Obama - Is This the End of Black

Is This the End of Black?

by Leonard Pitts

You might think so if you'd followed certain pundits and bloggers chewing over the election of Barack Obama.

Over and over, one hears that he is the harbinger of a "postracial" America, his election signifying a nation that has grown completely beyond racial discrimination. As if no one has been called a rhymes-with-digger or pulled over for driving black since Nov. 4.

Those who claim we live in a post-racial America are guilty of no sin greater than wishful thinking. But that doesn't make them any less incorrect. Not simply because people are still being pulled over for driving black but, more fundamentally, because Obama's victory does not mean what some of us think it does. I don't mean to suggest it does not embody breathtaking progress it does.

But does it remove black from the equation? No.

This is not the end of black. Rather, it is the ascendancy of what I will call Black 2.0.

In the public mind, black has long represented a politics of grievance and lament think Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, Martin Luther King. But the elections of men like Carl Stokes (mayor of Cleveland) and Tom Bradley (mayor of Los Angeles) four decades ago presaged the rise of a new generation that sought to make black not invisible, but incidental. Bradley, for instance, did not campaign on the fact of being black but, rather, on a promise to improve mass transit.

He sold competence and let race take care of itself.

Years later, the Bradley model has been reflected in the careers of everyone from L. Douglas Wilder to Colin Powell to Condoleezza Rice to Michael Steele to J.C. Watts to David Dinkins. It reaches its apogee in the president-elect who, it is worth noting, seldom addressed race unprompted during the campaign. For all the racial hand-wringing his candidacy produced, Obama himself was remarkably reticent on the subject, his speech in Philadelphia notwithstanding.

His thinking seems to be that there is nothing to gain in making race a "thing" until or unless you must.

Which is not the same as pretending it does not exist or becoming some raceless blank.

Once, I interviewed Obama and he started quoting something I had written about him. I expressed surprise that he knew my work. To which he replied, "Oh yeah, brother, I read you."

He said it just like that, with the easy, offhand familiarity of black men among black men. It struck me, this oblique reference to the tie we share, a tie he would not, could not and, he might argue, need not reference so baldly in a public setting.

Some might call that a lie of omission. Others might call it politics. Either way, "Oh yeah, brother" becomes a way of pulling back the curtain to say, I'm still in here, I'm still me.

We are so comfortable defining black in certain ways, in restricting it to the politics of grievance and lament, that we sometimes do not recognize it when it takes other forms.

One is reminded how people used to say "The Cosby Show" was not black enough and never mind all those cultural signifiers, never mind the anti-apartheid sign on Theo's wall, Cliff's penchant for sweaters from historically-black colleges, all those guest appearances from elder statesmen of jazz and R&B, that episode saluting the 1963 March on Washington.

Not black? No, what they meant was, this is not the kind of black we expect, not the black of violence, ignorance, poverty and clownishness.

By the same token, when you're talking about Barack Obama, you're talking about a cool customer from the South Side whose speeches soar on black preacher cadences.

He will also be the first president in memory with a jump shot. And, yes, he is usually the smartest guy in the room. Oh yeah, brother, he's still in there.

And this not the end of black.

It is the evolution.

NEWS & CURRENT EVENTS ...