This moment in time until now has always been inconceivable for me. I was alive when JFK and Malcolm X were assassinated, and I remember the feeling of hopelessness and rage when RFK and MLK were gunned down. In fact, my personal experience as the “tragic mulatto” began when I went out to play with my friends in the hood the week Reverend King was assassinated. I learned that, although my African-American side of the family raised me, I myself was different from them, because I “passed” for white.

Color meant nothing to me at nine, because my whole world existed within the black community. My folks had lived there (and still do) all their lives. Until King’s assassination, color had never been an issue. When Reverend King was killed, I “became” white to all my black friends and their families; they told me to go home. My grandmother escorted me onto the sidewalk, holding my hand, in my effort to prove my Blackness. It didn’t work.

King’s assassination commenced my education into the racial polarities that exist to this day. His death was the death knell of civil rights and integration at that time. As Boston’s tiny Black community moved towards Black Nationalism and Separatism, my brothers and I became targets of understandably blind Black rage. The race war was on, and Boston was also burning up like other cities. Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” was here. And just to make sense of things at that tender age, I decided I hated whites, too. Sure, I could have hated Blacks for attacking my brothers and me, but my Black family was suffering. My family helped me to understand what the roots of the problem were, and that the response in the Black community was really reactionary. My brothers and I were just in the line of fire. Nothing personal.

I share this very personal story because I’m inspired by Senator Obama (and the music of Jason Luckett) to rise above the blood feuds of the past. It isn’t about me, and my story is only a reflection of the thousands of other stories that share the same racial and cultural thread. So for me to see and hear an African-American man stand before the nation and say that he does not refuse or negate any of the parts that comprise his totality, AND still identify himself as a Black man, is SO POWERFUL. Why? Because I’ve always believed that the utopian concept of colorless society espoused by (white) integrationists implied that if you see yourself as colorless, integrated, equal, etc, it’s not necessary to identify yourself as Black. However, Reverend King said that unity does not mean uniformity. So I sat at the “Black Tables” in college, and I lived in the “Affinity Dorm” dedicated to Malcolm X, and did a lot of other things that both Black and White students thought, “What’s he doing here/ who does he think he is?” until they heard me speak.
Obama’s message is clear. A person of color can support and participate in an integrated
community without giving up his/her identity or allowing the general concept to supplant
the specific. I’m sure Senator Obama is both amused and disgusted with the accusations
that either he’s too Black or isn’t Black enough. Thank you, Senator, for being Black
on your own terms.

The alternative was not an option. Passing would have been a betrayal to the family that raised me and loved me. So I praise Obama for honoring his love and allegiance to his white ancestors, just as I praise and honor my unique experience growing up as an “Unda Covah Brothah”, nurtured in a world of Black art, culture, and history in Boston’s historic Black community (Malcolm X’s Boston stomping grounds were also in Roxbury,
and all praises to the “Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts/ National Center for Afro-American Artists”) by an extended Black matriarchal family. My father’s side is only void, given the fact that he cut himself off from his family line when his father disowned him for marrying my mother. I only knew my father’s mother briefly. However, over
the last five years, I’ve been educating myself about my father’s Jewish history and culture
in an effort to connect to this other complex and rich diaspora that I’m also a product of. In fact, I’m very excited about an upcoming theatrical project I’m working on because I’ll be playing a Sephardic Jew. This is an exciting time to be alive, and the courage and hope that Senator Obama is instigating are compelling me to cast off the apathy, nihilism, and suffocating rage I’ve felt for forty years and begin again with earnest and a shared audacity to re-invigorate Reverend King’s dream.