All,
Here's a white man who grew up in a wealthy family with black servants under highly privileged circumstances in Apartheid South Africa (which outside of Nazi Germany was the most oppressive and racist society in the world for over a century), and even HE fully understands and acknowledges what millions of white, Latino, and Asian Americans in this country fail or simply refuse to grasp: That what Barack Obama said in his speech three days ago is the most clear-eyed, profound, and honest public meditation by an American politician on racism and its ongoing impact on American life in half a century.
It is a measure of just how appallingly ignorant and full of fear, hatred, jealousy, and cruelty far too many 'other' Americans are with respect to their fellow African American citizens that Mr. Roger Cohen can come to this country with a self admittedly 'shameful' historical background as a wealthy white South African and eventual compassionate witness to the horrors, stupidities, and severely oppressive consequences of Apartheid on his fellow South Africans--both black and white--and yet testify so intelligently and eloquently on precisely WHY Obama's already legendary speech of March 17, 2008 was so important, accurate, and necessary to any realistic and HONEST appraisal of what America actually happens to be both historically and in contemporary terms as opposed to the endless self-serving, fantasy ridden, and egomaniacal myths and lies that it habitually tells itself it is.
It just goes to show once again that Truth and Justice in society is only acquired, found useful, and made an integral part of our daily lives when one is consciously willing and able to recognize, defend, and honor the humanity of 'all others' no matter what the price (the late, great James Baldwin called it "the price of the ticket") because one's own human existence is not worth anything at all if it fails to acknowledge and embrace this fundamental reality. The following iconic figures from the endless pantheon of African Americans's highly complex political, cultural, and intellectual legacy have spent CENTURIES telling this truth out loud in public and demanding that ALL Americans take complete and immediate moral, ethical, and ideological responsibility for it. Their (last) names are legion throughout the world: DuBois, King, X, Baldwin, Tubman, Douglass, Wells-Barnett, Truth, Hamer, Baker, Baraka, Morrison, Reed, Powell, Williams, Himes, Hurston, Moses, Newton, A. Davis, Monroe Trotter, Hughes, Brooks, Wideman, Wilson, Coltrane, Hendrix, Dolphy, Ayler, Gaye, Holiday, Young, Wright, Fitzgerald, Ellington, Strayhorn, Basie, Monk, M.Davis, Parker, Mingus, Roach, Jones, F. Hampton, Cherry, Henderson, Cole, and too many others to mention.
What Mr. Cohen hasn't forgotten--like these African American icons--is that genuine freedom and self determination is the result of an often agonizing process that courageously insists on struggling with, and painfully acting on, what one knows and subsequently embraces as truth whether one is "understood", "accepted" or considered "popular" or not. What matters is whether one is mentally and spiritually prepared to pay the price of consciousness with engaged commitment and a dedication to purposeful action. Then and only then can one truly be free and thus a real member of the human community. Clearly, Cohen and Obama really do 'get it'. It's completely up to the rest of us to do the same.
Kofi
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Beyond America’s Original Sin
By ROGER COHEN
New York Times
Published: March 20, 2008
There are things you come to believe and things you carry in your blood. In my case, having spent part of my childhood in apartheid South Africa, I bear my measure of shame.
Roger Cohen
As a child, experience is wordless but no less powerful for that. How vast, how shimmering, was Muizenberg beach, near Cape Town, with all that glistening white skin spread across the golden sand!
The scrawny blacks were elsewhere, swimming off the rocks in a filthy harbor, and I watched from my grandfather’s house and I wondered.
Once, a black nanny took me out across the road to a parapet above a rail track beside that harbor. “You wouldn’t want me to drop you,” she said.
The fear I felt lingered. I returned recently to measure how far I would have fallen. In memory, the abyss plunged 100 feet. Reality revealed a drop of 10. That discrepancy measures a child’s panic.
A “For Sale” sign was up on what had been the family house. I inquired if I might visit and received a surly rebuff. But not before I glimpsed the mountain behind where my father hiked and where I feared the snakes among the thorn bushes.
Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at Muizenberg, was never quite absent from our sunlit African sojourns. My own was formed of disorientation: I was not quite of the system because my parents had emigrated from Johannesburg to London. So, on return visits, I wandered into blacks-only public toilet or sat on a blacks-only bench.
