Milestones

In a recent email to some friends I alluded to what I thought the three greatest things that happened in my lifetime (1941 – present) were the defeat of Hitler, the civil rights movement in the 60s and the election in America of a black President. A friend questioned my inclusion of that last event and why I’d chosen it. After some thought the following is my response to him.

The significance of this country electing a black man President cannot be overstated. Our U.S. history of slavery is extraordinary, all encompassing, and the ramifications and results of it are still very much present.

It’s not only the race relations in the current events of the last year or so – police killings of unarmed black men and boys and the murders in the AME Church in South Carolina – but in our four centuries history of slavery and apartheid. The depth and destruction of what was done to a race of people for generations dating back to the 1600s is almost unfathomable.

It wasn’t solely the enslavement of a targeted people, which after all is rife in human history, but the systematic destruction of a people based only on skin color that propagated the idea, the root of the cultural destruction itself, that one race of beings was inferior to another and therefore exploitable and expendable.

Once these ideas were implanted and propagated everything else was built upon that. It became so pervasive and entrenched that 150 years after the Proclamation that ended slavery we are still grappling with black and white relations in our country.

The cancerous ideas and beliefs that were embedded hundreds of years ago as a basis, and an excuse for subjugating and culturally annihilating a whole race of people remain with us today. This is terribly and tragically obvious on its face and that is why when a black man was elected President a mere six years ago, 143 years after slavery was abolished, it was a milestone in our history of utmost and shattering significance.

As a person born in the early 1940s I think I can say with all certainty that this event was not something any of us ever expected to see in our lifetimes or any time soon thereafter. If you had said to someone in the 1940s, 50s or 60s that we would have a black President in 2000 you’d have been thought insane, bonkers, it was so outside the cultural consciousness.

For this reason and this reason alone the myth, the lie, the horrid idea of superiority of white over black – or any other race (an entirely bogus concept to begin with) – has been dispelled, obliterated, no longer acceptable to any intelligent, sentient being. Of course this doesn’t mean that all is well and the past is behind us, or any such nonsense. There are miles yet to go.

But the root of slavery, the evil idea of white superiority, white supremacy, has been dug up and exposed, and the truth that it was a lie can never be replanted. Certainly it was not only the election of one black man but the many decades of the races intermingling since the 1960s and before, and the slow but growing recognition of blacks being equal or surpassing whites at every level of culture, in every endeavor of our society that is putting the centuries of lies to extinction.

The apotheosis of this equalization into the consciousness of the American people was the country electing a black man as its supreme leader. That is one damn important step in our cultural evolution and it alone presages hope for our nation’s future in human relations.