The gist of today was we’re in the last days of the campaign (not the Palin-esque Last Days), so what we have to offer is our personal stories.  We’re not going to wow people with policy at this point.  Argument is a waste of energy.  What we need to do is to motivate the already inclined to act.  So (and here’s some red meat for the haters) the first half of the camp was basically an autobiographical sketch workshop.  The task was identifying a personal challenge, explaining the choices we made because of it, and the outcome.  Yes it was Obamacentric in that we all had made choices to come and volunteer for this campaign.  And it had to be something that could be communicated in 120 seconds.

So I felt really esoteric when it came to my story.  I mean I write volumes about this stuff.  Our biographies overlap again and again.  I have millions of challenge>choice>outcomes that led me here.

Few kept it to 2 minutes – it’s hard with emotional subject matter.  But I like assignments, so I tried.  I offered the “nigger” story.

I was 5 and it was the days of Richard Pryor on vinyl.  My dad would call us “little shit asses.”  So you can’t blame me for being a foul mouthed kid.  I called a kid “nigger.”  I got beat up.  My parents explained the word to me and it began my journey into history and the language.  In Irvine a few years later I got beat up and called a “nigger.”

My corporal identity has allowed me to be perceived as oppressed and oppressor, included or other.  I focus on the inclusion in order to bring empathy toward the other for my peers.  I am the derided other, yet I’ve been included as family.  So take that a step further and include those for whom we don’t have a natural affinity.  Let’s understand their stories because they’re not dissimilar from your friend, me.

I feel like I’ve been able to do that through my music, it’s actually my mission.  I tried to do this a little through politics in college, but the pressure ate me up.  I said it was the “no Red States/Blue States” speech that got me, but really it wasn’t until the race speech (my Julia Moment) that I was in.  It’s that ability to speak in shared experience that I believe is Barack’s primary strength.

So is it all about race for me?  There are many biracial people out there I wouldn’t trust with my country.  Not many people would I trust with my country.  It’s what one does with his or her experience that moves me.  Obama does what I’d like to do in a larger forum.  I don’t agree with everything he does.  But that’s the great part about the conversation with those that are simultaneously “us-and-other.”   We see and can represent the humanity of those with whom we may differ from a rather unique perspective.  And if we’re practiced, we can hold this conversation in a really calm fashion.

I felt a little cold recalling this story to the group.  Name calling and childhood beatings seem rather existential when you’re talking with people whose narratives include present battles with healthcare and unemployment.  But it’s this essentialist tension that gives me the sense that Barack Obama has the skill set to hear the stories that will lead to effective leadership.  I’m not looking for an affective President, I’m looking for an effective President.  Affect is a large part of effective politicking, but something about the navigational balance of being “us-and-other” can blunt that when we’re trying for effective dialogue.  We’re not going to get a lot of red meat from Obama, but we will get a reasoned, educated and respectful discussion.

I remember first really connecting to my black American self reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X while traveling in Europe. I was in from the beginning, along with the rage, understanding Brother Malcolm’s hatred of the “white rapist blood” within him even though the preponderance of “white” blood in me came from histories of love and directly from a courageous woman who moved across a continent and an ocean to marry a man who feared the social repercussions of his choice. And though Malcolm eventually re-evaluates his characterizations of the “blue-eyed devils,” embracing a multi-hued community of sincerity–a journey I joined in my reading–I was momentarily just as much with him when he proclaimed that the only thing he liked integrated was his coffee. I understood the history. Parts of my life connected viscerally to his narrative through my own experience and the stories both my father and mother told me. I was caught up in his intelligence and charisma. Ultimately I was inspired by his capacity for change and love.

My father’s generation have told me about the moment they saw Diahann Carroll on TV in her show Julia. She was simply a beautiful black woman, sans caricature, neither Madonna, nor whore. A woman.

When we talk of race in this country, particularly in this era, it is generally of tolerance, of how close we are or not to equality, of self-identity, or in platitudinous phrases and descriptions of colorblindness (“Love See No Color” [sic...and gag!]), of a post-racial society. We speak “people of color”–whose opposite, I guess, would be “people absent color(?).”

And I’ve heard all the justifications for black rage and white anger.

But in political dialogue I’ve never heard a self-identified black man, speak of the absolute love he receives from his white family, his complete connection to them, even as the nearly inevitable racial experiences create moments of tension within that primary relationship. This was my Julia Moment.

Most of my “friends of color” have had our moments when we said we’d never date a white person again. And I’ve been asked if that sentiment offends me, seeing that I must have some connection to my whiteness. How could a sentiment that I’ve adopted myself for a period “offend” me? During my time of self-segregation I discovered that cultural ideas were as jumbled and problematic in my limited community as they were in the larger community to which I belong by blood and experience.

That’s the complicated beauty of Obama’s speech from Tuesday morning. I cannot disown, we cannot disown the white, the black, the brown, the Asian, the native people of this land nor can we deny the legacies of what has happened in the past and what is happening now that creates division in our society. The “whole” experience, the identity beyond the hyphen that adds divisive distinction preceding the word American, is a world where we can hold the profound and profane in a single family.

