"White House Is The People's House"

Just when you thought you had the “O-Man” figured out, he did it again – he went back to his bottomless rhetorical well to come up with another gem of a speech while on the campaign trail. Obama has been under a little pressure these last few days from parts of the black community who feel that he hasn’t been forthright about recognizing “black” issues. His whirlwind campaign made a quick pitstop in Orlando Florida today. Addressing the Urban League Conference, Obama dropped several kernels of knowledge:

"You know that civil rights and equal treatment under the law are necessary, but not sufficient, to seize America’s promise – as Dr. King once said, 'the inseparable twin of racial justice is economic justice.'

You know that you can’t take that seat at the front of the bus if you can’t afford the bus fare. You can’t live in an integrated neighborhood if you can’t afford the house. And it doesn’t mean a whole lot to sit down at that lunch counter if you can’t afford the lunch."

Remarkably, given the Urban League’s much noted commitment to African American progress, I counted only three sessions out the nineteen offered whose titles suggested that they were going to be centered solely around black issues. The vast majority of the workshops were concerned with education, getting ahead in corporate America, investments, the subprime mortgage crisis, and globalization, which are the same issues ALL Americans face in their daily lives.

"The problems of our cities aren’t just "urban" problems any more.
When rising foreclosures mean vacant homes, abandoned streets and rising crime that spills over city limits – that’s a suburban problem and an ex-urban problem too.

When tens of millions of people in our cities are uninsured, and our urban emergency rooms are overflowing – that’s a suburban and ex-urban problem too.

When urban roads, bridges and transit systems are crumbling; when urban schools aren’t giving young people the skills to compete, so companies decide to take their business and their jobs elsewhere – that’s a suburban and ex-urban problem too."

Tying the fate of our urban poor to the continued prosperity of America’s suburbanites is a pretty bold stance for a modern politician. Hopefully those of us who have been feeling neglected will realize that this elevation of our urban problems to the same level of importance as our mainstream ones can be enforced by the bully pulpit of the White House if Obama gets elected.

"It’s time for policies that reflect the fundamental truth that we rise or fall as one nation. That’s the truth at the heart of your Opportunity Compact – that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street and a struggling Main Street.

That when wages are flat, prices are rising, and more and more Americans are mired in debt, our economy as a whole suffers. Our competitiveness as a nation suffers. Our children’s future suffers.

So we all have a stake here. That’s why your opportunity agenda is a compact – not a guarantee, not a promise – but a call to responsibility.

Because we know that government can’t solve all our problems, and government can’t and shouldn’t do for us what we should be doing for ourselves: raising our kids the right way, being good neighbors and good citizens, becoming leaders in our industries and communities."

This new kind of bondage Obama is pushing us towards is the good kind. To expect him to strike a fiery, unapologetic pose the way some members of the Congressional Black Caucus can is unrealistic – Obama’s district includes both the postur-ers and the posture-ees. At the end of the day, the “O-Man” shows us that he is “keeping it real”, presidential candidate style.

Secret Black Frequency

Is there a secret black frequency I must tune into when I see other black people in mixed settings? Like Barack Obama, I seem to be getting this African American thing wrong lately, as if a few pages of our "Keeping It Real" handbooks are stuck together.

S. and I sat in a restaurant a week or so ago with some friends of ours, ex-neighbors we’ve known for over ten years. We were in the middle of catching up on who was doing what in our old subdivision when a black woman approached our table.

The friends of ours were white, two northern transplants from Pennsylvania and New Jersey whose sensibilities had clicked with our small town Southern and Midwestern selves long ago. The female interloper was black, like S. and I.

"Don’t I know you from somewhere?" the woman said, looking directly at S.

S. turned and looked more closely at the woman. "I think it was at a party – it might have been a party at our house. Yeah, that’s it, don’t you remember her?" S. said to me.

I raised my eyebrows towards our friends, who had been in the middle of an animated discussion about a wedding they were going to attend the next day, and then peered at the woman.

"No, not really."

The woman stood there anyway, as if there was some kind of magnetic force emanating from the end of our table, continuing a line of patter across my back with S. about the mutual friend they shared.

S. went on for a few seconds, while I smiled at our friends, who were waiting patiently to get back to their story. S.’s tone began to change, becoming more distant with each word as she attempted to signal to the woman with the pitch of her voice and her clipped responses that this exchange needed to come to a close.

The woman kept talking, probing with each word for a sign of solidarity, a sign that we still remembered where we came from. There was something extra in her gaze that seemed to penetrate a little more deeply when she looked at us than we she glanced at our friends. It was the same something implied in the way she paused after certain words she said, as if we were Navajo code talkers, speaking an indecipherable language at a frequency level only black people could hear.

Our friends kept smiling, their eyes darting in the woman’s direction every few seconds, until S. was forced to introduce the woman to our friends.

We practically had to shoo the woman away from the table.

For a few minutes after the woman left, there seemed to be a distance between us and our friends that had hadn’t been there when we had arrived at the restaurant. It slowly dissipated, disappearing all together by the time our food arrived.

The friendship we have with our ex-neighbors is one born of proximity that has grown to a level of genuine fondness as we discovered over the years that we had the same sensibilities, the same types of college experiences, the same types of parents.

I understand all too clearly that there are things my brown middle class brethren who have self segregated themselves will have to overcome in order to have these kind of friendships. "This is our moment", the Obama mantra that sends audiences into a frenzy whenever he utters these four words, speaks to more than the idea of electing America's first black president. To me, "this is our moment" also means that it is time for us as black Americans to reach out across our own personal boundaries and connect more fully with the larger world around us, like the Irish did, like the Italians did, like the Jews did, like the Asians are doing now.

This is one of the things about the Barack Obama phenomenon that the mainstream media culture hasn't picked up on yet. It still seems to be obsessed with the kind of tribal imagery more reminiscent of an old Tarzan movie - African drums speaking to each other across the plains in the middle of the night as the great white hunters sit fearfully by their campfire - than it is of reality. A ridiculous number of hours were devoted to deconstructing the "fist bump" that Barack gave his wife Michelle before his speech in Minnesota to claim the Democratic nomination, as if it were a signal for the rest of us black folks to start executing our secret plan to take over America.

S. and I know where we came from. We know who we are. Hanging out with black people exclusively isn't going to make us any blacker. Hanging out with white people all the time isn't going to make us any whiter. But even though I feel this way, I can understand the black woman's reluctance to acknowledge that our white friends could be just as important to us as she was. For me to get to the mindset I have today was a constant struggle against ingrained prejudices and a fear of the unknown. To this woman, and to others like her, all I will say is this - the TV commercial promoting Southwest Airlines is absolutely right – "you are now free to move about the country".