The 19 days since Barack Obama was elected as our first African- American president have generated a wave of conflicting emotions across the country. Many people are still pinching themselves at the gleeful wonder of it all. Others are flying their flags upside-down in distress. And some just can’t get past the race issue.
A distressing number of that last group have called or written here to unburden themselves, some of them stunning in their narrow-minded fury.
It would serve no purpose to repeat any of the truly offensive diatribes – it’s embarrassing enough just listening to them – but I’ll let one of the gentler comments I heard represent them all: “I didn’t order the Call & Post! Print a black paper for some other people to read . . . not me!”
That came from a man, voice cracking in anger, who said he was canceling his subscription in reaction to a Page One story on the Monday after the election that interviewed several black women across Northeast Ohio about what the prospect of Michelle Obama as America’s first lady meant to them.
Of course, it didn’t take the election to bring people like that out of the woodwork. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been smiling at a Metro cover photo of a happy kid, or a successful business owner, only to answer the phone and have the joy sucked out of the moment by some vicious, racist comment. But the election aftermath sure did increase the volume.
It’s always dangerous to extrapolate the comments of a small but hysterical minority into a widespread sentiment, and by no means do I suggest that they represent the bulk of the people who live here, or the people who voted against Obama.
But already I know there are people reading this who don’t consider themselves racists, but who took issue with two statements in my opening paragraph: “President” and “African-American.”
After The Plain Dealer published a special section on the Sunday after the election heralding Obama as “the 44th president,” some readers called to scold that he’s not the president yet – he’s the president-elect. And lots of people have corrected the term “African-American,” pointing out that, because he had a white mother, he should be called “biracial.”
That last complaint must hit black readers with heavy irony, when they consider the long history in this country that once put people who had only a sixteenth of African blood in their lineage on the wrong side of the Jim Crow laws.
I’m not the first to observe that there cannot be any truer example of an African-American than a man whose father was a black African and whose mother was a white American. We usually try to call people what they want to be called, and if that’s the way Barack Obama refers to himself, that ought to be good enough for the rest of us.
The historic nature of the 2008 election is the signature moment of the age, and it is beyond obvious that any news organization worth its name would examine the many ways it impacts our society.
In the days after the election, we published stories about the celebration by Obama’s dedicated campaign workers, Cleveland’s contribution to the success of black politicians, letters to the president from black schoolchildren, his possible impact on urban areas and the story on black women that our racist friend, quoted earlier, called “the final straw.”
There are many more angles left to explore. So anyone who is offended at news coverage of black people had better find a nice, quiet cave to hide in for the next quadrennium. With President Obama and his family inhabiting the White House, there are likely to be one or two more stories that feature them – not just by The Plain Dealer but by every news organization in the country.
But no matter what happens during the Obama administration, regardless of how successful he is at fulfilling the promises that got him elected, it’s possible that his most lasting legacy will be the establishment of the sheer normalcy of it all.
For the next four years, every one of us – black, white or in between, regardless of the stereotypes or prejudices we now carry – will become accustomed to observing an attractive, inspiring, smart, functioning black family of four as the highest profile family in the land.
Slowly, inexorably, perhaps in spite of ourselves, that experience is bound to get us all a good way down the road toward changing “them” to “us.”
Perhaps that will even be true of “Mr. Call & Post” above.
