I think the columnist for the New York Times, Bob Herbert must be almost 65 years old. That's a good thing, because when I was a kid the national life expectancy was 72. You might expect that that was the guess for a middle class white man and that for a black man it would be significantly lower, what with all our defects. Nevertheless, Herbert is still running strong. He's old enough to be my father meaning he probably went to college in the days when, in certain cities, you could get beat with a baseball bat for walking on the wrong side of a Jim Crow street.
Last week I hung out with an old black man at Magic Johnson Friday's over in Ladera Heights. I really enjoy hanging out with old men, in fact, it's rather my new favorite pastime. The man I shared drinks with was an old Air Force guy and the reason I bring that up is because black men in the military are the ones who are most consistently conservative like me. Interestingly enough, this particular gent spent a lot of time defending George W. Bush because of his personal experience with pilots the fascinating details of which I won't go into. His bottom line, everybody who thinks that Bush is stupid is stupid. You cannot fly jets without being the best of the best. You can't be a drunk. The reason I bring up the military black man is because he seems to be along with the rich black man, the only type who has benefited from the kind of life-altering experience more powerful than the caste definitions of race, and the passionate rage such role-playing fuels. Sure, there are other exceptions I can think of, the black man who specializes in bedding Becky, the black man who grows to be a spiritual leader across racial lines, the exceptional author or intellectual who decolonizes his own mind, the black athlete or musician unapologetically cheered from all directions, but there is something about the intensity of leading men which singularly obliterates the claim of racial victimization from the black man's mind. It's something Herbert doesn't seem to get. There seems in his latest editorial an obdurate need to dig deep and find a nugget of racial animus to keep our optimism at bay.
Herbert enters his wayback machine to bring us the bleatings of the un-Christian racist Ben Tillman who said:
“We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be the equal of the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.”
Herbert won't give us an exact date on that quote, but Tillman was certainly dead before Herbert was born, and probably before Herbert's own father was born. And while we are in mind of Martin Luther King, yet another dead man, is it not for us the living to be dedicated to unfinished work? But it hardly seems proper that we speak about lynching. It is no more. So we only speak about people who find comfort in the words of people who threatened lynching.
We seem ever mindful of Southern Strategies and Beer Hall Putsches that might signal some charismatic who stirs racial fires and hopes that could awaken a populist fascism. There is some righteousness in that inclination. But are we so eager to forget what happened just a year ago in the South to the candidacy of George Allen? As tangential as any segregationist agenda or racist philosophy was to his candidacy, it was summarily the reason he failed the ethical sniff test America and the Republican Party have defacto initiated. But it is Barack Obama today who is the charismatic who invokes the implicit racial messages Americans most want to see expressed. We want to show and prove that an African American can be elected President., and we want that to be our enduring symbol of race in America. This is not new. America wanted it for Colin Powell as well. And the next highly outstanding African American who considers the job will be two or three times removed from 'first black'. All things considered, the trend is positive.
Those who agitate vigorously against racial impropriety have found themselves uncomfortably overwhelmed by a surfeit of common sense on racial progress. Instead of exhorting and excoriating intransigent majorities, as was the case when Bob Herbert was young, they must go further into nooks and crannies of America, and back through time in order to find examples that justify their exclamations. And even now it has to be a part-time profession toted to the front on MLK day, as if neo-confederates only care about their battle flag a few days of the year.
So Herbert's history lesson may be useful. We have come to the moment in the sun at which point 'toxic layers of bigotry' are all we have to contend with, and we go to the ends of American society to flush them out for public shame and humiliation. Herbert does so at the paper of record with all the combative metaphors at his disposal as well as a well-trained audience who condescend appropriately. Mister Tibbs would be proud. I am not under any illusion that history does not ebb and flow which is why the moment is celebrated for what it is, where we can reminisce about the bad old days and still find living remnants of the decadent society that was. I'd say that's a pretty good battle for a man Herbert's age.
We often speculate about what King would be doing right about now, had he lived so long. For one, it's rather a good think King himself who would be 79 this year was spared this petty level of oration taken up by time-travelers and trekkers to American backwaters. But I think he'd be doing rather the same thing as Elie Weisel who is the same age. And since there would be no King holiday, he'd probably be playing second fiddle to Weisel on the lecture circuit on his way towards the obscurity of Tutu and Solzhenitsyn. Still, it would be nice to see Dr King throwing verbal harpoons at today's mediocre moralizers. It would be pleasant to see him having written books and gaining some endowed chair at Harvard - no doubt he would have gotten there before West and Gates. It would have been great to see him embraced by Mandela, writing the preface to Roots, hanging out with Oprah, giving Abernathy his props and media attention, praying over the disgraced mayor of Washington, holding Harold Washington's mayoral hand high. Yes, he would have been at the top of any number of notable agendas and thus devalued by familiarity.
But I think of all possible outcomes, Dr King would be most like who Dr James Cone and Dr John Hope Franklin are today. Exactly.
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