A Day Late and a Dollar Short

Pierre Robert, Jon Jeter

Description

Could this be the final victory for civil rights, or the first of many to come?

When Henry Louis Gates spoke out about his ridiculous arrest, he stated a truth few Americans?including President Obama?are eager to discuss: there is no such thing as a post-racial America. When it comes to race, the United States has come a long way, but not far enough and not fast enough. Every day, we cope with casual racism, myriad indignities, institutional obstacles, post-racial nonsense, and peers bent on self-destruction. The powers that be, meanwhile, always seem to arrive with their apologies and redress a day late and a dollar short.

This book takes a close look at the lives of African-Americans from diverse backgrounds as Obama?s victory comes to play a personal role in each of their lives. Every tale delves into the complex issues we will have to deal with going forward:

• The many challenges young black men face, such as subtle persistent racism
• The stagnation of blacks vis ? vis whites
• Widespread black participation in the military despite widespread anti-war sentiments
• The decline of unions even as organized labor becomes the primary vehicle for black progress
• The challenges of interracial families
• The lack of good schools or healthcare for the poor
• The inability of well-off blacks to lift up others

Barack Obama will deliver his first official State of the Union address in January 2010, and A Day Late and a Dollar Short will deliver an altogether different picture of the way things really under the first black president.
Acknowledgments.

Introduction.

1 Daisy Mae on the Bayou: The Past Is Still with Us.

2. Made in America: Union Organizing in Chicago.

3. He Doesn't See What We See: Diop's Protest in St. Petersburg.

4. Where the Grass is Greener: Linda in the Promised Land.

5. Casualty of War: Tee Green in Baghdad.

6. White Is Not an Abstract Concept: Angela's Daughters in Appalachia.

7. Little Men: Jewel and Launnie in New Orleans.

8. Dandelions: Eddie's Freedom in D.C.

9. Watermelon Man: Cecil, Jon, and Ryan In Indianapolis.

10. The Front Man: Lee Moves from South Africa to Brooklyn.

Notes.

Index.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Obama
• Sociology of race and ethnic relations
• History of the United States
• 21st Century
• United States
• History
• Joe Biden
• Barack Obama

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 19 novembre 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780470570494
• Langue: English

Extrait

Table of Contents
 
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
 
Chapter 1 - Daisy Mae on the Bayou
Chapter 2 - Made in America
Chapter 3 - He Doesn’t See What We See
Chapter 4 - Where the Grass Is Greener
Chapter 5 - Casualty of War
Chapter 6 - White Is Not an Abstract Concept
Chapter 7 - Little Men
Chapter 8 - Dandelions
Chapter 9 - Watermelon Man
Chapter 10 - The Front Man
 
Notes
Index

Copyright © 2010 by Robert E. Pierre and Jon Jeter. All rights reserved
 
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
 
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eISBN : 978-0-470-57049-4
 
 
 
 
To Daisy Mae Francis and Harrison Francis Sr. and all of their people:
 
Our People
Acknowledgments
 
 
 
 
I want to thank two of my most consistent nags, Tim Kelly and Linda Botts, who have never failed to ask when I was going to write a book. Perhaps this is that book; perhaps it is one not yet written. But Tim and Linda—who do not know each other—never let me forget this goal. In fact, it was Linda who planted the seed for this endeavor.
Thanks as well to family and friends who listened to kernels of ideas, read over chapters, suggested chapters, and remained friends even as I blew them off for several months during the writing and reporting process. I hesitate to mention other names for fear of leaving someone out, so to everyone who helped (you know who you are), thanks so much.
Finally, Jon and I send a heartfelt thank-you to all of the people who allowed us into their homes and lives, sharing intimate, funny, and embarrassing details that help shine a light on black America as it struggles to understand what it means to live under a black president.
—Robert E. Pierre
Introduction
 
 
 
