The struggle is both/and, not either/or [View all]

Ta-Nehisi Coates has done it again. What I LOVE about his writing is that he reaches down into the struggle in his soul and lays it all bare - and so beautifully written.

Barack Obama was not prophecy. Whatever had been laid before him, it takes gifted hands to operate, repeatedly, on a country scarred by white supremacy. The significance of the moment comes across, not simply in policy, by in the power of symbolism. I don't expect, in my lifetime, to again see a black family with the sheer beauty of Obama's on such a prominent stage. (In the private spaces of black America, I see them all the time.) I don't expect to see a black woman exuding the kind of humanity you see here on such a prominent stage ever again. (In the private spaces of black homes, I see it all the time.) And no matter how many times I've seen it in my private life, at Howard, in my home, among my close friends, I don't ever expect to see a black man of such agile intelligence as the current president put before the American public ever again.

This symbolism has real meaning...And this messenger—who is Barack Obama—becomes something more to black people. He becomes a champion of black imagination, of black dreams and black possibilities.

But here is where Coates exposes his struggle.

How does a black writer approach The Man when The Man is not just us, but the Champion of our ambitions? More, how do you approach the offices that have so often brutalized black people when those offices are occupied by the Champion? How do you acknowledge the president's many gifts, his actual accomplishments, while still and all outlining the depressing limits of his own imagination?

snip/

What I think Coates is missing is that the symbolism he described so well in that first quote has as much impact (in a different way) on white people as it does for blacks. One of the reasons so many have literally gone nuts during Obama's presidency is that the beauty, humanity and intelligence of this President challenge every fiber of white supremacy that has been hard-wired into our brains for centuries. That wound has festered for so long that it will not be lanced without tremendous pain and fury. And so, in addition to proactively tackling the major civil rights issues of our time, having the strength to maintain that beauty, humanity and intelligence in the face of the pain and fury that has been unleashed on them is perhaps the most powerful blow this President (and his family) can deliver to white supremacy.

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http://immasmartypants.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-struggle-is-bothand-not-eitheror.html