I was my maternal grandmother’s first grandchild. She wasn’t happy with the idea that her daughter was marrying a black man. A year after they were, my grandmother and I started a love affair that would continue into my 30s. We’d hold hands at our favorite bench, looking out at the lighthouse, facing east towards old England, from where our ancestors came in the 17th Century. I usually sat to her left, so when I looked towards her, in the distance southeast was the land where some of my family was bought and brought to this country. Behind us was entire land that used to belong to a brown people and the coast where I was raised in the sunshine. Even further west is the island of Oahu where Barack Obama and I were born. And beyond that is the Philippines where my step mother was born and raised.

This isn’t a platitude or a list, this is our family. I don’t love everything that happens within it, we’re a complicated community, but the bond and the love is irrefutable.

(c) Jason Luckett, March 19, 2008

Is that playing the race card intentionally or does it speak to a deeper status quo mindset that views Blacks as inspirational figures but not worthy of consideration for administrative leadership? I don’t believe that Hillary isn’t sincerely inspired when she realizes that there is an African-American man next to a European-American woman on the stage next to her running to lead the nation. But I do believe that her drive for the office may blind her to the some of the slights people who are not European-American feel everyday. And I’m clearly aware that in my editing of this comment, I went back to insert the word “man” after “African-American” and I inserted “European-American” before the word “woman.” Is it a given that a person running for President is a man? And is it a given that a woman running for President is white? Changing our collective assumptions about people in this world should be a vital project for the “Leader of the Free World.” It should result in strengthening our international image as well as creating a climate for greater security for us domestically. I think all should avoid using “Missus Clinton” in reference to Clinton as much as all should avoid efforts to attach marginalized Black leaders to Obama, as Bill Clinton has done. Overall I believe that Senator Obama is better positioned to change collective assumptions. However inspirational is her potential to break the glass ceiling, Senator Clinton and her team seem too locked into past divisions of patronage based on race, class and other privilege to offer as effective leadership to a diverse nation and world. If you are baited, it’s your responsibility as a leader neither to bite, nor deepen the divide by short sighted or misleading comments. Obama will be tested and baited by the media as the Democratic candidate for President. It is unknown how he will respond to the “Clinton Rules.” But we do know that in her self-touted vetting process, Senator Clinton and President Clinton have both failed.

Are they race-baiting intentionally? Probably not initially. Are they trying to capitalize on racial politics? You decide. (Frank Rich thinks so.)

I’m glad I know this history and can see it.

I don’t need to know the concepts behind a great piece of music. I don’t need to know the lyrics. But I’m excited by that knowledge, intrigued by the confluence and how that contributes to the power of the work. And I’m annoyed by those who dismiss it, dismiss the traditions of the music. This isn’t because I’m getting old, the first song I ever wrote was influenced by Woody Guthrie’s use of traditional source material. I was 9.

So I’m equally annoyed by those who are ignorant of the history of color prejudice, who wistfully long for a period when it will not matter in the near future or, even more egregiously, claim that time is now.

Tonight I’m just getting in from a Black/Brown dialogue by way of a Poetry Choir Performance in Highland Park. Really, most of the crowd, however identified, was ironically the shade of a brown paper bag, give or take. Maybe this is post racial, where we’re all the same shade but the difference is the cultural traditions. But the shade (the cover that you can’t judge!) leads to a story of the alchemy. And part of that alchemy includes the history of prejudice and how it has impacted all of our lives, privileged and not.

But beyond that, (¡Sí, Se Puede!), history is fun and illuminating. I’m at the debates Thursday, and the blue English signs for Obama are all out. So I get the red one, which is in Spanish. I’m not bilingual. And I’m the kid who took French in my upper-middle class suburb. But I dug “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido” better than “The People United will never be defeated” when we demonstrated against Aparthied back in the 80s. And I heard “¡Sí, Se Puede!” then. I heard it in the streets a couple years ago. And I’m completely thrilled. There are probably some cynics that will say it’s a co-opting akin to AeroMexico’s. But to me it’s an embrace, an embrace of the Farm Workers’ movement, et. al. I feel like only a true believer with the audacity of hope could think that he could use a phrase so identified with leftist movements to win a mainstream election while signaling his inclusion of people who have been historically shut out. And talk about inclusion, Obama even has a LGBT link on his page! (I wonder what Pat “see sah perda” Buchanan would say about that!). I’m just so excited that my generation, a generation with leaders that are post modern, recognizing the real presence of difference, of cultural circumstance, without bowing to the hierarchies of the past, has the chance to lead. That is the future, not some colorblind, bland, “we’re all the same” thing.

Yes we can embrace all these differences and thrive. Remember when multiculturalism was “hot?” Well now it just “is.” And we need someone who understands that intuitively, dare I say natively. We don’t need someone who’ll cynically use codified race baiting on the campaign trail, whether intentional or not, and I know it was Bill, not Hillary. (Remember when Bill Clinton discussed what the meaning of the word “is” is? I embrace ambiguity, but there’s a little cynical manipulation going on there. And I liked Clinton well enough. But both Clinton and George Wallace have won the South Carolina Primary along with John Edwards, Jesse Jackson and proto neo-con Henry M. Jackson.)

I said originally that this wasn’t going to be a blog just about Obama. And it isn’t, but this movement is really inspiring me.