing the little things - they notice all of them.  And if that's the case, who wouldn't want to pretend it doesn't exist?  For the past 2 weeks, we've heard, "It's the Obama campaign that made it about race."  Many people will think that's true and many will disagree. For all of the racial and ambiguous comments made by the Clinton campaign - I will say, yes, the Obama campaign DID make it about race.  

• By being a Black man and not bowing down to power, he made it about race.
• By knowing what it's like to live in two Americas - an America where you must be docile or else you're arrogant.
• An America where you close the door to your home and relax your shoulders because you no longer have to wear a mask.
• He made it about race by making people think about their own race and their own issues around race.

For as much as people see Senator Obama as post-racial, he's not and never has been.  To say that we can come together even while being different isn't to say that we can come together to ignore the differences. There is no melting pot and Obama has never promised one.

It is often hard, as someone who lives between two worlds, to fully embrace the American dream.  I dream of an America that is full of hope but see an America that has failed so many times.  The reason that I like "Yes We Can" by will.i.am is that it allows Obama to remind me that even though we have come short so often of what America SHOULD be, we keep working.  The arc of the moral universe is long, but we see that bend coming 'round freedom's way.

There are times that behind closed doors, we own up to the fact that America has let us down.  The government has lied, abused, tortured and killed.  That doesn't mean that we don't love America - it just means we watch America closely so she doesn't hurt us.

It's with that thought, with that sentiment, that the following words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King were spoken.  My sense is that they have very different meanings for different communities.  While the powerful and privileged of this nation could sing the words easily and without thought, they mean much more to those who have suffered at the hands of this country and even with that still love it and serve it dearly.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."