Barack Obama did his speech thing after the Potomac Primary on Tuesday night, and it was riveting. Television talking heads back in the studio talked all over the speeches made by John McCain and Hillary Clinton. During Obama’s speech, nobody made a sound. The camera didn’t waver. Obama, young, lean, confident, and black, speaks in three-word declarations collected into sentences delivered in an inflection from which the declarations fall like meteors, every few seconds, into audiences that can’t stand more than three or four of these hits before igniting into a helpless roar.
After his speech, the talking heads went for reactions from the political elite. A camera landed on the face of the Rev. Al Sharpton of New York. At least a month ago, watching this very long campaign unfolding, it occurred to me that no one, inside or outside of media, seemed very excited that one of the presidential candidates this November is going to be a woman, or a black man. After 209 years and 43 white male presidents, I thought this was pretty historic. Maybe I just wasn’t ready for it, and the rest of the nation was.
Then I saw Al Sharpton’s face. He didn’t look ready for it, either, even after 40 years of civil rights toil without which Obama candidacies might not exist. I went to my computer and Googled a 1967 movie, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”
And there it was: Sidney Poitier, Dr. James Wade Prentice, young, lean, confident, black doctor getting an earful from his father about his intention to marry a white woman, the daughter of well-to-do San Francisco parents. Dr. Prentice listens for a few minutes and then takes the floor. (They’re in the white family’s hilltop home, in the father’s study.) In short, declarative sentences, he tells his father how it is with him, and he ends this way:
“You are 30 years older than I am. You and your whole lousy generation believes the way it was for you is the way it's got to be. And not until your whole generation has lain down and died will the dead weight be off our backs! You understand, you've got to get off my back! Dad... Dad, you're my father. I'm your son. I love you. I always have and I always will. But you think of yourself as a colored man. I think of myself as a man.”
Times, vocabulary, attitudes and prejudices have changed since 1967. But what if the 2008 movie were “Guess Who’s Coming to Washington,” the elder was Rev. Al Sharpton, and the kid was Barack Obama? The New York Times this week published a long feature about Obama’s candidacy and race. The headline: “Seeking Unity, Obama Feels Pull of Racial Divide.” When Sharpton organized a march in Jena, Louisiana, protesting charges made against six black teenagers, Obama publicly supported the protest saying “the cases against the students were not a matter of black vs. white, but a matter of right vs. wrong.” Then he phoned Sharpton and declined to march, “because he did not want to politicize the issue.”
Whatever it takes, along the racial divide, Obama must think of himself as a man. In 1967, Dr. Prentice’s dad, hearing that, is not moved, but grumpy. But both son and father are anxious to hear what the white parents have to say. After long thought, the father, Matt Drayton (played by Spencer Tracy), addresses the group, saying he approves of the marriage, because “in the final analysis, it doesn’t matter a damn what we think. The only thing that matters is what they feel, and how much they feel, for each other.”
And then he tells the couple: “There'll be 100 million people right here in this country who will be shocked and offended and appalled and the two of you will just have to ride that out, maybe every day for the rest of your lives. You could try to ignore those people, or you could feel sorry for them and for their prejudice and their bigotry and their blind hatred and stupid fears, but where necessary you'll just have to cling tight to each other and say ‘screw all those people!’”
And that is the source of this history that I am feeling. I never dreamed of any circumstance where Al Sharpton and I might stand shoulder to shoulder and say, “Screw all those people!” But it could happen.
No comments:
Post a Comment