OBAMAS PARTING GIFT: THE POWER NOT TO FEAR WHITE RACISM

[DemocratSinceBirth]

The only Inauguration I have attended, and probably the only one I ever will attend, was Barack Obama’s first, eight years ago. My wife and I were nearly broke, but we gathered money from the life insurance left by my mother, who had died of lung cancer six weeks before the election. We wrapped our California kids, ages five and three, in a million layers of clothing and hats, filled thermoses with soup and hot chocolate, shared hand-warmers among us, and packed as though we were braving the Arctic tundra. The temperature in Washington was in the twenties, and we were outside for eight hours. It must have been uncomfortable. Our kids must have suffered. Their mom and I must have bickered. But I don’t remember it that way. I remember laughing a lot and holding gloved hands. I remember taking turns hoisting our children on our shoulders, and our son waving a flag with Michelle’s and Barack’s faces on it. I remember the Metro car, packed with the bodies of strangers, breaking out into impromptu choruses of “We Shall Overcome.”

We felt hope that day. But that hope was the flip side of the terror, anguish, and frustration we had felt every single day before, living in a country that, for centuries, systematically abused many of its people, and then punished those people for trying to regain their humanity. To be black in America is a wild and endless assault on the senses. You can spend every day fighting off your spiritual and intellectual extinction.

For much of my childhood, I lived in a small, mostly white town along Appalachia, in the Rust Belt. By seventh grade, I spent days fighting with kids who called me nigger and nights secretly wishing I was white so that I wouldn’t have to. The message arrived early that blackness was, for some reason, something bad, something that made people hate me, something that made people angry. When I was twelve, a white man drove by in a car and threw a milkshake at me as I rode a skateboard. Blackness, I learned, was so hateful that it made adults assault random children. It was as if I had a disease that made other people want to hurt me.

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/obamas-parting-gift-the-power-not-to-fear-white-racism

[delisen]

1. A beautiful & powerful memoir. Never want to go back to a whiter America n/t

[heaven05]

2. I will never fear

white ignorance, hate and stupidity all wrapped up in those two words white racism. Yet today I saw the death of the democratic experiment this country has always represented. I wore my black armband and mourned the loss of civility, class, grace and most importantly, intelligence in our leaders, especially that fuhrer who is potus now. Everything you mentioned was something I know is true from experience and we will see it again in ever increasing intensity as the racist white potus we now have makes us scapegoats for the problems of lost jobs ect in ameriKKKa that he started to elucidate today. No surrender is my watch word. Fight, resist and never fear any POS that tries to make one feel like they are not equal to the white person. I plan on spitting in their eye. NO MORE NICE.

My only hope is that he fucks things up so bad that his own people will disown this racist pig who is now potus.