Friends told me about a recent editorial by Dana Millbank in the Washington Post, entitled “Obama was right, he came too early.” After the 2016 election, Obama purportedly wondered to an aide if he had been president 10 or 20 years too early, implying that an African-American man as president would have been less disruptive in 2026 or 2036. The article went on to cite all the ways that our current president is encouraging the rise of white nationalism and disparaging minorities. The editorial does conclude that this current fomenting of difference and splintering of our citizenry will not last. Inevitably, according to the author, the country will become majority-minority in the next 20 or so years. The suggestion is that a larger diversity of people will be accepted into and accepting of the mainstream in our cultural life.
I was disappointed with the author’s easy riff on, I think, an unfortunate musing by Obama. I remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In it he chides the white clergy from the area for urging him and the civil rights activists “to wait until a “more convenient season.” As King writes, “We must come to see that human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and persistent work of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.” Even in our Declaration of Independence, written by a slave owner, the idea is planted, all men (sic) are created equal and all should have the freedom to aspire to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” We seem to be backsliding.
Rather than taking up Obama’s musing and running with it, I challenge this perspective. Instead of easily accepting as truth this one query by Obama, let’s turn the mirror around, look at ourselves and ask, why were or are we not ready for a president from a minority, any gender, various religious denominations, or a different sexual persuasion? Why aren’t we ready now? And what can we do about it?
I don’t think we have years to spare. I don’t think we can assume the inevitability of enlightened attitudes evolving and prevailing. I used to believe that the gift of this country to the world was the legal and social (for the most part) equality of all kinds of people within our culture. Now I think that one of Obama’s ‘gifts’ to us is showing us how far we have to go to achieve the vision suggested by the Declaration of Independence. We must do the hard work that we, as a culture, have avoided, and ask ourselves, why NOT now? What can each of us do to move toward our promise?