 
I t was November 2008, a few days after Americans had chosen a black man as the nation’s forty-fourth president. The head of a New York-based nonprofit, Maya Wiley, sat on the dais in the center of a cavernous symphony hall in Dallas, Texas, staring out into a sea of white faces, hundreds upon hundreds of the city’s wealthiest elites, oil money mostly, but some finance and real estate types, too. She had been invited to serve on a panel with New York Times columnists David Brooks and Nicholas Kristof, New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert, and Ron Kirk, the first African American mayor of Dallas. The topic was the intersection of race and American life in the Barack Obama era. She was a last-minute replacement for retired Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor, though for the life of her, Maya couldn’t imagine how anyone would’ve thought of her—a fortyish, dreadlocked, leftist African American intellectual—as a replacement for the conservative and white O’Connor.
But there was something in the air. Maya could feel it.
The Center for Social Inclusion, which she founded, takes a particular tack on civil rights issues, which is that class is no proxy for race and that as well intentioned as some Americans may be in thinking that the country should focus its efforts on helping the poor rather than on remedying discrimination, that approach misses the point almost entirely. Half of all Americans without health insurance are people of color; the subprime loan market, which sank the entire economy, targeted, with radarlike accuracy, blacks and Latinos; no successful social movement in the history of this country failed to integrate into its central narrative African Americans and their specific grievances. This idea—that racism is America’s original sin and until the country speaks its name it’s destined to continue to curse one generation after another—was uncomfortable stuff, especially among white folks, and uniquely among the elite, white, blue-blood Republican crowd like the one she faced that day. But from the moment that the moderator, historian Michael Beschloss, turned to Maya twenty minutes into the program and asked her what impact the Obama presidency would have on race and the law, Maya sensed the earth shifting beneath her.
“The short answer is that we don’t really know. If Barack Obama uses his leadership as the most visible African American in the world to plug into the dangerous and misguided notion that everything is all right and we are indeed a postracial society that has moved beyond racial disparities and deeply rooted racial injustice, then the law, as a tool for inclusion and creating opportunities, will suffer gravely.” This is when she noticed it. Usually, with an audience peopled with heretics and unbelievers in the notion of racism as America’s design flaw, the turning off and tuning out is unmistakable.
“They lean back in their chairs, they fold their arms across their chest, they shake their heads,” Maya said. “They make it very clear, with their body language, that they are not with you.” But this audience leaned forward . They uncrossed their arms; they nodded their heads, as though in agreement, or at least in recognition of something that struck them as closing in on the truth. “I was prepared to be pilloried, but they were very clearly engaged by what I was saying. It’s like the election had stirred this dormant part of their brains and their consciousness and we had an opportunity to talk, openly, about race and racism in America.” In that moment, the possibilities inherent in the election of the first black president of the United States became almost giddily clear.
And then just a quickly, the moment slipped away. Minutes after Maya spoke, Beschloss turned to the local panelists on the dais for comment. This group included Kirk, the only other African American on the panel and soon to be appointed U.S. trade representative for the Obama administration. He lit into Maya.
“I just want to say that Maya is wrong,” he said, as though he were a prosecutor and Maya a defendant in the dock. “What Barack Obama does for black America is to let black people know that they”—and Maya remembers that he paused here for dramatic effect—“have no more excuses.”
And that was it. The moment passed, the opportunity slipped away, the audience exhaled a sigh of relief, and when the panelists divided to lead separate workshops, most of the whites went with David Brooks. Maya doesn’t doubt that Kirk was sincere. He wasn’t just playing to the crowd like some Uncle Tom trying to assuage his white benefactors. She had seen that before, and this was not that. Still, his retort short-circuited, in her estimation, what could have been an electric conversation on the most intractable issue in America’s history. “It was like there was this breakthrough, and then another wall just went up in its place.”
What does Barack Obama mean to black America? This is a running debate taking place somewhere in the country every day, and the answer so far is this: everything and nothing; transformative change and elegiac stasis; a stark symbol of how far we’ve come and a painful marker of how far we’ve yet to go; a Rosetta stone that can help decode the distinctly different languages spoken by blacks and whites in this country; or a looming Tower of Babel that will encumber communication, corrupt speech, and scatter tribes like leaves. He is a repository for joy and sorrow and rage, a movie screen that runs the length and breadth of the country onto which young and old, rich and poor, socialists and conservatives, the ambitious and the demoralized, project their lament for the dead, their dreams for the unborn, and their nightmares for the living. He exemplifies what blacks can achieve when they quit whining, study long, and work hard, or alternately, just how comfortable white folks are with light-skinned blacks who never raise their voices and never try to wrestle the white people from their sweet spot atop a trash heap of privilege and denial. He is a messianic figure and a minstrel, the Good Black, the Blackness That Dare Not Speak Its Name, the tor