Donald Hoffman, Guest Commentary
- The day after the final two primaries in the Democratic presidential nomination contest, the headline placed symbolically above the masthead of my morning paper read, “OBAMA CLINCHES—He’s first black on major ticket”. That same morning I was channel surfing between candidates’ speeches and happened upon Oprah Winfrey’s movie, “Beloved”, and Beah Richards’s portrayal of preacher Baby Suggs’s sobering oratory to her flock:
“Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it…Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them, touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face, ‘cause they don’t love that either…And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will not heed. What you scream from it they do not hear…You got to love it. This is flesh that I’m talking about here.”
Contrary to America’s political punditry heralding Barack Obama’s candidacy as congratulatory to our former slave nation’s crossing a historically significant threshold—finally having a so-called “viable black candidate” for President—a feeling of frustrated grief tortures my own spirit. While I’m thrilled that America is potentially on a path toward electing a candidate of Barack Obama’s ethnic heritage to the office of President, I’m still deeply saddened to live in a country that can’t look at someone like Barack Obama and see him racially as anything other than “black”.
Touting Barack Obama’s candidacy as a sign of progress in America’s racial divide, while labeling the “racially blended” son of a black Kenyan father and a white Kansan mother “black”, is truly indicative of a level of ignorance beyond obtuse. As far as we think we’ve come, the lamentations of Baby Suggs still fits America to a tee. As white America pats itself on the back for embracing Barack Obama, Baby Suggs’s prophesy still rings true, “Yonder they do not love your flesh”.
Never in a million years in America would it happen that we’d observe the union of a black parent and a white parent and call a child of that union white. But, without pause we unthinkingly label such children black. Can such logic do anything other than affirm the white supremacist notion that the union of white flesh and blood with black represents contamination of the white race? For most of America’s history such unions were illegal. Just forty one years ago, the US Supreme Court declared such unions constitutionally legal when the decision in Loving v. Virginia overturned Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924. Interracial unions are no longer illegal in America, and supposedly they are tolerated. But the message remains that the racially blended offspring of such unions are subject to tacitly prejudiced rejection by America’s white race. Confined to the boundaries of Beloved’s “Sweet Home Plantation”, Americans of Negro ethnic heritage are still socially segregated and legally separated in the nation that first brought them to its shores to be bought, sold, and owned as slaves.
The message to African Americans, to whites, and to members of any other race who would truly embrace the equality of all humanity and procreate with the members of the black race, is laid out plainly and clearly: America will tolerate your presence and might even elect you to be President. But still it remains, “Yonder they do not love your flesh”, and if you mix your black flesh with white, the flesh produced by that union will be unquestionably yours but only conditionally accepted as theirs. Calling Barack Obama, Tiger Woods, Tracee Ellis Ross, Halle Berry, and anyone of bi or multi-racial heritage black is a clear declaration by white America that African Americans still live in a country that sticks to honoring its slave nation roots, subjecting its black race to unequal standards of humanity, subordinated in a partnership with America’s dominating white race.
“OBAMA CLINCHES”—Was this a banner day in American history, worthy of placing the lead story above the masthead? Yes, in a lot of ways it was. Yet at the same time, it’s as much the shame of America that 232 years into America’s history, Barack Obama’s candidacy should represent a historic American milestone. Underlying that shame is being a nation where a union of parents like Barack Obama’s can yield a child who would never be called white, but where few would think to question the message sent in declaring that same child black.
Donald Hoffman is a freelance columnist living in Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania. His email is hoffman50287@msn.com.