Blacks only — and I was white. Apartheid entered my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation. The black women who bathed me as an infant touched my skin, but their world was untouchable.
Only later did a cruel system come into focus. I see white men, gin and tonics on their breath, red meat on their plates, beneath the jacarandas of Johannesburg, sneering at the impossibility of desiring a black woman.
A racial divide, once lived, dwells in the deepest parts of the psyche. This is what was captured by Barack Obama’s pitch-perfect speech on race. Slavery was indeed America’s “original sin.” Of course, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” lives on in forms of African-American humiliation and anger that smolder in ways incommunicable to whites.
Segregation placed American blacks in the U.S. equivalent of that filthy African harbor.
It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”
Progress, since the Civil Rights Movement, or since apartheid, has assuaged the wounds of race but not closed them. To carry my part of shame is also to carry a clue to the vortexes of rancor for which Obama has uncovered words.
I understand the rage of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, however abhorrent its expression at times. I admire Obama for saying: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”
Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?
Yes. It. Can.
The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now in the United States for a presidency that uplifts rather than demeans is a reflection of the intellectual desert of the Bush years.
Hillary Clinton said in January that: “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” Wrong. America’s had its fill of the prosaic.
The unthinkable can come to pass. When I was a teenager, my relatives advised me to enjoy the swimming pools of Johannesburg because “next year they will be red with blood.”
But the inevitable bloodbath never came. Mandela walked out of prison and sought reconciliation, not revenge. Later Mandela would say: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
Like countless others, I came to America because possibility is broader here than in Europe’s narrower confines. Perhaps it’s my African “original sin,” but when Obama says he “will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible,” I feel fear slipping away, like a shadow receding before the still riveting idea that “out of many we are truly one.”
Here's a white man who grew up in a wealthy family with black servants under highly privileged circumstances in Apartheid South Africa (which outside of Nazi Germany was the most oppressive and racist society in the world for over a century), and even HE fully understands and acknowledges what millions of white, Latino, and Asian Americans in this country fail or simply refuse to grasp: That what Barack Obama said in his speech three days ago is the most clear-eyed, profound, and honest public meditation by an American politician on racism and its ongoing impact on American life in half a century.
It is a measure of just how appallingly ignorant and full of fear, hatred, jealousy, and cruelty far too many 'other' Americans are with respect to their fellow African American citizens that Mr. Roger Cohen can come to this country with a self admittedly 'shameful' historical background as a wealthy white South African and eventual compassionate witness to the horrors, stupidities, and severely oppressive consequences of Apartheid on his fellow South Africans--both black and white--and yet testify so intelligently and eloquently on precisely WHY Obama's already legendary speech of March 17, 2008 was so important, accurate, and necessary to any realistic and HONEST appraisal of what America actually happens to be both historically and in contemporary terms as opposed to the endless self-serving, fantasy ridden, and egomaniacal myths and lies that it habitually tells itself it is.
It just goes to show once again that Truth and Justice in society is only acquired, found useful, and made an integral part of our daily lives when one is consciously willing and able to recognize, defend, and honor the humanity of 'all others' no matter what the price (the late, great James Baldwin called it "the price of the ticket") because one's own human existence is not worth anything at all if it fails to acknowledge and embrace this fundamental reality. The following iconic figures from the endless pantheon of African Americans's highly complex political, cultural, and intellectual legacy have spent CENTURIES telling this truth out loud in public and demanding that ALL Americans take complete and immediate moral, ethical, and ideological responsibility for it. Their (last) names are legion throughout the world: DuBois, King, X, Baldwin, Tubman, Douglass, Wells-Barnett, Truth, Hamer, Baker, Baraka, Morrison, Reed, Powell, Williams, Himes, Hurston, Moses, Newton, A. Davis, Monroe Trotter, Hughes, Brooks, Wideman, Wilson, Coltrane, Hendrix, Dolphy, Ayler, Gaye, Holiday, Young, Wright, Fitzgerald, Ellington, Strayhorn, Basie, Monk, M.Davis, Parker, Mingus, Roach, Jones, F. Hampton, Cherry, Henderson, Cole, and too many others to mention.
