Lecture I Went to Last Night.

Last night, I attended a lecture. It is a part of a lecture series given every semester at my college in honor of one of the teachers. She is a black woman who overcame a lot of adversity in her quest to become a professor. As such, all these lectures are related to African/African-American studies. Readers, I am a half-white, half-Mexican male who looks and acts like a white guy. Honestly, growing up in the generation I have, race has never been an issue for me. I get really tired of hearing older people harp on it. Don't get me wrong, I understand why the problem exists, and I understand that its not something people, especially older black folks, get over, but what I tire of is older people expecting people who have learned to continue to play by their rules and jump hoops that they have to. Especially militant old black people like the Reverend Al Sharpton.

Seriously people? I probably can't even express my opinion about this without making somebody upset. That is what upsets me the most about it. When a person cannot express his opinion of the way certain other people effect them, political correctness has gone too far.

In any case, I just wanted you to know that because when I saw the title of the lecture, "Where do we go from here?" Race in the Age of Obama, I was turned off. I didn't want to hear another lecture, literal this time, on race and how important it is that we realize its unimportant (even though by making a big deal out of that you are making it a big deal... hmm...). So I went in to this lecture thinking to myself that I was going to take notes and find everything that could be argued with and question him about it.

My. Mind. Was. Blown.

In all seriousness. Blown. Away. This man presented a lecture which was truly eye-opening to me. I learned for the first time in a very long time, and I must say it felt good.

The speaker, from Princeton by the way, began by asking a simple question buried under humongous words that I had to remember my Latin roots to understand. When he saw it went over our heads, or maybe he planned it that way to jumpstart thinking, he rephrased it. "Now that we have a black President, where do we go from here?" From this starting point, he launched into a discussion of M.L.K, Baldwin, and G.H. Mead. From M.L.K, he took the struggle of civil rights and the transitional period of its realization. From Baldwin, he took the ideas of how history effects the future and what black people and white people feel about each other. From Mead, he took the sociological perspective and the fact that the past frames the present, and that with out past, present becomes empty. Long story short he addressed black people's feelings of not belonging to the nation, white people's feelings of guilt and quest for redemption, and how those things have led to the era we have now: a generation who has not experienced Jim Crow.

Once he established this basic information about the past, he moved on to the present. He talked about how Obama's election effected how "blackness" was practiced, how his behavior in office is ironically slightly detrimental to race relations, and how this cannot be the end. He went back to Baldwin's description of how white people would try to make black people "blank" because that was the next-best thing to white. This idea is applied to Obama because if he attempts to address racial issues, such as the crime rates and ghettos, he becomes a "black" president and can no longer represent ALL of America. I actually hadn't thought of that before and had admittedly fallen into that very trap of thinking. He talked about an essay called "What America would be without Blacks" which stated that the titular ideal is the American Fantasy, because America would never have had to face its "Democratic Principals vs. Undemocratic Practices" demon. This is why white people try to "blank" out black people.

Finally, he moved on to the future. He put it on our shoulders. He told us that the point of remembering the past is not to cause guilt, but neither can we run past the wounds of the past era simply by electing a black president. There is still work to be done when it comes to making black people no longer second rate citizens. Poverty is a problem. There is a vicious cycle of culture that perpetuates the second class attitude. It is not equal yet. But, and this made him completely respectable in my eyes, he also said that we cannot linger on those wounds of the past, because to do so is to encourage guilt, defensiveness, and divisiveness; the very opposite of the "perfect union" our principles espouse.

It was the best lecture I have ever attended. The questions afterward were useful in clearing up a lot of things he said. One I thought was utterly ridiculous was a question regarding the American flag lapel pin that Obama now wears. It was treated as a serious topic of discussion, and I sat there thinking, "ok, you people, including the critics who brought it up in the first place, have WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY too much time on your hands if you think that simple wardrobe choices should be analyzed."

In any case, I thought you should know about this wonderful lecture and be treated to a terrible summery of it. Honestly, not much has changed about me. I don't think I need to behave any differently. Rather, what is different is that I now a) respect Obama as a person a lot more b) think about the past in a different way and c) avoid pitfalls of thought like the one about Obama being a "black" president.

I hope this wasn't a snooze fest for you. I know I don't have anywhere near the kind of delivery that guy had, but I hope I got across the general idea of what he meant.