My friend and valued colleague Quin Hillyer has an important column in today’s edition of The Washington Examiner, one that is well worth reading and thinking about in the serious manner in which one would contemplate careful advice from a trusted confidant on an urgent matter.
Regardless how his presidency is viewed from a policy perspective at its end, Barack Obama’s ascension ot the White House is among the most important milestones in American history. Today America entrusts its highest office to a man whose mother was white and whose father was black. Thus, Obama’s mixed heritage is an especially apt metaphor for what this nation has long strived to be and presently becomes in perhaps the most concrete manner possible.
It has been a very long time coming. Race has been the Achilles Heel of the American dream since decades before the Declaration of Independence when New England captains first began carrying captured black men and women from Africa to Charleston and other ports in the South to be sold into slavery.
Race almost prevented the adoption of the Constitution and was settled only for a time by the prudential efforts of James Madison, Roger Sherman and James Wilson during the convention in Philadelphia. And it almost tore the nation apart forever after Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech in 1858 and John Brown’s Harper’s Ferry raid the following year made the irrepressible conflict a matter that could only be settled with grape shot and bloody carnage.
We thought we had settled the issue in 1865, but in fact had only partly done so. There began a century of looking the other way, while tolerating the quiet injustices of defacto segregation in the North and dejure partition in the Jim Crow South.
It fell to the Greatest Generation that endured the Great Depression and won World War II to then cap its monumental contributions to our history with passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
But it has been the Baby Boom generation that followed whose burden and opportunity has been to sort out in day-to-day life what living in an integrated society actually looks like. It has sometimes seemed in the past four decades that instead of becoming a color-blind society, we were determined to be color-obsessed.
This was especially so in government where the goodness of Affirmative Action intent has too often been subverted by the reality of racial quotas, race-hustling demagoguerie and the soft bigotry of racially rationalized expectations and rewards.
And so we come now to the inauguration of Barack Obama and a crossroads in national policy: Does Obama’s election signify a time in which we remove from our national laws and regulations the last vestiges of racially obsessed policy or is it merely an opportunity for draining the final bitter dregs of racial aggrandizement from the halls of power?
Quin puts it well with these words:
“In almost every way that matters, the American people have moved beyond race. It is the elites who remain hung up on the subject. And the elites will do Obama a disservice if they hold him to standards other than those to which they held George W. Bush or Bill Clinton – or if they treat opposition to any of Obama’s plans as if it is race-based rather than based on the ordinary mix of philosophy and politics.
“More broadly, in the realms of both politics and the law, it is long past time for race to be discounted as a separate category subject to unique distinctions. In redistricting, school policies, and contracting, the law ought to be as colorblind as we hope our society is.”
January 20 is a landmark to be sure, but what about the day after Obama’s inauguration? Whatever else he does as president, if Obama is able to lead the way forward without reliving past struggles with race, then he will deserve the accolades of true statesmanship.