What Mr. Cohen hasn't forgotten--like these African American icons--is that genuine freedom and self determination is the result of an often agonizing process that courageously insists on struggling with, and painfully acting on, what one knows and subsequently embraces as truth whether one is "understood", "accepted" or considered "popular" or not. What matters is whether one is mentally and spiritually prepared to pay the price of consciousness with engaged commitment and a dedication to purposeful action. Then and only then can one truly be free and thus a real member of the human community. Clearly, Cohen and Obama really do 'get it'. It's completely up to the rest of us to do the same.
Kofi
OP-ED COLUMNIST
Beyond America’s Original Sin
By ROGER COHEN
New York Times
Published: March 20, 2008
There are things you come to believe and things you carry in your blood. In my case, having spent part of my childhood in apartheid South Africa, I bear my measure of shame.
Roger Cohen
As a child, experience is wordless but no less powerful for that. How vast, how shimmering, was Muizenberg beach, near Cape Town, with all that glistening white skin spread across the golden sand!
The scrawny blacks were elsewhere, swimming off the rocks in a filthy harbor, and I watched from my grandfather’s house and I wondered.
Once, a black nanny took me out across the road to a parapet above a rail track beside that harbor. “You wouldn’t want me to drop you,” she said.
The fear I felt lingered. I returned recently to measure how far I would have fallen. In memory, the abyss plunged 100 feet. Reality revealed a drop of 10. That discrepancy measures a child’s panic.
A “For Sale” sign was up on what had been the family house. I inquired if I might visit and received a surly rebuff. But not before I glimpsed the mountain behind where my father hiked and where I feared the snakes among the thorn bushes.
Fear, shadowy as the sharks beyond the nets at Muizenberg, was never quite absent from our sunlit African sojourns. My own was formed of disorientation: I was not quite of the system because my parents had emigrated from Johannesburg to London. So, on return visits, I wandered into blacks-only public toilet or sat on a blacks-only bench.
Blacks only — and I was white. Apartheid entered my consciousness as a kind of self-humiliation. The black women who bathed me as an infant touched my skin, but their world was untouchable.
Only later did a cruel system come into focus. I see white men, gin and tonics on their breath, red meat on their plates, beneath the jacarandas of Johannesburg, sneering at the impossibility of desiring a black woman.
A racial divide, once lived, dwells in the deepest parts of the psyche. This is what was captured by Barack Obama’s pitch-perfect speech on race. Slavery was indeed America’s “original sin.” Of course, “the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” lives on in forms of African-American humiliation and anger that smolder in ways incommunicable to whites.
Segregation placed American blacks in the U.S. equivalent of that filthy African harbor.
It takes bravery, and perhaps an unusual black-white vantage point, to navigate these places where hurt is profound, incomprehension the rule, just as it takes courage to say, as Obama did, that black “anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.”
Progress, since the Civil Rights Movement, or since apartheid, has assuaged the wounds of race but not closed them. To carry my part of shame is also to carry a clue to the vortexes of rancor for which Obama has uncovered words.
I understand the rage of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, however abhorrent its expression at times. I admire Obama for saying: “I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community.”
Honesty feels heady right now. For seven years, we have lived with the arid, us-against-them formulas of Bush’s menial mind, with the result that the nuanced exploration of America’s hardest subject is almost giddying. Can it be that a human being, like Wright, or like Obama’s grandmother, is actually inhabited by ambiguities? Can an inquiring mind actually explore the half-shades of truth?
Yes. It. Can.
The unimaginable South African transition that Nelson Mandela made possible is a reminder that leadership matters. Words matter. The clamoring now in the United States for a presidency that uplifts rather than demeans is a reflection of the intellectual desert of the Bush years.
Hillary Clinton said in January that: “You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose.” Wrong. America’s had its fill of the prosaic.
The unthinkable can come to pass. When I was a teenager, my relatives advised me to enjoy the swimming pools of Johannesburg because “next year they will be red with blood.”
But the inevitable bloodbath never came. Mandela walked out of prison and sought reconciliation, not revenge. Later Mandela would say: “It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
Like countless others, I came to America because possibility is broader here than in Europe’s narrower confines. Perhaps it’s my African “original sin,” but when Obama says he “will never forget that in no other country on earth is my story even possible,” I feel fear slipping away, like a shadow receding before the still riveting idea that “out of many we are truly one.”
